The Zigzag Kid

by David Grossman

  Pessia started and gave a good strong kick with her hind leg.

  In a flash the fight was over. Picadors and banderilleros huddled together, their faces pale, their fighting spirit gone.

  “Are you going to let one lousy kick scare you to death?” I asked as I stepped forward, waving my red poncho around my face. It was a bath towel someone had swiped from a hotel in Tiberias.

  Chaim Stauber stepped forward, too, panting and puffing. He eyed me quizzically. He had the most remarkable eyes I’ve ever seen, eyes that seemed to breathe, dilating and contracting in moments of excitement.

  “You have the guts?” breathed his eyes.

  “Do I have a choice?” answered mine.

  I went down on my knees and prayed for the help of God. And being the first and only Jewish matador in history, I made the sign of the Star of David instead of the cross, and froze in this pose, like Paco Camino, Rafael Gómez, and Juan Belmonte. Maybe I could sense what was about to happen and wanted to savor the last few moments. And then slowly, momentously, I approached my good horse.

  I began by slowly circling the cow. She was nervous by then and followed my movements with her oblong head. She looked pretty scary from close up, really big, too, a whole head taller than me and about as broad as a four-door closet. Then I galloped right in front of her wet black nose and saw her nostrils flare, and just as I was passing her, I smacked her near the tail with my open hand.

  It sounded like a whip cracking. My whole hand ached, and Pessia looked back at me with a plaintive moo.

  I was stunned by her mooing, but also stirred somehow. It was so real, just like she mooed when Mautner took her calf away each year. For a few days she would moan and cry, exactly the same way she’d mooed at me a moment before. And suddenly I was overwhelmed. I turned around. Pessia, too, turned around, with surprising grace, and stared right at me. Her milk-swollen udders sagged heavily. I stamped on the ground. So did Pessia. I lowered my head. So did she. I waited for her to moo. I was dying to hear that terrible sound again. But she played dumb. She refused to cooperate! And then, with a loud whoop, I galloped straight at her, swerving off in the nick of time and smacking her again with my open hand. And again she kicked at me and mooed, but I sheered away from her.

  This was getting serious. The others were huddled by the hole in the fence. They were about make a run for it. I couldn’t see their faces, but from time to time I would catch sight of Chaim’s brightly burning eyes, and I knew that he was mine forever. That this bullfight was our covenant, because there was nothing more he could ask of me, nothing I could give him, beyond the madness I had whipped up for his sake.

  Torrents of blood flowed through my brain, and then came that feverish buzzing between my eyes, with the tall tales, and the lies, and the need to impress people with how special I am … On one of my next forays I took a tumble at Pessia’s feet, and it was a real miracle that I managed to roll away in time, as she lunged forward, stepped on my horse, and snapped its spine as though it were a matchstick.

  Without my horse I felt small and vulnerable. I ran out in front of her, waving my arms around like propellers and screaming at the top of my lungs, and I knew the time was fast drawing near when I would have to fight her to the death.

  She, too, must have sensed it, the way she stamped her hind legs, raised her tail, and let out a steamy jet of piss. She stank of urine, sweat, and fear, as she nervously trampled the fresh mud. Like a speeding bullet I flew toward her. I saw her head go down and the black of her horns, and her startling agility as she butted me.

  I’d never caught it so bad before. Pessia’s massive head, which was solid as a rock, bashed into my shoulder and down my arm, knocking the wind out of me. I flew up and landed in the thick of Mautner’s grapevine. The others rushed over to me. I could barely see, with my left eye swollen shut and all bloody, and there was blood spurting out of a gash on my right shoulder, where I would have a scar for the rest of my life, and still I got up. I tottered but I was standing.

  Now I was drawn into the fiery ring of battle. Slowly I pulled out Dad’s screwdriver. I couldn’t speak, my jaws weighed a ton, so I signaled Micah to lend me his horse and began to shamble around the cow.

  The sun had almost set. Pessia turned full face toward me. She followed my every movement. Now and then she lunged and tried to gore me again. Her eyes were red with rage, and her lips foamy white. Three times I waved the red poncho in front of her nose, wondering whether the massive head with the horns would come at me from the other side.

  My wounds were bleeding. My shoulder was a bundle of pain, but still I went on fighting, beyond pain and fear, beyond all reason.

  My poncho flapped in the air, and the glare of the sun was like the reflection of a thousand pairs of binoculars trained on me; but more than that, the buzzing between my eyes bored deep into my forehead like a giant drill and, with it, a sense that what I was doing no kid before me had ever done nor should have done, and that I was both the greatest and the most despicable kid in the whole world.

  And as the sun spewed forth its dying rays, I charged one last time.

  I galloped full speed, rolling my eyes with terror and brandishing the screwdriver at Pessia from afar. She lowered her enormous horns. I flew at her. I jumped higher than I’d ever jumped before, up over her shoulders, and I stabbed her flank with my screwdriver and rolled over in the mud.

  “With your screwdriver?” asked Felix, accidentally stepping on the brake and jolting us both. “You mean, just like that?”

  Just like that. Her right flank, all the way down.

  Blood spurted out of her, blackish red and very hot.

  Pessia was suddenly still, and then she turned her head toward me in bewilderment, or sorrow. We stood there staring at each other in disbelief.

  And then she mooed.

  And her eyes filled with madness. They shone blacker than ever. She mooed again, and raised her tail, and started to run around in circles.

  It was an awful sight. She went crazy. She charged at Mautner’s house and gored down the door. She threw her hulking body against the brick wall and crashed through. Into the house. It was astounding. I lost sight of her. All I could see was the doorway and part of Mautner’s living room; a mad cow was on the rampage in there. I could hear furniture crashing and glass shattering, and deafening booms; maybe she was only looking for the way out, maybe she didn’t mean to wreak havoc, but in a very short while she managed to tear down Mautner’s house, smash the furniture, and dent the refrigerator …

  Then the noise stopped. I glanced right and left. My friends weren’t around anymore. I was standing alone in the middle of Mautner’s yard. From the house I heard a long moo, and Pessia trampling in a daze through the ruins, bumping her shanks and horns into the chairs and tables. You might have thought she was rearranging the furniture. After a while she appeared in the doorway. Her imposing head, her monumental shoulders. Then she lumbered back out to the yard. She stared at me blindly, as if I didn’t exist anymore, and started to graze again. There was clotted blood on her hide where I’d stabbed her.

  She munched with zeal, with rapt attention, as though trying to remind both me and herself what a cow looks like and what she does.

  A heavy silence filled the car. Felix glanced at me out of the corner of his eye with a new expression.

  Silence. I was sorry I’d told him the story.

  “And then?” he said, both hands on the steering wheel.

  As a result of the corrida, my friendship with Chaim Stauber was over, and our little gang split up for good. Dad was obliged to compensate Mautner with the Humber Pullman. There was no more Pearl, and worse yet, no more Tuesday-evening ritual, with Dad and me talking man talk. And incidentally—it was then that they sent me to Haifa for the first time, to hear a sermon from my uncle.

  But there was more. One day Mautner drove home with a truck, heaved Pessia onto it, and took her back to the kibbutz. He told the neighbors that he hadn’t bee
n able to go near her since the stabbing. That she’d let him down and he didn’t want anything more to do with her. The kids at school started avoiding me, and quietly leaving me out of things, though it was nothing official. They all seemed frightened of me. Or disgusted. They were careful not to touch me, as though I might infect them with my evil. Only Micah stayed faithful; well, not exactly faithful: actually he seemed to derive a strange pleasure out of constantly hanging around to remind me with a little sneer of that ghastly experience.

  I changed. First of all, I became a strict vegetarian. I calculated that if I gave up hot dogs and steaks for ten years, I would spare the life of one cow and atone for hurting Pessia and driving her crazy, and causing her banishment from home. And I began to be scared of myself. Because I knew that what had happened to me was completely out of my control. That I was in the grip of a sort of madness, that an alien self might pop out of me any second, a stranger who had chosen to possess my soul for some inexplicable reason.

  These were things I’d never said out loud before the night Felix Glick and I drove up the coastal road. I told him so he would know I was completely in his hands now, for better or worse. Or maybe this was my way of saying, Take care of me, please, you are leading me on this wild escapade, and I’m all confused. I don’t understand what’s going on or who you really are, I’m completely in your hands now, so remember Pessia and what I might do, and how fast I might do it. And please, keep me safe, don’t let anything bad happen to me, now that you know who and what I am.

  Felix said nothing. I knew he had heard my unspoken plea, because he was listening to me as no grownup ever had.

  The car cruised along silently. The lights blinked orange, and all the traffic seemed to have passed us while I was telling him the story. The soft jazz on the radio whispered comfortingly. The streetlamps cast yellow halos around us. I told Felix that Gabi had stayed loyal even after the Pessia incident. She was the second grownup, after Chaim Stauber’s mother, who arrived on the scene of the crime. Even when I was muddy and covered with blood and paralyzed with fear, Gabi hugged me and said, “Don’t worry, Nonny, I’ll protect you from your father.”

  Because Mautner eventually calmed down, but my father almost killed me, and in a fit of rage, for the first and only time, he said something about Zohara, and about the curse which had, it seemed, passed down to me.

  16

  A Brief Moment of Light in the Dark before Dark

  A subtle perfume filled the air. Light from a small Chinese lampshade rose like mist, spreading through the room. I sank into an easy chair and tightly clutched the armrests.

  Felix was calmer, but then, Felix is always calm in times of danger. He sat in an armchair facing me, with his legs crossed and a glass of wine in his hand. In the course of the evening he had polished off a bottle of champagne, three glasses of whiskey, and now wine.

  My trembling soul cried: Let me out!!!

  I raised my feet off the carpet to avoid dirtying it and kept my eyes discreetly lidded, so as not to desecrate the room with my naked stare.

  Out. Let me out of here. This is too much already.

  One wall was covered with framed photographs hanging side by side, like in a camera shop display. Only, here it was the same woman in every picture—Lola Ciperola—now with a famous actor, now with a government minister, now alone, holding a huge bouquet of flowers in her hand; and there were pictures of her at crowded parties, or posing dramatically on the stage; or alone again in an empty room, her face turned wistfully toward the light, resting her chin on the palm of her hand, reminiscing no doubt about a long-lost love, the one fortunate man she might have married because he wouldn’t have tried to control her body and soul.

  Every picture had a few words scrawled on it. On one I made out the autograph of Elizabeth Taylor herself and there was one from David Ben-Gurion, and another from Danny Kaye, and even one from Moshe Dayan. With all those famous people in the room I felt intimidated. Gabi would have given anything to be here with me, I knew, after all the hours we’d spent waiting outside this house together, trying to imagine what it looked like inside. And here I was, without her. I supposed I ought to memorize every piece of furniture, every picture and every plant in the room, so I could describe them to her later, but I didn’t dare: as though anything I might imprint in my mind here would be an invasion of Lola Ciperola’s privacy. A breach.

  “Lady of the house is late tonight,” observed Felix, glancing at the big clock on the wall.

  “There’s a lot of applause when the curtain goes down,” I explained in a whisper. “And after the play, people come backstage to ask for her autograph …”

  “And you, did you ask?”

  “No, I was too shy. Come on, let’s get out of here.”

  “What? You mean, without her scarf?”

  I was so terrified, my stomach did a flip-flop. I almost threw up all over the big, beautiful carpet.

  “Let’s go already. It isn’t right to walk into a person’s house like this.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like this, the way you …” I was trying to come up with a tactful explanation, “just walked in without … you know, by picking the lock.”

  “Only because our noble lady locked her door and left no key.”

  “Right, to keep strangers out!”

  “What, are you and Felix strangers?” His eyebrows arched sharply. “How can she think we are strangers if she does not even know us?”

  I turned this question over in my mind, but couldn’t quite grasp what he meant.

  “We make our lady’s acquaintance”—Felix continued to reveal his cold-blooded intentions—“and then ask if she wants us to visit her home. If not—we get up and go, Good day, thank you, and shalom. Felix never forced himself on anyone!”

  “But what if she calls the police?”

  “That would be sure sign she does not want us here,” Felix conceded. “But why decide in her place what she does or does not want? I hear she is liberated lady who will allow no one to make decisions for her.”

  He got up and poured himself a drink from the bottle standing on a round table in the corner. The clock ticked loudly. Felix went to the window. A minute passed and then another. I was petrified each time I heard footsteps in the street. Felix heaved a sigh.

  “Once I, too, live in beautiful house like this.”

  As though he were talking to his reflection in the glass.

  “Let’s go outside,” I tried again. “And you can tell me about it there.”

  “Why outside? Outside is too dangerous! Better here inside. Ach, if only Felix knew enough then to build warm home for the time of his old age, instead of just place for parties.” And he added with a wave of his hand around the room that was now suffused in a pleasant glow and at the cozy armchairs and the embroidered tablecloths, and the leafy green plants, “You see, this is what Felix lost. This house he could have had, and he lost it. Why was he hungry to travel everywhere? To run so fast! And lots of money, ach, for what?!”

  Felix leaned against the windowsill, looking bowed and withered.

  “La dracu!” he suddenly spat, and though I didn’t understand the words, I knew he was cursing in Romanian. But it wasn’t like him to curse. I felt a little nervous.

  “That is Felix for you!” He shook himself and raised the glass to his reflection in the windowpane. “Sometimes down, sometimes up!” He tried to smile. “Today all I have is wallet filled with sand for running away from fat waiter, but tomorrow I will be Felix of great wide world! Beloved Felix! Felix who dances …”

  With a sudden groan he collapsed in his armchair. I jumped to my feet. He signaled me not to approach, not to touch him. I felt as if an invisible circle had been drawn around him, the way I do when Dad gets sick and starts to shrink into himself. He fights the pain and suffers inwardly. So no one will see, so no one will try to help him.

  He groped in his pocket with a shaking hand and took out a little round box. He swal
lowed first one pill and then another, and closed his eyes. Beads of sweat broke out on his forehead. His face turned sallow and he started muttering over and over, “So old … and sick … Who will cry when Felix is no more?”

  I moved closer. Then away. I didn’t dare. He looked so helpless and alone there, so utterly withdrawn. His face was no longer that of a pro, and you could see he was afraid to be alone beyond the invisible circle, but I crossed over to him, come what may. I knelt beside his armchair and cautiously touched his hand. Felix was stunned. He opened his eyes and made an effort to smile at me, and far from pulling his hand away from mine, he clasped it with the other. I could see him struggling to catch his breath. He wanted to say something, but he couldn’t. I breathed along with him, to remind him how, in case he’d forgotten, while he kept trying to smooth his wrinkled shirt. Maybe he was ashamed to be looking so disheveled, so unlike Felix, and all I could do was sit there in dismay, shaking my head to let him know how wrong he was, that even though I’d known him for only a short while, less than twenty-four hours, in fact, I would never ever forget him. Today had been a day like no other, and we had forged a special bond between us.

  We sat this way for several minutes till he caught his breath again. Sitting up in his armchair, he loosened his tie and looked at me with a wan smile.

  “Beg pardon … it was just stomach cramp probably … Now everything is fine! Back to normal again, yes sir!” He tried to speak in a loud, clear voice.

  I went to the kitchen to fetch him a glass of water. How could a famous star like Lola Ciperola live so modestly? Her kitchen was cramped and antiquated. The refrigerator was shorter than I was. There was a half loaf of rye bread on the counter. She had left the light on. Dad would have given her a demerit for that. I poured a glass of water and took it to Felix. He was somewhat recovered. Or at least, pretended to be.

  “Okay, now tell me,” I said, “tell me about the olden days.”

  So he would forget his weakness, and I, my fear.