The Zigzag Kid

by David Grossman

  On these good days, Zohara bubbled over with words. She needed to talk, and would make up stories to tell her family, her classmates, anyone with the patience to listen. In a lyrical language, like a little poet, she would speak of the other worlds she visited, in former incarnations, perhaps, or of the tiny beings that floated under her lids and performed her wishes, or about a certain young prince who lived in a far-off country, the name of which she must not utter because it was like a magic spell; the oracle of the realm had foretold that the prince would marry a girl from Israel, from the little city of Tel Aviv … She would say such things with the utmost gravity, her eyes half-closed and her lips pouting as though she were listening to someone inside tell her these things, which she in turn was bound to pass on to others. And so charming were the stories she told that no one called them lies but only fairy tales, Zohara’s fairy tales; even at school none of her classmates called her a liar and would listen in wonder, with only the mildest reservations, unable to decide whether or not Zohara believed what she was saying herself; because if she didn’t, how could she speak with so much authority, and how could anyone understand a girl who acts one way and then suddenly another. Let her decide once and for all who she is!

  And there’s another thing that pains me: when she was eight or nine, Zohara would choose a boy to love passionately, with all the devotion and grandeur of her soul. Of course, this was alarming to the chosen one. Who needed a crazy girl clinging to you like a pest, making the other children smirk at you with her heavy, grown-up love? But Zohara, undeterred, would write long letters, wait for hours outside the boy’s house, and make a real fool of herself in front of everyone, though she seemed not to notice that he was trying to avoid her (if he was kind), or as happened more often, that he was laughing in her lovesick face, with vows of undying love prompted by his tittering friends behind the door. Zohara didn’t mind. She had chosen him and was indifferent to their mockery. She knew that boys their age hated girls, it was a law of nature, though it was too bad the wonderful boy of her choice had yielded to convention. Still, Zohara was strong enough for both of them; her patience went beyond convention, beyond nature, even, she was a law unto herself, and would wait uncomplainingly for him to pass through this silly phase. She had no doubt that something of what she lavished on him sank in, that a word or a look of hers still sparkled in his heart of hearts when he was away from his mocking friends, and that someday, in a year or two, a great light would shine forth to her from his heart, which was all the more reason to rejoice even now and dance through the streets; life was so beautiful and she was a part of it, not as a spy, but as a girl of flesh and blood and soul!

  And suddenly, as if by some feat of dark magic, her eyes would cloud over and the corners of her mouth would fall, and her face would grow so pinched she looked like an old crone who was weary of living.

  The slightest thing would cause her unendurable pain: a broken pitcher, a man limping across the street, a promise unkept. Even in springtime when the world is in flower and children feel like the fruit and blossom of the trees, their bodies filled with juice, she would sit by the window, holding her hand up to the light to see her delicate bones and joints, and then burst into tears. Once in the middle of a lesson at school, she stood up, gaping as though she’d just wakened from a nightmare, and screamed, “But there’s no fence! There’s no fence!” When the teacher put her arms around her and tried to calm her down and find out what had frightened her so much, Zohara wriggled away from her and scurried around the classroom like a frightened animal, shrieking, “There’s no fence, there’s no fence around the world, what if we all fall off?”

  But at the age of fourteen, when her doctors had given up hope, these grievous symptoms all but disappeared. Like magic. The doctors had no explanation for this. They mumbled something about puberty … the effect of hormones … The important thing is that she’s better … And Zohara began to mature. The bitterly unhappy child was gone, to everyone’s relief, and a young girl emerged, to take her place: wild, mercurial, with a ringing laugh, an unquenchable thirst for the colors and pleasures of the world, growing daily taller and more beautiful, no, not beautiful, ravishing, with her jet-black hair and eyes, and the curving cheekbones that made her seem both fierce and refined. She outdid the boys in coarse language and scruffy clothes, her everyday trousers and ragged shirts. There was no mirror on the wardrobe door of her bedroom. “I just don’t want to see myself, there’s nothing to see!” She would goad the boys into foolhardy acts, and incite them cruelly against the other girls, the soft, feminine girls, who were terrified of her; she was rude to her teachers, and spent one day at school for every two at the beach, and her eyes sparkled, she was tan and muscular, with a swimmer’s physique, fast-moving and frenetic, as if to make up for all the years of staring and inertia. She wouldn’t touch a book if she could help it and risk falling foolishly into the snare of depression that lay between the alluring covers. Only the recorder beckoned occasionally, drawing her back when the seasons changed, but as she sat on the windowsill in her bedroom, pressing her lips to the mouthpiece, she would suddenly— No! Absolutely not! Because Zohara was the boss, it was she who would decide what to play and how to play it! And if the recorder defied her with extraneous notes and forgotten undertones, she would confine it to its velvet sheath, where it would have to lie in the dark until it learned its lesson.

  All this occurred in the stormy days before Israel became a state and the Jews were trying to oust the British and teenagers like Zohara were joining the underground, performing heroic deeds, toughing out beatings, arrest, and jail. At school there were whispers, secret codes, and rumors. Everyone spoke the same language, but Zohara remained uninvolved. “Who cares about politics, I go to the beach to swim and sunbathe, not to help illegal immigrants off the boats,” and once someone spotted her dancing at a café frequented by British soldiers, and when she received a gentle warning to stay away from the enemy occupiers of the land, she replied so coarsely that a classmate who was active in the underground said, “Forget about her, she doesn’t belong anywhere. Just pretend that she fell from the moon.”

  And maybe he was right. In a little while we’ll get to the part in my story where she ran across the moon and jumped down to earth, and it was to that moon and a certain lunar mountain that I owe my birth.

  “I don’t know anything about Zohara,” I said again to Felix in Lola’s kitchen. “Dad refuses to talk about her, and even Gabi is silent on the subject.”

  “I think,” said Felix, “that Miss Gabi finds very nice, smart way to tell you about Zohara.”

  “But she didn’t tell me anything!”

  “Little by little you understand how much she tells you.”

  “Someone once said that she used to like strawberry jam.”

  “Did your father tell you this, or Gabi?”

  “Neither of them. It was Tsitka, Dad’s mother. I polished off a jar of jam, and Tsitka said I was just like her. ‘Just like his mother,’ she said in that voice, with her lips like a scar.”

  “And I can tell you, Amnon, that your mother loved anything sweet, but most of all she loved chocolate, she was crazy for chocolate.”

  Just like me.

  And there was something about my bullfight that reminded Dad of her and made him mad.

  “And you never meet anyone from your mother’s family? Uncles, aunts, anyone?”

  “She didn’t have a family …” Or so I’d heard. Or thought. Or hadn’t thought.

  “Really? You have seen once somebody with no family at all, no uncle or distant cousin even, nothing? And what is her work, her profession? You never think to ask that?”

  I was speechless.

  “Now I tell you the story, Amnon. It will not be easy for you to hear. And it will hurt, too. But then you will understand many things you did not know before. I have to tell you, because you see—how to say it—this is why I wanted that we should meet.”

  “All right, the
n, tell me.” What will be will be.

  “One moment. Maybe you think it over first. Maybe is too much for you to know. What you don’t know won’t hurt.”

  But what I didn’t know already hurt. I nodded at him to continue.

  “All right,” he said, sitting up in his chair, “I tell you before that I knew Zohara from when she was baby, because I knew her mother, too. Then I knew Zohara at your age. But I knew her best when she was eighteen. So pretty, and she was most wonderful girl I ever know, and believe me, Amnon, this old man,” he said, pointing at himself, “know plenty of girls in his day.”

  “Did you … love her?” But I didn’t have to ask. I could see it on his face.

  “For me it was impossible not to love Zohara.”

  For me it was plain embarrassing to hear that Felix had once been my mother’s boyfriend.

  “But it was special kind of love,” he said. “Love like in cinema!”

  Worse and worse.

  Then slowly, Felix unfolded the story of Zohara. He spoke simply, without drama, rarely flashing his eyes. I sensed how hard he was trying to be fair, to stick to the facts, even when they were incredible. He wanted me to hear it straight, minus any artifice on his part.

  I couldn’t say how long Felix spoke. I put myself completely in his hands and he took me around the world, in rickshaws, riverboats, and big airplanes. He told the story with care, and though every word was painful at first, turning my whole life inside out, I knew it was all true; still, now and then, I would find myself listening as though this were a very sad and beautiful fairy tale.

  Once upon a time, in the city of Tel Aviv, there lived a beautiful maiden named Zohara. Zohara was a wild, fresh sea nymph. At sixteen she decided to quit school, and no one could say she knew less than other girls her age. By her seventeenth birthday she was the most beautiful girl in Tel Aviv, wooed not only by British soldiers but by a famous millionaire nearly twice her age, a Dutch conductor, and the center forward of the Tel Aviv soccer team. Zohara would have none of them. And why? Because she hadn’t found anyone worthy of her? Or because she was afraid to love again as she had in childhood? At eighteen, she took her first trip abroad with the archcriminal Felix Glick, a man with mesmerizing blue eyes.

  It was a two-year journey to exotic places, the faraway countries of an atlas smudged with fingerprints. For two years my mother and Felix Glick traveled together to places Zohara chose according to the incantatory power of their names: Madagascar, Hawaii, Paraguay, Tierra del Fuego, Tanganyika, Zanzibar, the Ivory Coast…

  In luxurious hotel lobbies they would encounter characters who seemed to have stepped out of an old book: exiled princes, dethroned emperors, generals and mercenaries, failed revolutionaries, stars of the silent screen whose voices had proven too shrill for talking pictures …

  “And I was there posing as art collector from Italy”—Felix smiled—“or curator of museum in Florence who ran away from Italian bureau of taxes, and Zohara—well, we tell people she is my only daughter, and sole heir to paintings by Picasso and Modigliani I keep in bank. This is what we do.”

  “Go on.” I laughed, uncomprehending. “You mean Zohara was also a … uhm …”

  “You must to listen now, and I will tell you.”

  During their sojourns in one city or another, they would stroll along the river, or hire a gaudy carriage emblazoned with imitation gold, and the devoted daughter would tuck an angora shawl around the knees of her would-be father to keep him warm. And thus, on their innocent outings, they might chance upon an exiled king who would happen to notice the white handkerchief dropped by the beautiful girl, run after the two of them, retrieve the hanky, kiss her hand, and tip his hat to her and her father. In the course of the conversation that invariably followed, the king would ask the modest gentleman and his beautiful daughter to join him for dinner at his hotel suite, and afterward, when he was mellow with wine and had fallen under the spell of the daughter’s charms and the blue of Felix’s eyes, he would invite them on a river cruise aboard his yacht.

  At first they would demur, not wishing to be a nuisance. “Not at all! It will be a great pleasure, I’m sure!”

  “But you are too gracious, Your Highness.”

  “Not in the least! Do come. We sail tomorrow.”

  And at last they would agree, and step aboard the luxurious yacht wearing tropical sun hats and carrying seven empty suitcases, to impress him with their wealth, and Zohara’s recorder, purchased from a music store in Tel Aviv, to summon the nymphs of the sea.

  “Always this story,” said Felix, looking away. “Five times, ten times—it works same. Only places change, and different people, different pigeon every time. We hunt him—and he, you can be sure, was hunting us, but there was no huntress like your mother.”

  “What? What did you say?” I couldn’t understand what he was on about. How did any of this concern my mother? I wished he would tell me about Zohara already.

  Felix was silent a moment. He shrugged his shoulders.

  “This is not easy for you, Amnon. It is difficult story. But I must to tell you. I promised her. She asked me to promise.”

  And I said, as though bitten by a snake, “Who asked? Who asked you?”

  “Your mother, Zohara. Before she died. She told me to find you and tell you whole story before your bar mitzvah. She said you must to know everything about her. That is reason for all this.”

  “The reason for all what?”

  “For this. For taking you with me so I can tell you story … Your bar mitzvah is any day now.”

  “Ah,” I said, nodding slowly, “ah yes.” But I didn’t understand a thing.

  “And I must to give you gift from her,” he added carefully, “her present for your bar mitzvah.”

  “What present? She’s dead, isn’t she?” I could barely move my lips.

  “Yes, she is dead. But before she died, she arranged it for you. Only I think is impossible to get it until tomorrow morning. Her present is in safe-deposit box she left in bank many years ago. This is why I want you should stay with me until tomorrow. If you go with me to safe-deposit box, I give you last golden ear of wheat. Then you can leave, forget about Felix.”

  My lips formed a pale smile. Forget about Felix. Oh sure.

  “My mother—” I began hoarsely, and the two words nearly toppled me over, and filled my throat with honey and brine and other strange flavors.

  “She was very special woman,” said Felix, stroking my hand because he saw my distress. “Beautiful, wild, like tiger, and so young, she was queen of Tel Aviv. Whenever she crooked her little finger, twenty men were willing to kill themselves for her. There is nothing in this world she wanted and did not do, and there is no one in this world could tell her what to do.”

  I listened in amazement. My mother? Is that what she was like? Although I seldom imagined her, suddenly she was beyond imagining.

  “And she was strong, Amnon, strong like only very beautiful people are. She was even, how to say it, cruel. Maybe she did not know her own power or understand danger of beauty. There are some whose lives were ruined because of her. Because they fell in love with her, and she played with them until she was tired and tossed them away.”

  “Cruel?” It couldn’t be. He must have been talking about some other woman, not my mother. He was lying! It was a fib from beginning to end! But his face spoke the truth.

  “Yes, cruel, like kitten playing with mouse. The kitten does not know how strong its claws are. It thinks it is playing with mouse, but poor mousy is already dead.”

  “But how did she marry my father? How did they meet? Tell me about that!” I felt an urgent need to change his story, or at least to bring Zohara closer to Dad. And normal life.

  “Not so soon, Amnon.” Felix sighed. “There is long way to go before she meets your Mr. Father.”

  “Wait a minute,” I shouted. “Is that why you kidnapped me? To get even with Dad for taking her away from you? Because she loved him more than s
he loved you?”

  Felix shook his head. “I am sorry, Amnon! But you must to hear whole story! From beginning to end. In sequence. That is what she said! If not, you will understand nothing.”

  Fine. I wanted him to tell me. That is, I did and I didn’t. Actually, I didn’t know what I wanted anymore. Everything he said turned my life topsy-turvy. And made it seem weird, too. And as soon as he finished telling me the story, I’d have to start getting reacquainted with myself. Nonny Feuerberg, a pleasure to meet you, or maybe not such a pleasure, at that.

  “She was my partner. Yes, your mother. That is what she wished!” And then he added, as though justifying himself, when he saw the look in my eye, “That is life she wanted. She told me so. Is true!”

  “A life of … of crime?”

  He hung his head in silence.

  “You mean my mother was a crimi— You’re lying! You’re lying to me again!” I shouted. I got up. I sat down. I stared up at the ceiling and down at the floor.

  “Listen to me!” cried Felix. “That is what she wanted. ‘Felix,’ she said to me, ‘they’re all cowards, living hand-me-down lives!’ And I said to her, ‘Zohara, the life of criminals is very short! Any minute they can die!’ And she answered that either way life is short, so why not live the time we have, whether it’s years or months, as long as we live how we want! The grand life! The life of cinema!”

  So I had a criminal mother. That’s what she was. That’s what they had always tried to hide from me. A criminal mother. It happens. There are women’s prisons out there, full of criminals. Still, how could it have happened to me? But why not? It had to happen to somebody, so why not me? And what did I care about her, anyway? I never even knew her. But I did care, she was the only thing I actually did care about just then. Or maybe Felix was lying. No, he was telling the truth. My mother had committed crimes all over the world. That’s why Dad never talked about her, except for that one time after what I did to Pessia, when he yelled about the curse Zohara passed on to me.