The Zigzag Kid

by David Grossman

Almost immediately we came to an embankment. It was huge, several meters high and many meters long. A wall of sand had been pressed into a solid rampart—the sand, apparently, scooped out of the ditch where we had stood before.

  “This hill blocks view from Lola’s window!” shouted Felix over the noise. “It hides sea from her!”

  “But when they build a house here, it will hide it even more,” I shouted.

  “For three years they are not building!” he answered at the top of his voice. “They go away and leave everything behind like this, sand, bulldozer, even guard! They run out of money and take off with sea! Now hold on tight! Hi-deh!”

  And with a terrible shout, he turned the bulldozer toward the hill and raced ahead full force. I bounced up. With one hand I grabbed hold of the hood rail and closed my eyes.

  The shovel struck the middle of the rampart and broke it in two. After three years, the sand had been packed solid with salt and moisture, but the bulldozer smashed right through it. Suffocating clouds of sand blew up. My eyes, my nose, my mouth—everything was full of sand. Felix grabbed the gearshift and reversed the bulldozer. He maneuvered it boldly around and charged again.

  The bulldozer was making inroads, raising the shovel, letting it down again, pounding the embankment with all its steely might. Huge slabs and rocks of sand broke off and collapsed all around us, rising up as dust to the sky. Felix threw his head back, roared like a lion, howled like a jackal, and screamed for joy. I punched his shoulder to remind him we were partners! He slid over in the driver’s seat to let me step on the gas. The bulldozer rumbled and shook. I pulled out of the piles of sand cascading all around us, and again we rushed down the embankment, looking for a place to smash through. It was incredible, insane; we were like conquerors battering a stone rampart, and in the little list I kept in my head, under the heading of “driving experience” I added “bulldozer” after “locomotive.” Felix was shouting at the top of his lungs, singing, I believe, new words to the old tune “Who will steal the train to Tel Aviv?” and belting out the answer, “We the pioneers will steal Tel Aviv!” Then he sang another song, “Blue sea below, blue skies above, demolish the harbor, blast the cove.” And then I figured it was time to sing our anthem, and raising our voices with the clouds of dust and the pounding waves, we composed this little song:

  Your eyes shine diamonds

  From the quay you wave farewell!

  They stole the sea!

  I’ll bring it back!

  And your scarf you’ll give to me!

  I’m not sure which one of us actually made it up. I began it, Felix took over, and a moment later we were both shouting it out loud. Felix waved his arms in the air, tears of joy pouring down his cheeks. Jumping around in his beggar’s costume, he looked like some ancient pagan worshipping the moon, and I wondered whether perhaps he was so happy because throughout his lifetime of crime he had never done the kind of job he was doing with me, for a worthy cause, and so we danced, waving our arms and shouting together, and the yellow bulldozer joined in the spirit of things. Never in my life have I seen such a playful bulldozer. Maybe it was grateful to us for waking it from its slumbers. It cavorted around, slyly approached the rampart, and, at the very last moment, surprised it with a blow of its mighty shovel. It was as sweetly menacing as a baby mammoth, raising its snaggy shovel to the sky after every wallop and seeming to shake with bulldozer laughter. Sometimes we had to smack it in the ribs to quiet it down …

  (All together now:

  Hey, hey, Lola—

  Hey, Lola Ciperola!

  Hey, hey, Lola—

  Lola Ciperola!)

  The sky turned pallid and its color slowly drained into the sea. Light-blue stripes were visible through the breaches we had made in the rampart. I took a deep breath of sea air and felt the salty sting in my lungs. I hollered, I screamed, I can’t remember what I did, I had conquered it! Now it was mine! The first kid ever! In the whole wide world!

  At five in the morning the bulldozer stopped abruptly. Maybe it broke down or ran out of gas or something. The sky was turning bright around the edges, and white seagulls began to soar and screech. The rampart lay in ruins all the way down, and fast little morning waves were already nibbling at it, dragging the remains back into the sea. Felix and I were covered with sand from head to toe. I even felt the stinging over my eyelids. A mask of wet sand and salt had hardened over our faces, but his eyes shone through like the blue eyes of a very happy child.

  Felix slipped his mud-cast hand under his torn beggar’s shirt and pulled out a fine gold chain. A heart-shaped locket and two golden ears of wheat sparkled mysteriously in his sand-frosted hand.

  “You’re just like your mother.” He laughed through the sand. “This is how she was at seashore. Crazy like you. The sea was her home. She was like fish in water.”

  He took an ear of wheat off the chain and caressed it with his fingers. “Now toss it,” he said, putting it in the palm of my hand.

  “Me?”

  (Me?!)

  “You’re letting me give your sign?”

  (He was letting me give his sign?)

  “Yes. Please. It is right thing to do. Go ahead, please.”

  Light and golden. A tiny ear of wheat in my hand. I stood tall on the bulldozer. I saw he was giving me a special sideways glance, as he had the first time he saw me on the train. I tossed it high, to the sky, to the sea.

  It hovered in the air and slowly twirled and flashed as it was swallowed by the waves. A white seagull swooped down after it. Maybe it caught it, maybe not.

  We jumped off the bulldozer and started to run. We had to drop out of sight before the city woke up. I looked back with a twinge of sadness: our little bulldozer was parked on the shoreline, its shovel raised. We had awakened it from its enchanted sleep for a single night, but now it had gone to sleep again.

  From the guard’s shack we heard the sounds of banging and shouting. Felix hesitated, and then walked over to the shack. He loosened the beam over the handle. The banging inside subsided. Maybe the man was frightened. We hurried away, but before we left the beach, Felix stopped and pointed at the tall buildings.

  “Look there, Amnon.”

  The shutters on most of the buildings were drawn. Tel Aviv was still asleep, innocently dreaming its last dream. But from one high window a sheer purple cloud was waving and quivering and coming alive in the morning breeze. It was Lola Ciperola’s scarf, and now it was mine.

  20

  Do You Believe in Reincarnation? and Also, I Make the Headlines

  To begin with, I took a shower. It was the first shower I’d ever taken in Tel Aviv, and I must say it was just like Jerusalemites describe it: a heavy flow of water foaming down over your head, not the trickle-trickle of a Jerusalem shower, one quick spritz before the water gurgles back into the pipes. Anyway, I washed off the layers of sand that encrusted me and stood under the waterfall for another half hour or so until I was all calmed down. While I was in there, I remembered that I hadn’t called Dad and Gabi yet, but as soon as I got out, Felix said breakfast was ready and that we’d better sit down and eat. Lola had fixed us a royal feast of omelettes and salad finely chopped and cocoa and applesauce, which in my opinion deserved at least second place on the YUMTUM scale (after our dinner at the restaurant). I told her she made salads just like Gabi, and Lola asked, Who’s Gabi, and I answered with my mouth full (as befitted Gabi). I regretted that Gabi wasn’t with me now, because I felt sure she and Lola would have gotten along really well on account of their similar views about life and men. And I also regretted that Gabi couldn’t see me here, talking with a famous and important star. I’d been calling her Lola for quite a while, and she’d been calling me Nonny.

  But Lola didn’t seem famous or important around the house. She was a plain old woman without the layers of makeup, and without her voice sliding up and down so fast it sounded theatrical, and her melodramatic gestures. At home she was a woman of flesh and blood who spoke with a slight a
ccent and made humorous comments about things, and had a pretty face and a supple body and age spots on her hands and a slightly wrinkled neck, which may be why she always wore the scarf.

  With me she was gentle and solicitous. She would follow me wherever I went, sit down, and gaze at me. This was kind of weird, because until yesterday I’d been the one straining to catch a glimpse of her, and normally I had to pay money to sit and watch her, whereas here she was the one devouring me with her eyes.

  “Let me know when you get tired of me, Nonny,” she said. “I so enjoy looking at you.”

  “What’s there to see?” I giggled with embarrassment.

  “You’re a nice-looking boy, not a boy beautiful, so don’t let it go to your head, but you do have an interesting face. There are so many contradictions in you I’d like to understand better! And those ears—like a cat’s. You’re sweet when you smile, and I’m touched by everything you do. Oof!” She pressed her cheeks and shook her head, laughing. “What an old chatterbox I am. But you must understand me: the only children I come in contact with in the theater are grown women dressed up as children. I haven’t seen a real child in a very long time. Tell me more.”

  “About what?”

  “Oh, everything. About your friends, how your room is arranged, who buys your clothes, what you do after school. Do you like to read?”

  First Felix and now Lola. It had been ages since anyone took such an interest in me. What had gotten into the two of them?

  “So come help me with the pictures. I need someone strong to hand them to me.”

  She climbed up on a stepladder, and one by one, I passed her the pictures that had been hanging on the wall until the day before. She had spent the whole night taking them down, pulling out the nails and filling the holes with toothpaste, and toward dawn she had repainted the wall.

  “All thanks to you. Because you helped me decide!” she said in greeting when we returned from the beach that morning. She was dressed in trousers and a man’s shirt splattered with paint.

  “For ten years I’ve wanted to do this, but didn’t dare!” she exclaimed, waving the paintbrush and dabbling Felix white from head to toe. “For ten years I have been suffocated by those pompous faces, and by my own pictures in those dreadful poses. Into the storage loft with all of them! I want some fresh air in here!”

  I stood below, handing up Elizabeth Taylor, David Ben-Gurion, even Moshe Dayan, and her laughter rolled over my head as she thrust them into the storage loft.

  “I would call this a most successful diet!” she informed me, climbing down. “I’m sure I’ve lost at least a ton of façades and pretensions, and all in one night!”

  “But the theater is your life!” I said, stunned and a little disappointed.

  “Wrong, Mr. Feuerberg! My life is only now beginning. Today! And perhaps I owe it all to you!” She grabbed me and danced wildly around the room with me until we nearly fell down.

  I’m going nuts, I thought, I don’t understand anything.

  But it sure is fun.

  As we were eating our breakfast we heard the neighbors open their blinds, cry out in surprise, and shout for joy. More and more blinds were opened. People looked out and called to each other, astonished at the miracle that had taken place during the night. I could hear an old man downstairs explaining at length that the light of the moon the night before had exerted such a strong gravitational force that it drew in unusually big waves that flooded the rampart and eroded it. Another neighbor speculated that the municipality was planning to levy a new tax on the view, which is why they had quickly brought the sea back to the neighborhood …

  “You heard right, boy,” said Lola. “Entrance tests are not required for those who live in Tel Aviv.” She came and stood between Felix and me and threw her arms around our shoulders. “It was a fine gift you gave them,” she said, “even though they may never know.”

  I wanted to call home, but Felix started describing yet again how we had torn down the embankment, with the sand flying everywhere, and how we had locked the guard in his shack, and how … He looked like Dad does when he winds up a case. He spoke with pride, and with contempt for anyone who tried to stand in his way. At such times it was the sadness in Dad that faded, but with Felix it was some of his elegance. I observed him, thinking how much he and Dad both loved to win, and that it must certainly have been humiliating for him when Dad won the contest.

  Lola said it was time for bed. She offered Felix the sofa in the living room and led me to a small room with a view of the sea.

  “This room has the best view in the apartment,” she said as she made up the bed. “Years ago, I would sit here for hours, looking out at the waves. Alone or with another. Even from afar, the sea has a calming effect on me, and now, thanks to you and Felix, I have it back again.”

  She stood a moment, leaning out the window. “From here the sea looks bluer, more open,” she murmured, seeming to quote someone who had often said so.

  Then she let down the blinds so the morning sun wouldn’t disturb me. But her movements were sharp, as though she wished to keep out a painful memory. “Good night, Nonny,” she whispered, and left the room.

  Darkness. I lay on my back and tried to fall asleep. I could hear her speaking to Felix in a whisper, but I didn’t catch what they said. It irked me that I’d forgotten to call home again. Oh well. Later.

  The bed was narrow as a child’s cot, but I felt comfortable, like Goldilocks in the baby bear’s bed. I seemed to have caught a little cold on the job, and I had trouble breathing. Also, the air in the room was musty. You could tell it hadn’t been used for a while, possibly no one had even been in it. There was a big wardrobe against the wall facing me, and pictures of scenery. I got up quietly for a better look: they were framed postcards of the Alps, the Eiffel Tower, the Empire State Building, a herd of zebras. I walked on tiptoe. I didn’t want Lola and Felix to know I was up. Why was I so secretive, and from whom was I hiding?

  There was a row of little dolls on the corner shelf, soldier dolls from various lands, dressed in traditional uniforms. Someone had apparently arranged them on the shelf that way many years before. I picked one up and it came apart in my hand. The bright red uniform practically crumbled. I felt bad about spoiling it, and began to worry that I might spoil everything I touched.

  I hurried back to bed. It was dark in the room, but I stepped surely; everything felt familiar to me, like the rough tiles under my bare feet. It was as if I had been here before. But how was that possible? The first time I’d ever walked into Lola’s apartment was yesterday! The buzzing between my eyes was about to begin again. I could feel it coming, like a motorcycle rounding the bend. Maybe I’d eaten too much for breakfast. I lay down. Sat up. Who’s there? Only a shadow.

  I pulled the covers over my head, over both ears, contrary to Dad’s regulations. I left just a crack open to peep through. I examined the shadows. The wardrobe, various objects, the little soldiers on the shelf, the scenic postcards from all over the world. I began to feel cramped. The room was crowding in on me. I rolled over onto my back. No good. I rolled back onto my stomach. Took a whiff of the pillow. It smelled familiar. I knew that smell. What was the matter with me? Everything in the room spoke to me. Breakfast congealed in my stomach. I reached out listlessly and touched the wall, and my finger found a scratch there, shaped like a bolt of lightning, deeper by far than the one I had at home, so I guess whoever had slept in that bed must have tried very hard to keep from crying, and as I touched it I felt my finger turn pale. I quickly slipped my hand between the bed frame and the mattress. There I found what I had been looking for, what I’d been afraid to find, petrified gobs of chewing gum. It couldn’t be, I thought, everything’s the same as it is in my room. I poked around the mattress and found the hole in the cover, just where I knew it would be. Whoever had slept here before liked to dig his finger into the mattress right where I did. Please, I thought stupidly, don’t let me find any raspberry candies in there.


  I sat up in alarm. This couldn’t be happening, I thought, it’s too weird. Suddenly I stopped sniffling. I realized that this was exactly like the story Chaim Stauber had told me once about an Indian girl remembering who she’d been in her previous incarnation, and then taking her parents to a village she had never seen in her life and showing them exactly where she’d hidden a favorite toy one hundred years before she was born. But things like that could happen only in India. Not here. Not to me. What’s wrong with me? I asked myself. Who am I? Frozen with fear, I unwrapped the candy and put it in my mouth. It was all dried up. Like a rock crystal. Even the mildew had solidified. I licked it and sucked it and rolled it around in my mouth until it got wet and remembered what it was. A fine thread of flavor, the memory of raspberry, melted on my tongue and spread through my brain. I sat up in bed and licked that candy, all mouth and tongue and memory. Everything vanished, except for the taste of raspberry melting in my mouth. Maybe that’s how a baby feels, suckling its mother’s milk.

  I woke up from this sweet reverie, no longer tired. The room was calling me, emanating sound waves the way a hand transmits the sensation of pins and needles when it’s fallen asleep and is trying to wake up. I quietly got out of bed, walked over to the wardrobe, and opened it.

  It was a child’s wardrobe. Nothing unusual here, I thought, trying to keep cool: from top to bottom, children’s clothes. But I couldn’t keep cool. Just the opposite, in fact; I had goose bumps all over. Children’s clothes. A boy’s or a girl’s? I couldn’t tell. Maybe both: there were dresses and skirts, and girl’s underwear. But also a boy’s shirts and trousers. Wide leather belts. Thick sweat socks. A boy’s or a girl’s? And the doll collection on the shelf—a boy’s or a girl’s? Dolls, yes, but they were soldiers. Or maybe a lot of boys and girls had come through this room, like me, lured here by means of tricks and excuses? And what happened to them? Where were they now? I ran my hand over a dress hanging in the wardrobe. It was cool to the touch, like the skirt Felix had given me today. The colors, too, were like the colors of the clothes he gave me, reds and purples and greens. Something’s wrong here, I thought. Why had they put me in this particular room? Gabi never told me about a little boy or girl living with Lola. So to whom did the clothes in the wardrobe belong? And what was the connection between Lola and Felix? And why had Felix brought me here? I wanted to call home. I had to talk to Dad. Right away.