The Zigzag Kid

by David Grossman

  I heard footsteps approaching and jumped back into bed. I managed to cover myself just in time. Lola and Felix tiptoed into the room. I closed my eyes. I was cold with fear, fear that flitted batlike out of the darkness of translated fairy tales and unconfirmed police reports about kidnappers and what they do to children. With my last bit of strength I wrestled with that fear. It simply wasn’t in their character. No? Why not? Maybe all kidnappers seem like perfectly nice people. They have to lure kids into following them, don’t they? Maybe the two of them always worked as a team, and it was Felix’s job to bring the victims here. And what did Lola mean about his crazy games, when she asked whether he had permission to bring me here? And where did they get all the children’s clothes?

  I peeked out and saw them standing over me. She was leaning against his shoulder, and he had his arm around her. They watched me in silence.

  Lola sighed.

  Then she pushed Felix out of the room and closed the door behind him. She sat down on a little chair near my bed and gazed at me, barely breathing.

  I was so confused. I didn’t have the strength to figure out what was happening around me. Felix had been a criminal at one time, maybe he still was, but I was the one who’d brought him here. I chose to come! And Lola? What was her connection to all this? If she was involved in a crime against me, then I wouldn’t mind dying, because nothing would mean anything. I sighed with anguish.

  Lola stood up and hurried to my side. She stroked my brow and wiped away the perspiration.

  “Go to sleep now, I’ll watch over you,” she whispered. Her gentle hands tucked the blanket around me and fluffed the pillow. Of course, I knew all long that she could never be involved in wickedness.

  Her eyes enveloped me with wistfulness, longing. I turned toward her. We gazed at each other in the dark.

  “Don’t be afraid, Nonny,” she said in her haimish voice. “It’s only me. Would you like me to go?”

  “No, that’s okay,” I answered. But what did she want from me?

  “Felix tells me you used to wait outside my house and that I never even noticed you,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

  “It doesn’t matter. I got to see you in your plays, too.”

  “So he told me. And what do you think of my acting?”

  “It’s wonderful. I thought … I think you’re a really great actress, only …”

  “Only what?” She leaned forward. Why did I have to open my big mouth?

  “It’s just that, well, here in your house, you seem, you know, more real.”

  I heard her chuckle in the darkness.

  “Well, Felix thinks so, too. He says I’m only good at playing queens, but in the role of an ordinary woman, I’m quite a flop. He’s been saying that to me for years. Maybe he’s right.”

  I wanted to protest, to rush to her defense, the way I do when Gabi makes fun of herself for being fat. But I was just too weak.

  “Tell me about yourself, Nonny.”

  “I’m a little tired now.”

  “How silly of me. I so enjoy being with you, having a little boy around, but here I am torturing you, poor darling. Never mind, I’ll leave now. Go to sleep.”

  “No, stay! Please don’t leave.” Maybe I was afraid to be alone in that mysterious room, or maybe it was the wonderful feeling I had with her, like being with a grandmother.

  Of course I already had Grandma Tsitka. A complicated relationship. She was the mother of Uncle Samuel and Dad and their three brothers, a tall, thin woman who wore her hair in a top knot, had a cataract over one eye, and bony yellow fingers. I’m sorry if this sounds like a police description of a missing witch, but that’s just how she looked. Nor did she care for me very much, in general or in particular. No matter what I said or did, she always criticized me. The moment she saw me, she would fix me with her one good eye and start circling around, carping at me till I just couldn’t take any more, and then I would burst out crying or throw a tantrum. I believe she detested me from the moment I was born, and I, for my part, stopped calling her Grandma at the age of three and insisted on using her first name instead. I had a special way of pronouncing it, “Tsitka,” making sure she would hear exactly how I felt about her. Then, at the age of four—after Gabi read me “Little Red Riding-Hood”—I began having serious suspicions about Tsitka, and I told Dad I didn’t want to visit her anymore, at least not until the hunter arrived and clarified a few points concerning her identity.

  Dad never tried to intervene. He simply went along with whatever she said about me and tried to keep us apart. Sometimes I wondered at her readiness to cut off relations. But then Dad wasn’t much of a family man. Nor was he particularly eager for me to make friends with Tsitka’s other grandchildren, my seven cousins, all of them, without exception, typical Feuerberg-Shilhavs, who didn’t seem to have much trouble suppressing their friendliness toward someone like me. We never met except at weddings and other family occasions, when they would sit with their parents all evening and eat with a knife and fork and speak only when spoken to. And because they were always giving me dirty looks and I didn’t want to spoil their bad impression, I used to stand at the bar and pretend to gulp down one drink after another, until the waiter would call one of my uncles over to take care of the little shikker. Then, looking out of the corner of my eye to make sure Grandma Tsitka had a good view, I would march away with my head held high and pick a fight with the drummer.

  Yet with Lola, a stranger, I felt good. Her gentleness, her unaccountable fondness for me—

  “Tell me about you,” I said, half dozing. “Not as an actress. About you.”

  “Finally, someone who understands.” Lola smiled. She sat with her feet tucked under her, the way she liked, and reflected a moment.

  “You’re right, Nonny. The person I am and the actress are no longer one and the same. For years now I’ve been aware of the difference, and to tell the truth”—she moved closer and whispered—“I don’t really enjoy standing in front of an audience anymore.”

  I was flabbergasted. What a scoop! “Lola Ciperola Hates Theater!” But she could count on me not to leak it to the press. This was private and confidential.

  “How strange.” She smiled. “I never said it quite that way before. So firmly. Being with you makes everything clearer somehow: what’s important and what’s not. And what to do with my remaining years.”

  I smiled a crooked smile. She was being polite with me.

  “I feel like telling you about myself.” She giggled. “So you’ll get to know me better. I don’t want to tire you, but I can’t seem to hold myself back. Aren’t I awful? Go on, say you’re tired and that you’ve had enough.”

  “Tell me what you were like as a girl.”

  “Shall I really?” She was so delighted, I immediately saw how she’d been as a girl.

  “But don’t tell me—” I hesitated. I didn’t know how to say it without hurting her feelings. “Don’t tell me the things you say in your interviews. Tell me new stories.”

  She gazed at me and slowly nodded. “For that you deserve a great big kiss, Nonny, but I’ll try to control myself. Suddenly I don’t feel like talking anymore. Would you mind if I sang you a song?”

  “ ‘Your Eyes Shine’?”

  “No. A different song. One my mother used to sing to me when I was about your age, living in a faraway land where I was known as Lola Katz. I hadn’t taken on my ridiculous stage name yet. But I had a dog named Victor. And two friends named Elka and Katya.”

  “Lola Katz? Is that your real name?”

  “Fancy that. Are you disappointed?”

  “No—I just—I mean, it’s strange—because Lola Ciperola is a pretty nice name, actually …”

  She smiled to herself, closed her eyes, and sang a sweet song in a strange language.

  A few hours, or minutes, later I heard her murmur, “Sleep, my darling. There’s still time.”

  But by the time I woke up it was evening. Everything was topsyturvy. I lay in bed dreami
ng a little while longer. If I were home now, Dad would still be out and I would have the house to myself. I would play soccer or go through Dad’s gun catalogues or trot the globe with my fingertips, trying different routes to different places, or do nothing at all.

  Sometimes it seemed as though a whole hour had gone by and that Dad would be home any minute, but the clock maintained that only a minute had passed, so what to do now? I didn’t feel like staying in the house. I didn’t feel like doing homework without Gabi. I would go to Micah’s as a last resort and hang around with him, and when my lies started gushing out, he would stare at me, his mouth agape, his heavy earlobes like sinkers, waiting for me to get caught up in my own lies, which would irritate me into provoking a fight out of sheer boredom, and eventually I would leave him, feeling hollow inside. Our friendship had long ago stopped being real; it was just that we had nothing better to do. After my bar mitzvah I planned to inform him that we were no longer friends. Enough is enough already.

  If only I enjoyed reading—but I didn’t, I preferred it if Gabi read to me. If only I played a musical instrument, like the drums—you don’t need a good ear to be a drummer, just a sense of rhythm and plenty of energy, and I definitely had that. But Dad refused to buy me a drum set.

  So where did those thousands of hours go? Those interminable afternoons of my childhood? How did I fill my life? For one thing, I remember, I used to try to identify the neighbors’ cars by the noises their motors made. Or I would spend hours leafing through my missing-persons notices, wondering where they were now, and how I could organize them into my own secret service, since they had no connections anymore, they were lost, so why couldn’t they join up with me and be my guards? Or I would roller-skate over to Memorial Park and see if I could remember the names of the forty fallen on the plaque. Or I would hang around, doing nothing, just existing and waiting for life to begin.

  But it didn’t begin. And when it did, with one genuine friendship, I blew it.

  If today were a Wednesday, I would be creeping through the bushes about now, seeing Chaim’s mother safely home from the shopping center. At six-thirty in the evening she would make her way back from the beauty parlor, and though I was in disgrace as far as she was concerned, I didn’t like to leave her without protection. As her bodyguard, I would check for possible trouble sources in the vicinity, and plan escape routes in case anything came up, like a protest demonstration. Sometimes she would stop to talk to a neighbor in the street. I would stand alert, ready to leap into the fire if the neighbor attacked. Inside my head I would hear a voice blaring, “Draw! Fire! Shoot!” and steal a glance out of the bushes at her softly fluttering eyelashes. And sometimes when I hid close by, it seemed to me that I could hear her words.

  The clock on the wall at Lola’s showed a quarter to seven. I got up and took another shower, to wash away the perspiration of the sultry day. How can anyone stand to live in Tel Aviv, I wondered. Lola had already gone to the theater, leaving Felix a long list of “Instructions for minding the house, the kitchen, and Nonny.” You might have thought I was three years old and made of glass. Felix was sitting in the living room, reading the newspaper by the light of the Chinese lamp. He was wearing a red bathrobe tied with a sash. His hair was freshly shampooed, combed in neat little white waves, yellowing at the ends. When he saw me, he stood up, folded the newspaper, and asked what I wanted to eat.

  There was tension in his voice, I noticed. We set the table in the kitchen, neither of us speaking. I sat down. I got up. I wanted to call home. Felix said the omelette would be ready in a minute and it would be a shame not to eat it hot. I said I just wanted to tell them I was okay at home, it wouldn’t take long. Felix said all the lines to Jerusalem would probably be busy at this hour. He spoke fast and sounded firm. I sat down again. Why would the lines be busy? He served my omelette, garnished with a crown of pimiento and a sprig of parsley, like an artist’s signature. He must have missed the good old days, with thirty guests for dinner.

  “Is okay this way, Amnon?”

  “Sure. That’s style, eh?”

  There was a wan smile on his lips. I was alarmed. Whenever Felix was down like this, I felt as if someone were trying to blow out the candle we’d succeeded in lighting together. I reminded him how the night before we had charged on the bulldozer and made the rampart fall.

  “So what you want to do tonight?” he interrupted absentmindedly.

  I returned the question: “What do you want to do?”

  “You can go home, if you want.”

  “What? Are you kidding? Quit now?” I was just starting to enjoy myself.

  “We don’t have to,” he sighed. “You decide.”

  “I’d like to stay like this forever.” I laughed. “Only, I have a bar mitzvah in a few days. What did Dad tell you? What did the two of you decide?”

  “Once again, I tell you, Amnon: is for you to decide.”

  That was a strange answer. As though he was avoiding my question.

  “Wait a minute: what if I decided that we should stay together for a week? Or a month? And that I won’t go to school anymore, that we’ll just roam around at night and do things?”

  Gravely Felix answered, “For me that is greatest compliment.”

  But his answer sounded wrong. Dad would never let him keep me. A little warning bell started ringing inside me. People always say that it rings in their heads. With me, it rang in my stomach, just under my heart and to the right.

  Felix wandered around the kitchen. He washed the glasses, he retied the sash of his bathrobe a few times. He opened the refrigerator and shut it…

  I stopped eating and watched him. What was the matter?

  “By the way, Amnon,” he said, with his back to me, “there is something we must to talk about, you and I. Just we two. Before we go on.”

  “What is it? Is anything wrong?” Oh please, don’t let anything be wrong, I prayed, don’t let anything spoil this beautiful dream. Just a little while longer, another day or two. In any case, I had to be back by Saturday. Felix was searching for something. He found it on his chair. The newspaper. The folded newspaper. He threw it on the table, right into my plate. What was the matter with him? He indicated that I should open the paper and read. What was I supposed to be looking for? It didn’t take me long to find out.

  In big red letters the headline screamed: SEARCH FOR BOY’S KIDNAPPER WIDENS.

  And underneath, in heavy black letters: “Police have called for total news blackout. Kidnapped boy is reportedly the son of senior police officer.”

  Below was a picture of the engineer standing outside the train in the middle of a field. And then I read another line: “The father of the boy is organizing the search. The identity of the kidnapper is known. The boy’s life may be in danger.”

  21

  Quick on the Draw: A Question of Love

  I was very cold. That I remember. I felt cold all over, as if someone had snipped me out of a warm, glowing picture with a pair of frosty scissors.

  “What’s this?” I asked. Or said. I didn’t have the energy to perk my voice up into a question.

  “I tell you story,” said Felix wearily. His eyes were closed.

  “What is this …” I asked again, my voice trembling like the newspaper in his hands. The words “boy’s life in danger” were flashing at me. On the table, between me and Felix, lay a large bread knife. I couldn’t take my eyes off it.

  “Did you kidnap me?” I asked cautiously. I couldn’t believe it. I knew all along, only I hadn’t wanted to understand.

  “You might say that,” he answered. He still hadn’t opened his eyes. His face looked pinched and drawn.

  “You actually kidnapped me?” My voice cracked.

  “You choose to come with me,” he said.

  He was right. I was the one who’d approached him on the train and asked, “Who am I?”

  “It is long story … very complicated,” said Felix, leaning against the wall. “But if you don’t wish to h
ear it, tell me now.”

  I felt numb. No emotions or sensations. I didn’t want to exist anymore. Going home was out of the question. How could I go home to Dad after what I’d done? Had all my adventures with Felix actually been crimes? Yes, crimes. I had committed crimes. The buzzing bored through my head, directly into my left eye. I. deserved the pain. But how did it happen? Was it coincidental? And did Dad plan any of the things I did? And if he didn’t know, then he wouldn’t come and leave a big fat tip for the big fat waiter, which made me Felix’s accomplice in all those crimes. How could I have believed him? What’s the matter with me? Who am I, indeed?

  And why had I enjoyed it all so much?

  “Why did you kidnap me?” I asked, carefully pronouncing the word “kidnap,” which sounded horribly ruthless all of a sudden.

  He didn’t reply.

  “Why did you kidnap me?!” I shouted. He shuddered, looking old and weak suddenly.

  “Because … because … I want to tell you something,” he said.

  “Tell me what? Why are you lying?” I shouted, so loudly that I startled myself. The knife was very close to his hand.

  “This is story about you, Amnon. Also about me, but mostly about you.”

  “And what are you going to do to me now? Ask Dad for ransom money?”

  Now I understood: this was his revenge on Dad! That’s right. He was a criminal, he had hinted as much, but I was too stupid to understand: he wanted revenge on Dad for arresting him and sending him to prison! But where was my guilt in all this? What had I ever done to him?!

  And what about their secret agreement to train me as a criminal so I would make a better detective, what about their manly handshake? I had made it all up.