The Zigzag Kid

by David Grossman

And it was Dad who finally caught him.

  “And also fine talent for lying. You were cool as cucumber just then, my boy. Perhaps there is future for you. Do you often tell lies?”

  “Sometimes. Not too often.”

  Like now, Mr. Glick.

  “But you see, policeman as good as invited us to lie,” said Felix. “So what is wrong? You tremble at your own courage?”

  “Why? Why do you ask?”

  “You are looking pale. You want we should stop? Feeling ill? Must to vomit?”

  “No, I’m fine … Drive on. Keep going …”

  Whenever Felix Glick struck, he would leave a fine ear of wheat made of gold at the scene of the crime. This was his trademark, recognized by police departments the world over. Time after time he’d risked getting caught on account of it. Gabi, incidentally, had her heart set on owning one of Felix Glick’s trademarks, the golden ear of wheat; that, and the purple scarf belonging to her favorite actress, Lola Ciperola. “Someday, when those two things are mine,” Gabi would say, “I’ll close my eyes and make a big wish, and then we’ll see if miracles still happen.”

  “Where are we going?” I managed to squeeze the question through the excitement choking my throat.

  “Out for dinner, to finest restaurant in Israel. The Bugatti of restaurants! This is your day!”

  I looked away. It was typical of Dad not to mention Felix Glick to me, although Gabi (also typically) used to tell me things about him from time to time, quite a lot of things, in fact: about his escapades, and his legendary wealth, and all the women who had loved him, and how people used to say it would take someone with two brains to outwit Felix Glick. The whole of Interpol was on his track, a host of detectives investigated his every crime, yet he always managed to get away, to slip like a shadow out of every trap they set, and only Dad succeeded in laying his heavy hand upon him. That’s right, they do know each other professionally! I thought, almost choking with laughter. And how they do!

  I stretched my legs out, still looking the other way. I was afraid Felix would see everything on my face. I took a deep breath of fresh air. Dad’s plan was beginning to seem even crazier to me now, and better: I almost cried, it was so touching that twenty years later, he and Felix had joined forces to entertain me on the occasion of my bar mitzvah. And I could just imagine how it happened, how Dad made contact with Felix and met with him to talk somewhere, and how Felix said, “We must to forget past, Mr. Feuerberg. We had fair fight, and you won. You are true pro, and I admire you. You caught Felix, and because of this, you are top detective in all of Israel, perhaps outside Israel, too. We both know how it is lonely at the top, and for this reason I think is natural you turn to me, it is great compliment that you wish me to guide your son through world of crime. You will never find better guide than Felix, yes sir!”

  And my sad-eyed father shook hands with him, and his face turned red.

  This so moved me that I almost jumped up and gave Felix a hug.

  “At least he left us very nice present,” said Felix, suddenly mischievous.

  “Who?”

  “That boychik policeman.”

  He raised his hand and displayed the policeman’s watch on his wrist, the big Marvin all members of the force had received as a gift last Passover.

  “How …? When did you …?”

  “Who knows? I see it there and I take it. My fingers think faster than I do.”

  I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t quite know how I felt about him now. On the one hand, Felix had actually stolen something, but here he was, looking at me sheepishly, knowing full well what I thought of him.

  “How silly,” he blurted at last. “You are right. It was mean to take it from him, that nice young man.”

  “So why did you take it?”

  Felix slowed down, his head between his shoulders. Now he did look old, and the pitiful mustache seemed to be really his.

  “I think perhaps … don’t laugh, but I think that perhaps I wish to impress you …”

  “To impress me? How?”

  “Well, I don’t know, maybe by showing you I can steal watch of policeman … I lift it while he is checking my license … for prank, for joke, you see, to laugh at later, you and I…”

  I was annoyed with him for stealing the watch. For me this petty theft marred the noble understanding between him and Dad. Again I could feel the cold blade twisting under my heart, cautioning me that I was mistaken, that there was something I had yet to discover about Felix. But then I looked at his remorseful face, at his penitent lips muttering silently, and I felt sorry for him. He was only trying to make me happy, I thought. He would have danced for me if he could have, or sung if he could sing to make me happy, but all he knows is how to cheat and steal and shoot a gun. So first he shot the gun, and now he put on this little pocketpicking demonstration for me.

  “Maybe we could return the watch to him?” I suggested.

  “Maybe … yes. We will leave it in car when we abandon it.”

  “Why are we going to abandon it?”

  “Because we must to keep changing everything, cars, Purim costumes, cover stories. Otherwise police will catch up with Felix, and then no more game! But never you worry! I am used to this,” he said with a glum little chuckle. “All my life I am changeable this way.”

  “Hey, wait.” I had a sudden suspicion. “Is this car legit?”

  Felix Glick shrugged his shoulders. “No, it is not, young Mr. Feuerberg,” he said, “nothing in this entire game is legit. The only question is: Do you still want to play?”

  I thought about Dad, about his meeting with Felix after twenty years, and how he entrusted me to his care and shook his hand. And I thought about the story of Zohara, which Felix had agreed to tell me. And then I sat up straight: You bet I want to play.

  13

  Are Feelings Touchable?

  We drove on in silence, as though we were both sad for the same reason, a reason I couldn’t quite explain. It was as if we had failed in some way. But it was Felix who stole the watch, so why did I feel this bitter pain? Maybe it was because I saw the way he lied, I saw how easy it was for him to lie, and I knew he was capable of cheating me as well. Or maybe it was the way he winced like a child caught doing something naughty—childish shame in an old man’s wrinkles; and just then an unhappy memory recurred to me, the memory of Chaim Stauber, and the way I had tried to impress him and make him like me, and what had happened as a result to Mautner’s cow, so maybe I wasn’t any better than Felix, and who could say where I would end up after such an unpromising start?

  I closed my eyes. I pretended to sleep. I went over what happened with Chaim relentlessly, so it would hurt. I thought about the day he moved into the neighborhood, and the way his eyes glowed with a little sunrise over the pupils whenever he became excited about something, and how before him, the only friend I had was Micah, who wasn’t really a friend, as I realized all along, except I didn’t have anyone else, and he never argued with me and hardly ever talked, and whenever he listened, his face looked dark and dull, till sometimes I suspected that he wasn’t listening out of friendship but the opposite—it almost gratified him to see me carried away by my own tall tales.

  But when Chaim arrived on the scene, everything changed. My whole life was transformed. He came in the middle of the school year. The week before, they started telling us about this special new kid, the son of a famous professor, who would soon be joining our class; the kid was an absolute genius, and a concert pianist, too.

  A few days after Purim, in the middle of an arithmetic lesson, the school principal knocked on the door and introduced Chaim to our class. We looked him over. He seemed normal enough, though he did have a big head, as befitting a genius. There was something strange about his forehead, too: it was high and tan where his thick dark hair was brushed back. That looked unusual. The teacher sat him next to Michael Karni and told us to be nice to the new boy.

  At that time I used to hang around with a little gan
g of kids who always did things together. We had a password and a hideout and a tree house, and we would go on secret missions, and there was this enemy spy we used to pester—some poor guy named Kremmerman who lived upstairs. (I should probably point out here that in those days, children played together, not through a modem.)

  During recess I suggested that we let the new boy into our gang, so he wouldn’t feel lonely.

  The new boy was only too happy to join us. We played soccer and we made him goalie, only he wasn’t so good at it, a real butterfingers. I did like his spirit of self-sacrifice, though. I remember saying to Micah, See those suicidal leaps of his? And Micah answered dully, Yeah, but what’s the point of leaping if every ball goes straight into the goal?

  After school we walked home together, me, Micah, and Chaim Stauber. They walked, that is; I roller-skated. In those days I virtually lived on wheels. I hardly ever stepped out of the house without my big, clunky skates. On the way home from school, Micah would walk while I skated circles around him, talking to him first from one side, then the other, enjoying the way he kept looking for me where I wasn’t anymore. The day Chaim joined us I skated even wider circles. I gave a casual demonstration of what a professional skater can do. A few little whirls, death-defying leaps from the sidewalk, and a long, pensive slide on one foot between two disruptive cars—my usual routine. Chaim Stauber devoured me with his eyes. This was the first time I saw his eyes light up as if somebody had struck a match inside them. There really was a little sunrise over each eye. I could tell he was bursting to ask me for a turn, and I started planning how much to charge him. He was obviously rich. We walked him home. He lived in a big house not far from our building. As we all stood chatting outside his gate, his mother ran out calling, “Chaim, Chaimke, how was your first day at school?” And Chaim said quietly to Micah and me, “Don’t tell her I played soccer with you,” and he stood there letting her cuddle him like a baby.

  “Are these your new friends?” she asked, regaining her composure and scrutinizing Micah and me as though she were trying to see under our skin in order to determine whether we were good enough for her son. So I promptly put on my angel face and cooed, “How do you do, Mrs. Stauber,” extending my hand, which she pressed with a little smile of surprise. And what a hand she had …! Warm, soft, silky, with slender fingers and manicured nails, and though I didn’t want to let go, I quickly pulled back my own filthy mitt, sullied by filchings and fist-fights and crawling on the floor. Luckily I had enough sense to hide my left hand behind my back, as well, the hand with the long pinky nail, probably the longest pinky nail in my class, in the whole school, even.

  That was our first encounter; she was so pretty she took my breath away; and I didn’t dare open my mouth for fear of blurting out that Chaim had played soccer, though I didn’t really see what there was to hide.

  “It’s because of the piano,” Chaim explained the following day. And when we didn’t quite understand the connection, he explained that he had to be careful, his mother was anxious about his fingers. Micah laughed his slow, stupid laugh, while I—God knows what came over me—replied at once that his mother was right, that maybe he shouldn’t play soccer, after all. Chaim Stauber said that his mother would have liked to keep his fingers safely in her own hands forever and only let them out to play études and concertos. Then suddenly he gave a whoop, jumped high in the air, and clapped his hands, and I peered around to make sure no harm had come to the fingers his mother wanted to keep in her hands.

  And then I heard myself telling him again that his mother was a hundred percent right, and that now that I understood all the facts, I intended to keep him out of trouble, because his future, and maybe that of the entire country, depended on his piano playing; decent soccer players aren’t hard to find, but a concert pianist is one in a million.

  Micah was startled by what I had said, and so was I. I mean, who appointed me guardian of Chaim’s fingers, and what did I care about his fingers anyway; as soon as the words were out of my mouth, I knew I had said the right thing, the noble and virtuous thing, and it was one of the few times in my life when I felt I had principles, something important I was willing to fight for, even though there was nothing in it for me. To demonstrate my seriousness, I quickly removed my roller skates and carried them as I walked at Chaim’s side like a bodyguard. Chaim, who seemed fairly amazed that I was taking him under my protection, asked hesitantly whether I, too, played an instrument, and I laughed and said, What, me play an instrument? and Micah said, Yeah, sure he does, he plays on people’s nerves. I must admit that from the moment Chaim Stauber joined us, everything Micah said or did seemed dumb, crude, and annoying to me, and I only hoped that Chaim wouldn’t hold him against me.

  Nevertheless, the following day at school Chaim insisted that we play soccer. I walked over nice and friendly, took him aside, and tried to explain that it was too dangerous, but he said he didn’t care. I tried to talk him out of it, I even tried to bribe him, but he wouldn’t listen. The others started clamoring that recess was almost over, and I had no choice but to give in. I also had to relinquish my position as center forward that day so I could concentrate on defending his goal. I didn’t budge from the penalty area the whole game. All I did was stop the other team’s attempts to break through. I was such a great defense, Chaim Stauber could dawdle around safe if empty-handed. I can’t remember a more exhausting game.

  And so it went. He would insist on playing goalie, and I would protect him like a precious etrog packed in wadding. I would kick the shins of any player who came near those invaluable fingers. I was getting to be more like a professional bodyguard than a soccer player. As soon as I got rid of a player trying to kick the ball into our goal, I would turn to Chaim and smile, flushed with devotion. Sometimes even my best defense was not enough to stop a rival player, so I would be forced to watch breathlessly as Chaim risked his whole future with a furious lunge at the opponent’s feet, and I would shut my eyes and tremble, feeling his mother’s warm, slender fingers closing tenderly around my heart.

  Apart from these nerve-racking soccer games, there were good times, too. I don’t know what it was like in his old neighborhood, since he never talked about it, but with me and the gang Chaim really started to enjoy himself. Once a month we’d go through this ordeal of courage in the valley behind the building to prove our friendship. The ordeal consisted of crawling through a thirty-meter sewage pipe, no longer in use, until you reached a deep underground cesspool, where you then had to turn around and crawl back. It was pretty scary crawling there in the dark. There was no guarantee that sewage wouldn’t start gushing through the pipe again and flood the cavern. Simon Margolies swore to us once that a big black snake had slithered by him inside (the week after, naturally, I spotted a viper, over one meter long). And finally when you crawled past the big hole, you could hear the water flowing below, all black and putrid. But for me the scariest moments were when Chaim crawled in there alone.

  He insisted on going through the ordeal with us, and even yelled at me when I tried to talk some sense into him. The others started teasing me, saying I treated him like a grandmother, and even Micah giggled about it.

  So what could I do? I stood aside, chewed grass, and pleaded silently with God to extend His influence over the cesspool, though mostly I prayed to Chaim Stauber’s mother, joining my hands with hers to warm Chaim’s fingers now that he’d decided to be a roughneck.

  He emerged from the pipe with dirt all over his face and his hands covered with scratches, but you could see he was one happy kid. Simon Margolies asked how he felt in there, and he said that it was a little scary, especially while he was over the cesspool, but otherwise it was fun. That was all. He didn’t brag or tell us that his heart was in his underpants or that he’d seen a ghost like I did one time; he merely observed that it was fun, and that he wanted to go in again next week.

  He was driving me crazy, this Chaim. Anything I told him not to do, he couldn’t wait to try, just to pro
voke me. Sometimes I felt like the babysitter of a severely disturbed child. In class I would stare at his back, groaning under my latest worries. I mean, it had gotten to the point where Chaim Stauber offered me money for a turn on my roller skates and I declined. Even Micah. Micah, who was made of steel, told me bluntly that I was overdoing it with Chaim, but I think he was only jealous.

  And he had good reason to be. Chaim Stauber, in spite of his plans to drive me nuts, was truly a smart and interesting kid. He had an encyclopedic mind. For hours I would sit around listening to his stories about the Aborigines and Eskimos and Indians. He’d even been to Japan once with his parents, and said that the houses there are made of wood and that they grow miniature trees. He would say the most amazing things in his modest way, quietly and simply, without being a showoff. He wasn’t trying to impress me, he was just telling me the facts. But his facts were more amazing than anything I could have imagined. And lying in my bed at night I would try to mimic the matter-of-fact way he told me, for instance, that “in Japan we went to a place where they serve chocolate-covered ants. I didn’t eat mine because Mommy wouldn’t let me.”

  That was the main reason I admired him: he had the guts to say his mommy wouldn’t let him. I mean, if it were me telling a story about chocolate-covered ants in Japan, I’d make a big megillah out of it; I’d say I devoured a kilo of ants, that they tickled all the way down, and that the ant-chef swore he’d never met a kid like me.

  And Chaim’s mother. I’ve already described her hands, but everything else about her seemed wonderful, too. She was very tall, taller than Chaim’s father, with a porcelain complexion and honey-colored hair that fell in heavy curls down to her shoulders. She would blink her blue eyes at you like a doll, as if any minute she might open them again and say “Mama,” but instead she would say, “Chaim.” Like this: “Chaim?” softly, liltingly, as if she had to make certain each time that he was alive and breathing and hers. Whenever I was there, she would keep coming into the room with a different excuse each time: to turn on the light so he wouldn’t strain his eyes, or to bring him a special vitamin to strengthen his bones. I rarely spoke when she was around, and if the buzzing started between my eyes I would just hang my head and bite my cheeks till they bled. I used my very best language with her and, of course, never alluded to my rich experience with law and crime, because I sensed it might put her off.