The Zigzag Kid

by David Grossman

  I took a deep breath. “And then she jumped.”

  “But is very big jump down!” said Felix skeptically. “Four meters maybe!”

  “Well, she jumped all the same,” I insisted, “and nothing happened to her!”

  “She always landed on her feet,” Felix murmured wonderingly.

  “It was night,” I went on, unable to stop myself. The story virtually poured out of me, out of the place between my eyes, though I’d never heard it before. “The chocolate factory was deserted, and Zohara scurried around …” I could just imagine her scurrying around, looking for the exit, popping in and out of the huge facility, bounding through it on velvet feet. I saw all of this, with the feather-tickle in my brain, and I told them about it directly from the place of fantasy, only this time it wasn’t a lie, it was my own story emerging at last like a tangled skein that had always been there but was suddenly unraveling, to bring Zohara back to life and set her dancing among the chocolate vats and stirring machines, and she would stop, unable to resist, stick her finger in, lick it, and laugh.

  A heavy thud: a hulking body lands on the roof of the factory. It’s the detective. The one and only. He rolls over, cursing, gets up, and cautiously enters the chocolate facility with his gun drawn. He peers around in search of the suspect. He’s getting clear signals: warmth around the navel means a criminal is nearby. And he feels very hot, around the navel and everywhere else.

  “Hey, you!” shouts Dad, and his voice echoes in an emanation of chocolate. “The place is surrounded! You don’t stand a chance! Come out slowly with your hands in the air!”

  The echoes fade away. Dad looks cautiously around. The smell of chocolate reaches his nostrils. Perhaps, for one fleeting whiff, he remembers his childhood in a similar factory, among machines such as this and sacks of flour and sugar. Cookies and chocolate together, yum! But he subdues all thought of this. In a profession like his, no distractions are permitted and any error might prove fatal. He treads carefully, his gun sniffing in every direction.

  And then? What happened? My imagination suddenly switches off. The hot place between my eyes has grown cold. A red-black curtain waves in front of my mind.

  “And then,” said Felix, “she shot him.”

  “Shot him?” I gasped. It never occurred to me that she had a gun. “You mean to say that she shot Dad?”

  “Yes, of course, with gun you have now in your pocket, Amnon. Gun you take from me belongs to her.”

  A woman’s gun, I remembered. That’s right. He examined one like it at a firearms exhibit once. Stroked it with his finger.

  “Was he hit? Did she hit him?”

  “In shoulder, I am sorry to say. She never shoots gun before in her life. She wouldn’t kill even fly. But at your father, she fires one bullet. Maybe this was only joke for her, or maybe—who knows?”

  “Maybe what?” I groaned. “Why on earth did she shoot him?”

  “Maybe she felt that he was dangerous,” said Lola simply. “Not as a detective, but as a man. Maybe she could sense that he would play an important part in her life, and it threw her into a panic.”

  I leaned back in the sidecar, allowed myself to flow. It would probably take me a couple of hundred years to digest all this. I buried my head under the seat, let my feet dangle over the side. Lola whispered something to Felix, and Felix sniffled. An airplane flew by. The antenna on top of the diamond center blinked red. The bullet on the chain fell out of my shirt and landed in my mouth. It was cold. Taken out of his body. Fired at him by Zohara. All my life I had been wearing it around my neck in complete ignorance. “Like Cupid’s dart,” said Lola, gently pulling me out of the sidecar. “Your father fell in love with her instantaneously.”

  “Because when she laughs as she fires the gun,” explained Felix, “he hears that she is young woman.”

  Dad was stunned. I’m sure being hit by a bullet hurts about as much, say, as being gored by a cow. With his uninjured hand Dad grasped his shoulder to try to stop the bleeding. “What, you’re a woman?” he asked in amazement.

  And again he heard her laughter ring, deriding him. She fired again, but not in an attempt to hit him this time.

  “You don’t stand a chance against me,” Dad called out to her, smiling against his will, and over against the pain shooting through him to his heart.

  She fired yet again, shattering the big lamp over his head. He ducked and took cover behind the bags of coffee beans. Another shot. A cascade of fragrant brown beans flowed over him. He jumped back. Crouched down. She fired. He counted the shots, knew how many bullets she had left. Knowledge is power, only this time it seemed that the more he knew the weaker he became, and the more complete was his surrender.

  They were alone together for what seemed like an eternity. She laughed and taunted him, hiding behind the machines, climbing on the forklifts, sticking out her rosy tongue at him from behind the assembly line where they make Cat Tongues, my favorite kind of chocolate to this day, waving her sweater from behind the sugar sacks, then vanishing as soon as he ran to her, reappearing somewhere else entirely, and carefully firing a shot over his head as part of the game.

  He never stopped smiling. Against his will, despite new pain.

  “That’s how it all started,” I explained, suddenly understanding. “She made him laugh.”

  “That’s right,” Lola confirmed. “No one could resist her when she wanted to amuse.”

  Yes, I thought. She’s the only person who could make him laugh.

  Poor Gabi.

  “Once, when we were in Jamaica,” Felix recalled, “Zohara was chosen Queen of Laughter for 1951! Three thousand dollars she won just for laughing!”

  “And so they laughed together in the deserted factory,” I continued, rejoicing at the thought of them, my father and my mother, chasing each other around the huge facility, young and happy, not as cops and robbers but as man and woman, and their laughter rang through the factory, her bell-like laugh and his husky horselaugh. I had never really heard him laugh wholeheartedly … “Until suddenly—”

  Sometimes I think that was the moment it was decreed that I should become a storyteller. “Suddenly,” I continued, strangely confident, “as she was running across a platform, she tripped and came tumbling down, and then …”

  “And then …?” asked Lola and Felix in unison, leaning forward.

  “And then she landed … right in a vat of chocolate,” I concluded with pride. It was three meters wide, three meters long, and two meters deep. A giant blade slowly stirred the sweetness. I had memorized the dimensions of all the vats. Gabi used to stand for hours by the biggest one, and silly me, I thought she was longing to dive into a sea of chocolate.

  “Dad leaped in after her, uniform and all. He swam with all his might through the thick hot chocolate.” I sounded like a sportscaster all of a sudden.

  But then I stopped.

  Because Dad doesn’t know how to swim.

  “True,” Felix concurred. “He almost drowned!” And added chaffingly, in an aside to Lola, “What kind of detective drowns in chocolate.”

  “But Zohara did know how to swim,” Lola went on, ignoring him. “She grabbed him by his wavy hair and dragged him all the way to the stairs inside the vat.”

  She grabbed him by his wavy hair.

  And by his heart.

  He had a full head of hair at the time. And a heart.

  “Oh dear,” said Lola. “It must be very hard for you to tell this story, and to hear it, too.”

  “Yes, it is,” I said. “Or rather, it is and it isn’t,” I admitted, sitting in the sidecar again. “I had no idea I could tell this story.”

  “That is kind of story that comes out best,” said Felix.

  He was covered in it; there was chocolate all over him, on his eyes, his uniform, his gun. But his bachelor’s heart was pounding like a drum: here was the one woman alive who could meet his difficult demands, a woman who had hunted down and fished him out … And Zohara stood there heav
ing with laughter, filled with a young girl’s hope and admiration for his sturdy shoulders, his rugged body …

  I see her as clearly as if I were there with them: lonely, unhappy, but covered with chocolate from head to toe. Her hair, her neck, her shoulders, her pointed ears, dripping long trails of chocolate. A bitter almond covered in chocolate.

  “Like two chocolate dolls,” whispered Lola, “a police doll and a thief doll.”

  “And they laugh together,” grumbled Felix.

  And how he laughed.

  Poor Gabi.

  She gorged herself on chocolate, but couldn’t make him laugh.

  “Put your hands in the air,” said the detective doll, with his chocolate-covered gun.

  Because he had counted the shots and knew she was out of ammunition.

  “I like you,” said the thief doll. Maybe she wiped a little chocolate off the tip of his nose and licked her finger. “I never met a man like you before. If you say pretty please, I’ll marry you.”

  “All right then, pretty please—put your hands in the air,” said Dad, who hadn’t quite understood.

  Zohara burst out laughing, because she thought that must be his special sense of humor.

  26

  No Two People Have Ever Been So Incompatible

  On the road again. We left the chocolate factory and headed north. I didn’t know where we were going and didn’t ask. On the way I changed back into my own clothes. I didn’t need Zohara’s anymore, now that I had her inside me.

  The streetlamps flew by. The few people out walking stopped and stared. What a weird-looking trio we made, Felix in that awful leather helmet, leaning forward like a jockey in a race; Lola with her long hair flying like snakes; and me, far too young to be out at this hour of the night.

  And of course the motorcycle also caught their eye: it was bulky and antiquated, and noisy as a tank. The sidecar seemed in danger of coming off any minute. One sharp turn and I’d be flying off alone, silent as a tomato plant, while Felix and Lola would continue on their way, clinging to each other on the motorcycle. Into the sunset.

  I mean sunrise.

  Occasionally I glanced over. Lola clung to him, her long gray hair covering both of them like a scarf. Felix didn’t stop talking to her, shouting against the wind, and she shouted her answers into his ear. They may have been arguing, or just having a pleasant chat, but either way, you could see how close they had once been.

  “That’s only the beginning of the story!” Lola called over to me through the scarf of hair.

  “I’m all ears!” I shouted in reply.

  … Back at the chocolate factory, Dad spoke briefly to Zohara, explaining what she could expect: he was going to lead her out, make sure no one hurt her, and try to have himself assigned as her interrogator. She would say what she had to say, and tell him why she had decided to pull such a prank, when it was obvious that she came from a good family; maybe she did it on a dare, these things happen, no one understood that better than he did; and in return for her complete cooperation, he would see to it that she got off lightly, without the taint of a criminal record, so she could carry on with the normal life of a law-abiding citizen. And then, maybe, after it was all over, would she agree to go to the cinema with him?

  Zohara was entranced. By his strength, his determination, his rugged manliness. By the way he came after her instead of waiting below with the other policemen. And because, while some suitors wrote high-flying love poems, and others threatened to jump off the roof if she ever left them, he was the very first man who had climbed to the heights in her pursuit and not abandoned her there. And Zohara, the woman who had spurned the advances of millionaires and soccer stars, gazed at my father, and her lips moved voicelessly. “Are you trustworthy?” she asked from the depths of her soul, and the vigor of his being roared out the answer with all the thunder of a regiment presenting arms, and Zohara was vanquished, taken by storm.

  “A woman like Zohara,” said Lola over the wind, “who lived in fantasy and often lost sight of the borderline between truth and fiction, would naturally be entranced by a man like your father. Maybe she thought he could help her find some peace of mind—”

  Maybe Lola was right at that, because although he had been wild in his youth, and climbed up to those embassy roofs and cast the shadow of the Union Jack over French croissants, or squared wheels and lassoed zebras, he always knew where the border was, and the difference between right and wrong, fact and fantasy. It would not have perplexed him, for instance, to be asked who he was.

  “Hey, cowboy.” The chocolate doll smiled, unaware that this had once been his nickname. “Do you know what a catch you’ve made?”

  And there and then, by the chocolate vat, she recounted a story abounding with the names of dethroned monarchs and exotic lands, etc., and sums of money and bank vaults in Switzerland. Dad just stood there with his mouth open, and she threw back her head and laughed at the sight of his blessed naïveté, the naïveté of an overgrown child, and I know that a cold sharp pain went though my father’s heart just then, because a voice within him shouted, She’s different from what you always imagined, she’s not for you! And he could already hear his older brother Samuel berating him for falling so rashly in love with a criminal, and his mother, Tsitka, muttering, “Over my dead body you’ll marry a criminal”; and he knew that his superiors on the force would suspend him from any operational responsibility on account of his criminal affiliations—he knew all this from the very first moment, and sure enough it all came to pass. Yet his heart was filled with the sweetest nectar of all, the nectar of new love, and he would not, could not, relinquish the only woman who had ever touched him so deeply; muscles he never dreamed were there now fortified his soul, the muscles of persistence and determination.

  That’s how it started. In those few moments his fate was diverted to another track, and even the cast of his features changed, becoming serious, somber, responsible, as though he had only then passed from youth into manhood. His neck suddenly thickened and lodged between his shoulders, and his shoulders grew broad over his chest in order to hold all the heart within him, to bear the new yoke; someone who had once danced with a refrigerator on his back could assume this enormous burden, the tumultuous life of the ravishingly beautiful woman who stood before him, because even while she spoke laughingly of the most odious crimes—hair-raising crimes!—he could hear her soft whispers, her pleas for help, and knew that she had been scrutinizing him to learn whether he would be a true detective and see through her pretenses into the lonely little girl, so bitter, so bright, searching for someone who would not fear her …

  And of all my moments with Dad, of all the stories I ever heard about him, this was the one that made me love him the most (even though I wasn’t with him at the time): the moment of his heroic effort to let go of all his little fears and rational considerations, and the tried-and-true course before him, and agree to take a dangerous and unfamiliar course. In short, for giving up what was clear-cut and substantial in return for something as intangible as love.

  Dad was assigned to interrogate her. For an entire month he went to see her daily at the jailhouse, and sat with her eight hours at a time, taking down her statement.

  “It was no statement,” grumbled Felix. “It was her confession.” And he stepped angrily on the gas, jolting us back and forth.

  “What do you want from the girl?” said Lola, poking him with her sharp nails in the best tradition of a knitting-needle grandmother. “She didn’t inform on you! She never once mentioned your name! She wanted to purge herself of all her lies! To start over fresh. Can you blame her?”

  “But why she must to tell him whole history of world going back to creation?” Felix ground his teeth and screeched down on the brakes. “Why she tell him every last secret?”

  “Because that’s the way she was when she fell in love.” Lola sighed to herself, or perhaps to Felix. “She couldn’t hold back any secrets from the man she loved …”

&n
bsp; We rode on in silence for a while. Felix hiked his shoulders up to his ears, as though trying to ward off something Lola had hurled at him, something that I didn’t quite understand. Then Lola sighed deeply and took up the story of that strange interrogation.

  Zohara told Dad about the diamonds pouring like pomegranate seeds into the palm of her hand, and made frequent mention of remote islands and other places he had only read about in magazines, till everything sounded both real and surreal, he no longer cared which, because he felt she was pulling him by the hair on his head beyond his limitations, beyond all limitations, and something inside him cheered her on, while something else dug its feet in the ground with stubborn fear …

  “It was a truly unique interrogation,” Lola tried to shout through mantles of wind. “He wanted to know absolutely everything about her! It wasn’t her crimes that interested him now … He had become fascinated by her character … by the riddle … Zohara …”

  “He even came to interrogate Lola!” Felix shouted scornfully, driving so fast that the words flew away in the wind.

  “Not to interrogate, to talk to me … in the kitchen, night after night … for weeks on end … to ask what she was like as a child … to look at photograph albums … at her school notebooks … and sit for hours … He couldn’t understand …” The wind brought tears to my eyes. The words she shouted sank into my ears. I thought about my father in Lola’s kitchen, where I myself had sat only yesterday.

  “And there was a trial.” Lola continued shouting the story through the wind. “Your father promised the judge he would see to it that Zohara kept out of trouble. Thanks to him, the judge was lenient, and she was sentenced to two years in prison, which was very light considering what she’d done.”