The Zigzag Kid

by David Grossman

  “I want nothing from your father. I do not need his money.”

  “What do you want from him, then?”

  “His son.”

  “What for?!”

  The question erupted from inside me with a howl, rending my heart in two. Because I had liked him and I believed he liked me, before I realized I was kidnapped. But everything had gone wrong, everything was twisted now. How could I have believed for one minute that Dad planned the operation, when, in fact, the only arrangements he and Gabi had made were for a magician, a contortionist, a policeman in disguise, and a phony prisoner to come aboard the train—which is not a whole lot, compared to what I did with Felix.

  “You kidnapped me for revenge,” I said, spitting out the word with disgust. “To get revenge on Dad. That’s why!”

  He shook his head and closed his eyes. I had the feeling he was afraid to open them again, because he, too, was sorry everything was spoiled. “No, Amnon. I kidnap you only because I want to see you and be with you. This is not connected to your father. It is something just between you and me.”

  “Me? Come on! Why me? I’m not famous. I’m just a kid! You wouldn’t get anything for me if I weren’t his son!”

  “Amnon, go if you want—you are free,” said Felix. “I am not holding you against your will. But I want you should know: only you are important to me here. Not your father. Only you, Amnon.”

  “What, you mean if I want to, I can just get up and run away?”

  “You don’t must to run away. Running away is only when people are chasing after you.”

  “And you won’t… chase after me?”

  At last he opened his eyes. They were veiled with sadness, resignation. I believed his eyes, but I couldn’t help remembering all the people he had fooled with those same eyes.

  “The way you look at me now …” he said, pressing his head with his hands and shaking it, “this is my great punishment for seventy years of lies—your eyes, the way you look at me …”

  I got up. My knees were trembling, and so were my arms. I tried to hide it from him. I didn’t want him to see I was afraid. I walked away slowly, never turning my back. He groaned. I could see how much it hurt him that I didn’t trust him anymore. How could I trust him?

  “I’m going,” I said.

  “You decide. I always say to you, you decide when this game is over.”

  I backed off toward the door.

  “I must to tell you important story,” he said quietly. “Story about your life.”

  To hell with you and your stories, I thought. You spoiled the beautiful dream, and now everything seems ugly and frightening.

  “I only want for you to know one thing,” said Felix. “If you give me few more hours, not long, just until tomorrow morning, I can tell you this story.”

  “And if I don’t? If I don’t believe you?”

  With every word I said he bowed his head lower, as though stricken. “Don’t go. No one else can tell you this story.”

  “I bet you’d swear to that.”

  I bumped into the door handle. I was sure that it was locked, that the key was clenched in his hand, that he would dangle it before my eyes soon, smiling like a maniac, and that would be the end of me, as it was for the other children he had brought to this house. And then my picture would appear on a missing-persons notice, and the police would ask for volunteers to help search for me, and they would find my remains in the Jerusalem Forest.

  “No, Amnon, I don’t swear anything to you,” said Felix softly. “To you I only promise.”

  But the key was in the lock. I turned it and the door opened. I skipped out, slammed the door behind me, and bounded down the stairs. I cleared three or four steps at a time. For a second I imagined he was hot on my trail, and I may have screamed. My hair bristled, my body bristled. But he wasn’t running after me. I tore out of the building. It was dark in the street. Cars were passing with their headlights on. I rested against a fence, panting like a dog. All the while I kept thinking, I’m free! I’m free! But I felt no joy somehow, only terrible pain and humiliation. I remember that the air was fragrant with honeysuckle, that it seemed like a perfectly ordinary evening. No one could have guessed what I was going through then, and the fate I had eluded. A couple passed, arm in arm, and then a man with a dog. He carried the newspaper with the headline. What would he do if I stopped him now and revealed that I was the one, the boy the whole country was searching for?

  The man walked past me, but the dog dawdled along and sniffed my shoes. It looked up suspiciously and started growling at me, as dogs are wont to do. But the man tugged at the leash and dragged the dog off before it could give me away.

  I walked quickly up the sidewalk, thinking I would need a whole year’s quiet to unravel the tangled events of the past two days. What shocked me most was that I had never realized what was going on around me. That while so many people were searching frantically for me, I had been lost in my own little fiction.

  As usual.

  Idiot. What was I thinking? That Dad would place me in the hands of a certified criminal so he could teach me some tricks of the trade, offer me a speed course in lawbreaking? My own father, who’d tried so hard all his life to abide by the law and fight against crooks like this Felix character.

  What was the matter with me? How could I have made such a mistake? It was as if I’d been sidetracked in my sleep but went on smiling like an imbecile, believing everything I saw, when it was all a lie. A lie and a crime. And after so many lies, I had deceived myself.

  The kiosk on the corner was still open. I glanced cautiously at the headlines as I scuttled by, all of them seemingly about me, though the only information they revealed was that I’d been kidnapped. They didn’t even give my name, because the police were keeping that a secret.

  Kidnapping. Kidnapped. Life in danger. I muttered the words to myself. They sounded tinny. They had nothing to do with Felix’s treatment of me. And my life was not in danger. Why did the papers lie like that? To attract readers.

  I crossed the street and hurried on, where I didn’t know. To get away from Felix. To run as far as possible from the danger in him. What was he doing now, alone, in the kitchen? He had escaped, no doubt, slipped out like a shadow, and was already searching for another sucker.

  I circled around, back to the street behind Lola Ciperola’s house. I just wanted to see whether he would try to get out through the window. He didn’t, though. I figured I’d better report to the police. I could ask to call from the kiosk. I didn’t have any money on me, but maybe I could explain to the man that I was the kid in all the newspapers, the victim of the kidnapping. Right.

  I slowed down. Such things required serious consideration. I wondered whether Micah knew already, whether the rest of my classmates had guessed that it was me. The ones who’d never been my friends, who used to make fun of me and Dad and our silly detective games and the way we saluted each other, and the ranks he did or did not confer on me, the “police mascot,” who couldn’t even get accepted into the traffic patrol for reasons A, B, and C.

  Let’s hear what they have to say now. Like Mrs. Marcus, who was always so eager to have me expelled from school, maybe she would wipe her eyes and say, “No, he wasn’t emotionally disturbed, he was a zigzag kid, that’s all, with the soul of an artist, only we didn’t realize it in time.” And the other teachers would be on the phone to each other by now, saying, “It was him. Poor thing. Maybe we drove him to it. We should print up a nice little booklet in his memory. There was something special about the boy, though he could get a little wild sometimes.”

  I wondered what Chaim Stauber was thinking now, and if this would change anything. And whether he would discuss it at home.

  I stuck my hands in my pockets to slow myself down. Why was I running? Look before you leap. But there I was again, in front of Lola Ciperola’s house. The streets all looked the same to me. I walked down to the corner. I passed the newspaper headlines again. Maybe even Golda Meir ha
d taken time out of her busy schedule to ask her special advisor on crime whether the police were making every effort to save the boy, and whether he would divulge the boy’s name to her, in strictest confidence, of course, and the advisor would whisper my name in her ear, and the Prime Minister would say, “Aha!,” neglecting, for the moment, other pressing affairs of state.

  But what was Felix doing, all alone by the kitchen table? This man, the partner with whom I had just spent the two happiest days of my life, had entered the headlines and become a stranger and an enemy. As I walked away, I had seen the life drain out of him. Why was it so vital that I believe him? Why had he been trying so hard to show me a good time?

  He’d offered to share my vegetarianism.

  And I’d promised (in my heart) that I would be loyal to him.

  I betrayed him. But he betrayed me first.

  I sat on the curb, wondering what to do.

  A police siren went off down the street. All I had to do was go over there now and I could be done with this. But then I would never learn the secret Felix wanted to tell me. And I couldn’t ask him any more questions. Dad would never tell me the story. He didn’t want me to know. Not even Gabi was allowed to discuss it with me.

  And Felix said he had known Zohara.

  He knew about her life in the mountains with Dad.

  But what about the horses they kept there? And what was it like for them together?

  He said he had kidnapped me so he could tell me the story.

  The story. The story. There was no end to the buzzing of this story. For thirteen years the story had been silent, and now it wouldn’t leave me alone.

  But wait: the photo. The one he’d showed me on the train.

  Oh, God.

  In that photo of me and Micah, I was wearing a coat. Which meant Felix started planning this operation last winter. So much thought and effort had gone into it: and for what, so he could tell me a story? What about the Bugatti he had had shipped to Israel, and the Beetle that succeeded it? And maybe there was more to come. I had heard him say to Lola, This is Felix’s final operation. His farewell performance.

  He knew something about me. Something that was important to him. Otherwise he wouldn’t have put so much into it. My story was important to him. And if he didn’t tell it to me, no one would. Because no one ever had, not in thirteen years.

  I’m not afraid of Felix, I told myself anxiously. I can go back now if I want, hear his story, then turn him over to the police.

  That would be great, I tried to work up a little enthusiasm.

  Father-detective catches a felon, and ten years later, son-detective catches same. Full circle.

  What a crook, I fumed: how did he convince me that Dad agreed to all this? I asked questions and he answered. And, in fact, he hadn’t lied to me. That was the strange thing: he hadn’t lied to me once since we’d met. Except for that time with the gun when he was trying to make me laugh. And even then he wanted to tell me about himself. And everything he had told me was true (or so it seemed to me), as if he had to have someone, even if only a kid, with whom he could be totally honest.

  But why me, the son of the detective who had apprehended him?

  I decided to go back. Felix had never lied to me or tried to harm me in any way. He had made no attempt to stop me from leaving. Why did I not hear what he kept telling me, then? “You decide. The choice is yours.” It was all up to me. If I had the courage, I would know everything. If I didn’t, I could go home now to a hero’s welcome for having escaped from the kidnapper. Only I would know the truth.

  Slowly I climbed the stairs. Yes, I was coming back of my own free will. I would listen to his story and lure him into a trap. That’s what I would do. That’s how I would make up for all I’d done with him, and Dad would have to forgive me.

  Just as I was about to knock on the door, I stopped. Be reasonable, I told myself, he has a gun. He’s desperate. This is your last chance to turn back. If you go in now, you may never come out alive.

  I knocked on Lola’s door. There was no sound inside.

  He’s probably run away by now, I thought. That’s typical. Yeah, well, was he supposed to wait patiently for me to return with the cops? He had run away, and now I would never hear the story. I felt a pang of regret. In part because the story had been lost to me forever and in part because I realized that I would miss that crook.

  I touched the handle. The door opened. I squeezed in sideways so it would be harder to hit me. All of Dad’s instincts were at work in me now.

  Silence.

  “Is anyone there?” I asked cautiously.

  The curtain stirred and Felix emerged from behind it with a gun in his hand. I knew. I had walked right into his trap.

  “You come back,” he said, his pallor showing through the tan. His hand was trembling. “You come back alone, without police, right?”

  I nodded. I didn’t dare move, I was so frightened and angry at my own stupidity.

  He tossed the gun on the carpet and covered his face with his hands. He pressed his eyelids. I stood perfectly still. I didn’t make a lunge for the gun. I waited for him to get hold of himself, for his shoulders to stop shaking. When he moved his hands away, I saw his eyes were red and swollen.

  “You come back,” he muttered. “This wonderful, Amnon, you come back.”

  He tottered away, dragging his feet, and his hair was wild and sticky with perspiration. I waited for him to go to the kitchen. Then I quickly picked up the gun and put it in my pocket. Now I felt more secure. But my heart was beating faster than ever, I don’t know why. I stood in the doorway to the kitchen. Felix was drinking a glass of water. He sat down with a sigh and rested his forehead on his hands. His face was deathly pale, as pale as the face of a corpse in a forensic photograph. There was a pen on the table and a sheet of paper with a few lines scrawled on it. When he noticed I was looking, he quietly picked it up and crumpled it into a little ball.

  “You don’t know what it means to me that you come back,” he said.

  “Were you about to run away?” I asked. There was still some harshness in my voice, but the hatred in it had dissolved.

  “By coming back you save my life,” he said. “Not that life of Felix Glick is worth very much anymore. But when you come back you make it worth something again … Do you understand what I tell you?”

  I didn’t understand.

  “Five minutes later, and we would never see each other again,” he said.

  “The story!” I puffed impatiently. Again I regretted coming back. I had given up my chance to make a clean getaway, to go home and forget all about this bizarre episode. “You promised a story, tell it to me now!” If only I had walked up to the police cruiser in the street before, I could by now have been talking to Dad on the telephone.

  “The story is about one woman,” said Felix hesitantly. My heart was pounding. Zohara, Zohara, the blood throbbed in my temples. Felix reached into his shirt. Unthinkingly I touched the trigger on the gun in my pocket. My instincts were faster than my thoughts, unnecessarily so, it seemed. He wasn’t going for a weapon. He was merely pulling out the gold chain with the one remaining ear of wheat and the heart-shaped locket.

  With a flick of his finger he opened the locket, handed it to me, and said with a croaking voice, “This woman both I and your father loved.”

  There inside the locket Zohara was smiling at me, with her beautiful face and wide-set eyes.

  22

  The Bird in Winter

  Once upon a time there was a little girl. On her sixth birthday, the little girl had a party. The guests gathered around the flower-festooned chair where she sat and lifted it in the air, once for each of her six years of life. But when they raised her high for the year to come, she announced with a beaming smile that she had decided to die exactly twenty years from the day. A hush fell over the crowded room. The girl gazed bewilderedly at the mute and pain-filled faces that surrounded her. Then she laughed and said, “Don’t worry, ther
e’s still plenty of time!”

  She had a narrow face with prominent cheekbones that gave her a hungry look, and her gangly arms and legs were usually covered with ugly scratches she inflicted on herself in her sleep at night or in her daylight reveries. She would sit for hours staring out the bedroom window through dark, half-lidded eyes, and even when her name was called, she didn’t hear. At a later age, she would devour books, or rather, be devoured by them herself. She would read anything and everything, whether for children or adults, nurturing the precious secret that she was not a little girl at all but a spy sent out to the world from her favorite book of the moment, to try to live an ordinary life among ordinary people, and never be discovered. And if anyone discovered her pretense of being a real person in the guise of a little girl, a grave punishment would follow. I’m afraid she never confided in her diary what this punishment would be, but now that I’m older than Zohara was when she died, I think I can guess: the spy would have to abide with humanity forever.

  When she was a little older, Zohara (or Pippi Longstocking or Anne of Green Gables or Huckleberry Finn or David Copperfield or Dorothy or Lassie or Romeo and Juliet—rolled into one) would write lengthy descriptions in her diary of a place she called “the land of death,” or the land of the dead, and the families that lived there together, in death, and she would draw pictures of the infants born there: little white babies with no eyes. Various doctors she was taken to could find no way to cure her sadness. One doctor suggested that playing a musical instrument might help, so they bought her a recorder in a small music shop in Tel Aviv, and though Zohara seemed eager to play it, usually, after a few moments, she would withdraw in silence again, with the recorder still in her mouth and her fingers fluttering over the holes to a secret tune no one else could hear.

  On her rare good days, Zohara would sing like a little sparrow, happy to have survived the winter storms: all brightness, she would chatter merrily and skip around, hugging her loved ones and pressing her cheek to their beating hearts. On those days her face shone brightly and the disfiguring lines of pain and anger vanished beneath her skin. Dressed in clothes she was too young to wear—long scarves and gaily colored hats—she would promenade with her mother through the streets of Tel Aviv, like some rare postage stamp, taking in the looks of astonishment on the faces of passersby, as though laying away supplies for a long and lonely voyage.