The Zigzag Kid

by David Grossman

  “Two years in prison?” I was astounded. “You mean they were separated for two whole years?”

  “Oh no, Nonny, quite the contrary. It was a great love affair! Now we’re getting there!”

  “Getting where?”

  But Lola touched her lips to silence me.

  The wind died down. Once again the shades that passed before my eyes turned into familiar objects, a row of trees, a eucalyptus grove, a sand dune, a high fence. Felix turned off the main road with his usual finesse. The Rolls raised some dust, bumped over a dirt road, clattered through a eucalyptus grove, and stopped.

  “Here,” whispered Lola, “here, for two years.”

  We jumped off the motorcycle. I was still kind of shaky from the ride. We all staggered a little and held on to each other. Felix was struggling with the leather helmet again. Lola stood hugging me from behind with her cheek to mine.

  “You’ll catch a cold,” she said.

  “Already she is typical grandmother.” Felix chuckled.

  There in the moonlight stood an ugly rectangular prison, a women’s prison surrounded by concrete walls and barbed wire. There were hexagonal turrets in each corner. Grim-looking guards marched across the roof. A searchlight revolved every minute or so and lit up the surrounding fields.

  For two whole years my mother lived here.

  Locked up, stifled, withering away.

  “Oh no,” said Lola, “within a month she was the leader of the joint, the representative of the inmates before the prison authorities. And besides, your father came to visit her every day!”

  Yes, every day. He would finish work, say goodbye to his young secretary, Miss Gabi, and drive out to the prison. Here in this lot he would park his motorcycle (he had removed the tomato plant from the sidecar, having realized that the age of youthful high jinks was past). And he would sit motionless as a rock with his head cast down, take a deep breath, as he often did before going out to face the trials of life, dismount his motorcycle, and head for the visitors’ gate.

  Day after day. Nothing could stop him. Neither the weather nor the wrath of his superiors on the force. It was then, as he had foreseen, that they began to make trouble for him. They postponed his promotion. They curtailed his duties. He was told: “Leave her—and your advance up the ranks is assured!” But he continued to visit her. They exploded. “How can you ruin your whole career for the sake of some little criminal?” Dad listened. Said nothing. But at the end of the day he hopped on his motorcycle and rode out to the prison.

  It was utterly senseless, utterly hopeless. It was unrealistic and unprofessional, and yet, I always remind myself, their love was born in a vat of chocolate, how could it be anything but senseless, and full of passion and remorse and sweet addiction and shame and guilt.

  At six o’clock every evening he would meet her in the visitors’ room, under the watchful eye of an armed guard. They would talk in whispers, head to head. My mother would tell him about prison life, about her cellmates, about her ongoing arguments with the warden and the guards. Dad would tell her about the homestead he was building for the two of them on a plot of land he had bought at the summit of the Mountain of the Moon on the Jordanian border: a wooden cabin, furniture he had made with his own hands, a pen for the sheep, a stable for the horses, and a chicken coop. He spent every weekend alone on the windy hilltop, building a nest where their love would grow. He bought lumber and tools, and pipes, and doors and windows, plus an old wooden plow, and seed and manure, and he started learning all about sheep and donkeys and horses … And when he came to visit Zohara he would show her the blueprints he had drawn, and where the sheep pen and the stable would be, and the plans for the fence he was putting up and the kitchen cupboards he was building. All the love imprisoned in him was translated into lumber, doorframes, and window cases. She was entranced by his thoroughgoing seriousness; his grave way of speaking about how high the stairs would be filled her with a serenity she had never known before. There was strength and responsibility in his broad shoulders and square hands, and Zohara imagined her perfect happiness in the wooden cabin with the three front steps, each one eighteen centimeters high.

  “It will be just like the cinema.” Zohara laughed, and her heart went out to him, her restless, easily bored, inconstant heart.

  “Ai,” sighed Lola, shivering.

  “Ai,” sighed Felix.

  “No two people have ever been so incompatible,” said Lola.

  “To this day I don’t understand what they saw in each other,” said Felix angrily.

  They were looking at me as if I held the answer. As if I were that answer.

  I didn’t know what to say. And I still wonder sometimes about the attraction between them, even though I’m the product of their differences and similarities.

  “Your Mr. Father only thought they are similar,” sneered Felix. I was beginning to realize just how much he disliked Dad. It’s kind of complicated, having a grandfather who’s the enemy of your father. “Your Mr. Father thinks just because he is making mischief in his army days or at shindigs in Jerusalem that he can understand Zohara. But she was too wild for him. If he was like cat, she was tigress.”

  Lola sighed. “He was simply too good and too honest… and also—how shall I put it—a bit too normal to understand the character of someone like her …”

  She didn’t say this sarcastically, but in a soft, almost regretful tone, and though I wasn’t quite sure what she meant by it, I sensed that she was right; the bitterness of it trickled into my heart, and for the first time I began to question his skills as a detective, and to see that being a pro did not necessarily provide solutions to all the riddles of life and other human beings.

  “I, too, am a little like …” I stammered, not knowing how to say it, “… like Zohara, what you said about her …” because I wanted to tell Lola everything about myself, the whole bitter truth, so there wouldn’t be a single lie between us.

  “You’re Zohara’s son and Felix’s grandson,” said Lola simply. “Naturally there’s something of them in your blood.”

  This was new, I’d never thought of it like this before. So was it a good thing or a bad thing? Was I the way I was because of Zohara? But I barely knew her! What did it mean that I had something of her and Felix in my blood?

  I stared at Felix in open-eyed amazement. He was standing tall, with his head held high, like a soldier on parade, looking somewhat anxious under my scrutiny, though, as if he felt guilty or apologetic, just as he had two days before after we broke into Lola’s house, when he made his confession, as if he wanted me to forgive him for what he had passed on to Zohara and she to me … All this was getting too heavy and I glanced up at Lola, hoping she would come to my rescue with a kind word, and she understood, perfect grandmother that she was, and said with a compassionate smile, “Imagine how happy the two of them were when she was finally released.”

  I heaved a sigh of relief and so did Felix.

  I could picture Zohara leaving the prison through the iron gate. Dad was waiting for her on the motorcycle, here in the parking lot. Okay, she’s passed the gate, she’s looking around. The guards are watching from the towers. Now Dad’s getting off the motorcycle and walking toward her. They embrace, though it embarrasses him to do so in public, and then they …

  But something was bothering me. I don’t know, maybe it had to do with what had just transpired between Felix and me, or maybe I suddenly realized, to my deep sorrow, just how incompatible Dad and Zohara really were.

  They hopped on the motorcycle and rode off to the Mountain of the Moon. Directly from prison, of this I was sure. They had nowhere else to go. Nobody wanted them anywhere. Zohara rode in the sidecar. I could see them moving into the distance. Perhaps there was a strong wind that day, too, making it difficult for them to talk to each other. Maybe they both fell silent, feeling shy now that they were alone together without the fairy-tale aura which had surrounded them before. No longer were they two dolls, policeman and cri
minal, whose love affair had been ignited by a gunshot and burst into flame behind bars … Now they were just two people, a man and a woman, feeling somewhat strange and extremely different from each other. How would they ever live there together, alone?

  They were suddenly scared, and so was I. Zohara sank deeper into the sidecar. I could feel her, I could feel him, as if I had actually been with them on the deserted road with the wind in their faces. Quite suddenly their individual and very separate fates came into focus, and something inside her arched its back at him and hissed, while something inside him barked angrily at her … She groped for his hand, but he pushed her away with a tight-lipped scowl. Because it was against the law to drive with one hand.

  “That’s where we go now,” whispered Felix. “We return this morning, in time to get Amnon’s present from bank vault.”

  “Where are you taking us?” Lola asked. “I’m cold. I want to go back.”

  “To their cabin up on Mountain of the Moon.”

  Lola was astounded. “What?! All the way there? But it’s so close to the border!”

  “We must to go,” insisted Felix. “I promise I show Amnon their whole life together tonight!”

  “Felix,” Lola cajoled him, “it will take hours to get there, and this old wreck is sure to fall apart on the way!”

  “We arrive in just one hour! This Felix promises!”

  The prison dogs had caught our scents, and our voices roused them, too. They started racing around like lunatics on their chains, barking themselves hoarse. Lola and Felix, nose to nose, stood rasping at each other.

  She: “You want to make all the decisions, don’t you? You want to plan out my whole life for me!”

  He: “But you never listen! If only you listen to me, then you—”

  She: “Thinks he knows better than anyone what to wear, what company to keep, which dramatic roles to accept! Mr. Big Shot!”

  “Well, I really do know better.” Felix laughed, stepping gracefully aside. “I even know what you are thinking.”

  “Oh, is that so?” said Lola, her face close to his. “Well, why don’t you just tell me what I’m thinking, smarty?”

  “You are thinking,” said Felix, drawling out the words, “you are thinking that tree over there is real.”

  And he pointed at a large clump of bushes in the middle of the grove.

  “You mean it isn’t real?” I asked.

  “Is not that what you think, Lolly?” Felix prodded her, cackling with delight and trying to pinch her chin till she was forced to turn her humiliated face toward him.

  “And what have you hidden there? A new surprise? Oh, Felix, won’t you ever grow up?”

  I didn’t wait around to hear the rest of the argument. I jumped up and ran to the tree.

  From close up, I could see something hidden there. A huge thing someone had camouflaged with branches and shrubs. I lit into it, started clearing off piles of foliage and throwing them on the ground.

  Very soon I saw what it was and could hardly believe my eyes. This was beyond my wildest imagination. How did he do it? When did he hide her here? Who helped him? Where on earth did he find her?

  First I saw the shiny black door, then the heavy desert tire, and then the rounded fender, the one the English painted a white stripe on during the Blitz so pedestrians would see it coming …

  I knelt beside her. My Pearl, our Pearl. The Humber Pullman we were forced to give Mautner, and which he overturned his first time out (Hallelujah), claiming she was cursed, and then promptly sold. And that was that, we forgot her, never mentioned her again, except now and then—when we flinched at the painful memory. And here she was, resurrected.

  Filled with awe, I opened the door. I knew every centimeter of that car. Times without number I had buffed and polished the sleek chassis, the dashboard, the steering wheel. It was almost as though I had imprinted something of my personality in her. I was overwhelmed with nostalgia, the kind I always feel at the end of Lassie Come Home. I nestled luxuriously next to the driver’s seat, wondering where she could possibly have been all this time and who had driven her, and whether she remembered the touch of my hands?

  Felix walked up and looked in through the window.

  “Nu, what do you say about your grandfather now?”

  “Where was she? How did you get her here?”

  “I thought if we start our trip in the Bugatti, we must to finish it in Humber Pullman. That is what I call style.”

  “But did you know it used to belong to us?”

  He chuckled to himself, enjoying my admiration.

  “Yes, that is what they always say,” he crooned, putting his arm around Lola, who had come over to see. “Felix the wizard, Felix the magician!”

  I told Lola about the Pearl, how Dad had found her by chance in a junkyard, nearly stripped, and brought her home in bits and pieces, and worked on her as though he were caring for a wounded animal, and how he and I had put her back together like a mosaic, and restored her dignity.

  “Your Mr. Father would not let her out of yard.” Felix laughed. “You hear that, Lolly? What is this, automobile or porcelain china?” He got in and invited us to join him. Lola stretched out in the back seat, I got in front. I knew there was no point in asking where he’d found her. He loved to shroud himself in mystery, even in cases less amazing than this. What did I care? Knowledge is power, but you don’t need an explanation for everything. I didn’t even ask. The searchlight whipped over us. The guards were becoming as edgy as the dogs. Maybe they thought we were planning a prison break. I could hear a loudspeaker blaring inside the walls. I looked at Felix. He looked at me. We felt the ants crawling up our backs. With a barely perceptible nod, Felix started the car. I counted under my breath as the engine gave three feeble hiccups that sounded so far away, no one would ever have guessed what was in those six cylinders. And then suddenly the motor started, and she trembled all over, like Sleeping Beauty when the Prince kisses her awake, and Felix released the hand brake, shifted into first gear, and with a mighty roar, the four desert tires, the kind Montgomery used against Rommel during the war, spurted out a stream of sand, and away we went.

  Driving on and on.

  Taking dirt roads through empty fields.

  “You want to drive now?”

  “What did you say?”

  “You want to drive? That is what I said.”

  Did I want to drive?

  “Felix!” my grandmother cautioned him, sticking her sharp finger between his shoulder blades. Sometimes she acted just like Tsitka. “Enough of this foolishness!”

  “Let our boy drive. Where is harm? There is no police here. No people to see. And already he has driven locomotive!”

  “Please, Lola!” I begged her. “Just for a little while!”

  “Well, you hold on to his hands, then, Felix! I’m not happy about this!”

  Felix winked at me. He stopped the car. We changed seats. I could barely reach the pedals. I stepped on the gas. The Pearl lurched forward. I slowed her down. I shifted gear. She obeyed me. She knew me. I knew how to rouse her and how to control her. All the moves were in my blood. The rounded top of the gearshift fit the palm of my hand now, so I could see how much I’d grown. Mautner could take driving lessons from me. I tried to think what Dad would say if he saw me. He would go nuts if I told him I’d driven her out of the yard. When would I tell him? Maybe never. Why go into all the details? I could hear my grandmother pleading from behind: “Nonny! Nonny!” Sometimes she shouted, “Felix, Felix!” I was bumping over a field of thistles, between the rocks, when suddenly I realized why you always see people steering a little to the right and then a little to the left, but the car goes straight ahead just the same, and then I felt the heat between my eyes. It ebbed and flowed. My foot pushed down on the gas, to fly away, to soar—

  I stopped myself. I regained control. A moment before the eruption. I realized that I’d already lost the Pearl once because of my stupidity and I didn’t want to lose her a
gain.

  “Your turn.” I offered Felix my seat.

  He looked at me, a little surprised. “This is it? I thought you will drive us all the way to Mountain of the Moon!”

  “No thanks. I’ve had enough.”

  Lola squeezed my shoulder from behind. “Come, sit next to me,” she said. I climbed over into the back and nestled beside her. I felt wonderful. As if I had fixed whatever it was that had gone wrong in my life. As if I had mastered something inside me. Felix was still watching me in the rearview mirror with a look of mild disappointment and surprise. Lola waved imperiously, and in the same voice she had used to tell the taxi driver, “Charge it to the theater!” she now commanded Felix, “To the Mountain of the Moon!” Felix obeyed.

  27

  The Empty House

  The car glided softly into the night. The radio was playing American songs. Felix was driving. Lola spread out her purple scarf, now mine, and we snuggled under it together. We spoke in whispers so as not to disturb Felix, who had to concentrate on his driving, and also because we wanted privacy.

  “Start asking,” she said as we snuggled up. “We’ve lost so much time already. Ask me anything you want. I want very much to answer.”

  All right.

  “When Zohara was a little girl, did she know that Felix was a—uhm—”

  “Excellent!” she exclaimed. “Straight to the point, just like me. Maybe you did inherit something from me, after all, besides your acting ability.”

  “What, you mean I inherited it from you and not from—” I almost said “Gabi,” which goes to show how hard it is to get rid of old beliefs.

  “I certainly hope it’s from me. Your mother was not a bad actress either! She had flair, she had feeling. As a little girl she practically lived at the theater with me. Oh my …” Lola laughed. “That child was utterly hypnotized, velvet curtains and masks, and kings and queens, and heroes and villains … My fellow actors called her the mascot of the Habimah Theater. Ah yes.” She sighed. “I guess her talent stood her well enough, who knows how many people she swindled with it … But you asked me an important question …”