The Zigzag Kid (12 page)

A police cruiser with a wailing siren was heading our way. Heh heh heh, I chuckled inwardly, like an old crook. Maybe the cops in the cruiser are hot on the trail of the hijackers in the black Bugatti! I checked myself: no, I wasn't afraid, not much. What did the cruiser have to do with me? Actually, I kind of wished they would come after us so we could lose them in a thrilling car chase. Of course we would lose them. We were fearless, lawless, a couple of wild animals. And with Felix beside me, everything would turn out right. He had experience, he had nerves of steel. No one would catch me under the spell of his deep blue gaze, at least for a day or two, then I would forget everything and mend my ways, I would be a good little boy, and never tell lies or misbehave, and only sometimes, alone in the night would I remember this day or maybe two, and all that happened in reality, though it will seem like a dream: the hijacked train, the black Bugatti, and the wailing sirens of a hundred police cars chasing after me, till I lose them and escape. Because I am swift and sudden, I buzz and sting and fly away. A master of crime is Nonny Feuerberg, soon to be the best detective in the whole wide world!

My heart was pounding. I pressed my knees together and bent over in the protective-custody position. For a moment I felt confused and scared, because, who am I anyway?

Gabi's been with us forever, I told Felix; that is, as far back as I can remember. She came to Dad and me after my mother died, which happened when I was very young, like at the age of one. I paused briefly, because this was usually the point where people started asking all sorts of stupid questions, like what she died of, and did I remember her. Felix, however, said nothing.

I was a little perplexed. Why did he show no interest, why didn't he care about this motherless child, this virtual orphan? I decided to conceal my surprise from him, though, because as I explained earlier, ordinarily it was the other way around, people were always bugging me with questions I didn't feel like answering, so I could just pretend it was the same this time.

I told him more about Gabi, that she'd worked as Dad's secretary since the old days when he was deputy chief of the bunko squad, and then transferred with him to the felonies division, and stayed on when he became a detective. Wherever he went, she went.

“I am the thunder, as it were,” she would say, “if we mistakenly assume for the moment that your dad is the lightning, that is.”

“She is kind of thundery,” I explained to Felix. “She's big and fat, and has a booming voice, but let me tell you, Gabi's the greatest, I don't know how we would have managed without her. [Brief pause] Especially after my mother died.”

Silence. Okay. He had a right to be silent. Even though, in my opinion, when a kid says, “After my mother died,” it makes him sort of
special. Or maybe not. Felix turned down a narrow road that led us to the sea and the sunset. The green beetle rolled slowly on, as though there were no policemen anywhere.

“She's always trying out new diets,” I confided, “because she's sworn not to give up the battle until her body is fit for human habitation. But she loves to eat, she's a chocolate freak, and then Dad and I cook these big wonderful meals, so she has to join us.”

She eats and then she hates herself. But when the onions sizzle in the olive oil and Dad throws in some mushrooms and stirs the macaroni, how can she be expected to control herself? Sometimes I suspect Dad of doing it on purpose: of cruelly tempting her so she'll get even fatter and he'll have an even better excuse not to marry her.

“But Zohara was really beautiful,” I told him for no particular reason. “I saw a picture of her once.”

Silence. He drove along the shore.

“Dad kept only that one picture. A picture of him and Zohara. He wanted to throw all the rest of her things away after she died.” I stressed the word “died,” in case he hadn't heard me the first time. But he didn't respond this time either. He just hunched over the steering wheel, with a long, tense face.

So be it. There's no law that says you have to discuss a dead woman, even if she was the mother of the person you're talking to. Because that person may not be so interested in talking about her himself. He hardly knew her. He was only a year old when she died, and she's hardly ever mentioned at home. She just died and that was that.

“And what about Gabi?” asked Felix out of the blue.

“She doesn't talk about her, either,” although occasionally, in the middle of a conversation, Gabi would fall strangely silent, as though she sensed a presence passing through the room and we had to pretend not to notice, and then Gabi would pick up with “Now, where were we?” I knew that Dad had forbidden her to mention Zohara in our house, because every time I worked up the courage to ask about her, Gabi would say, “Anything you want to know concerning Zohara, kindly ask your father,” and then seal her lips, though I knew very well that she was bursting to tell me things.

“No, you did not understand,” said Felix. “I meant, why is it Gabi came to take care of you?”

“Oh, that.”

All right, then, I thought, if this guy has no respect for the dead, if all he wants to talk about is Gabi, we'll talk about Gabi. In any case, there's not that much I can tell him about Zohara, since I know next to nothing about her. She's a stranger who happened to give birth to me, whereas Gabi's invested so much in my upbringing.

“When Dad married Zohara, he took a leave of absence from the police department; he wanted to try a different life. But after she died,” I continued, “he decided to rejoin the force, just when Gabi was thinking of quitting. She was fed up with working as a secretary. Gabi has loads of talent. She could succeed at anything.”

“Like what, for example?”

“Like what? Like being an actress maybe, or a singer! And she's a fabulous organizer, she organizes the holiday shows for police force kids, and she writes skits for the department ball. And she's terrific at crossword puzzles, and she's a real film buff, we go to see at least one film a week, and she does these hilarious impersonations of people in the news, and let's see, what else? … She has a great sense of humor. Practically perfect.”

Felix smiled.

“You love Gabi, don't you?”

“She's the best,” I said. Too bad I couldn't convince Dad of that, on account of her looks—or on account of Zohara …

“The trouble is that she is not pretty enough for your Mr. Father,” reflected Felix. I thought of something Gabi used to say: “Oh, why did my parents have to give me such a patty-cake face when I was meant to be Brigitte, the femme fatale!” I, personally, felt glad that Gabi had never resigned herself to her looks, otherwise she might have turned into some dumpy woman, with nothing interesting about her, when the opposite was true: she had a razor-keen wit and a zest for life—and suddenly I wondered whether maybe Gabi was Gabi not because of any genetic trait, and not because of her education, but because her soul had chosen to fight her form and face, and that was why she was always
trying to be so smart and special, and then I understood how hard she'd had to struggle all her life, without anyone's help, without anyone to confide in.

“Why she wanted to leave the police department?” Felix asked quietly.

“Because she was sick and tired of typing reports about corpses and murderers and organized crime.”

“And you know what I hated most?” she would ask me. “Seeing your father's sour face every morning.” (I didn't mention this to Felix.) She never heard a word of praise from Dad, and he would fly off the handle if she missed a day of work.

“Silly fool that I am, I thought this was his clumsy way of showing how much he needed me,” Gabi would say with a sigh whenever she told me the story.

“Once she almost left him,” I continued, “but she decided to stay on a little longer.”

“Because he looked so sad and so defeated, I couldn't leave, and I couldn't stay with him, either,” recalled Gabi, as we discussed it for the umpteenth time, over a cup of hot chocolate at a café after the movies, and later at home, in the kitchen, just the two of us. “The circles under his eyes were darker than ever, if you can imagine, and still his idiotic pride wouldn't let him admit the pain he felt to anyone.” Here she narrowed her eyes as she drew me closer, and said in a chilling whisper, “The sadness simply flowed out of him. He was the embodiment of human tragedy.”

“And then one day she saw him trying to diaper me on his desk at the office,” I told Felix, smiling to myself, because I could imagine him doing it.

“And when I watched him searching frantically for the pacifier, which was stuck in his gun holster …” At this point, her eyes would always turn misty, and her voice get hoarse and low. “Well, seeing him that way, as lost and helpless as his bawling baby, I realized that I loved the guy, that I had loved him all those years we worked together, without knowing it, and that I was the one who would bring a smile back to his grieving face.”

Then we would both fall silent in deference to her tender feelings. I liked that story.

“I guess I've seen too many movies where the widower marries the children's governess,” she would grumble.

“I wasn't allowed to call her Mommy,” I told Felix as we parked the green Beetle near the beach and made our way over the hot sand. Even before I could actually see the water, and only smelled it, I began to chatter. The sea always has that effect on me.

“She explained that she wasn't my mother, she was Gabi, my friend and Dad's. But I was too young to understand the difference.”

Because Gabi was always there with me. Except at night, when she went home to sleep. Or sometimes when Dad was out on a case, I would stay with her in her little apartment, and she would read me her favorite bedtime stories, and it was Gabi who chose my babysitters and my nursery school, and attended PTA meetings, and took me to the clinic when I was sick, and stayed with me for all my shots and vaccinations (because Dad, the hero, fainted when he saw the needle). And she kept a special baby book of what I'd learned and all the cute things I said. And it was Gabi who talked Dad into giving me a promotion, though he wasn't sure I'd earned it yet, so that, thanks to her, I made sergeant second-class, and she … and she … and me.

And once a month or so, when my homeroom teacher, Mrs. Marcus, expelled me from school, “this time for good,” it was Gabi who would fly to the teachers' lounge for the inevitable ritual of pleading with her to give me one last chance, after which, laying a hand on my shoulder, she would ask in her booming voice how they could possibly give up on such a wonderful boy, and Mrs. Marcus would answer with a smirk that she supposed a week's suspension was reasonable punishment for a boy like me, for a shallow pond like me, for chaff before the wind like me—back then teachers put a lot of thought into their insults, not like today—and that maybe Gabi ought to accept the fact that I needed a different sort of framework, better suited to my limitations. Rest assured, Gabi didn't let that pass in silence: “What you may see as limitations, I happen to consider advantages!” She swelled larger in front of Mrs. Marcus, like a cobra protecting her young. “The advantages of an
artistic soul! That's right! Not all children fit neatly into the square framework this school provides, you see. Some kids are round, some are shaped like a figure eight, some like a triangle, and some”—her voice dropped dramatically as she raised her hand high in the style of that famous actress Lola Ciperola playing Nora in
A Doll's House
—“like a zigzag!”

And my heart, as they say, went out to her.

My earliest childhood memory is of Gabi (we were sitting on the balcony one evening, and she was feeding me cream cheese out of a green pepper, when a man in sunglasses walked by, took a good, long look at us, and tipped his hat). She's always there in my baby pictures. To her I would run with my childish secrets, and she's the only person who ever saw me cry.

I stopped talking and let the sand trickle down between my fingers. We were sitting under a red beach umbrella by the nearly deserted sea. A black dog stood barking at us from the dunes. He must have smelled me from afar. The sea was smooth and blue. I could barely stop myself from diving in. Gabi says that I'm a fish who landed on shore by mistake, and it's true that as soon as I step in the water, in the waves, I feel much better, and I close my eyes and whisper things that I would never dare say anywhere else, all my most precious thoughts, all the questions I would never utter on land, and the secrets I could never remember there, these I would shout into the waves and let sink into oblivion, though I knew they would ripple on to infinity, preserved like a letter inside a very large bottle.

There by the sea, I wanted to tell Felix about her. Not to say “My mother died” to create an impression, but simply to talk to him about her. Because while I was talking about Gabi earlier, telling him how she fell in love with Dad, I felt a strange new sadness.

I couldn't figure out why Felix was keeping so quiet. He didn't seem bored by my story, though he also didn't try to draw me out. He had a special way of listening, unlike that of any other adult I knew, including Gabi. And I began to feel that I might have been mistaken about him before, when I thought he didn't want to hear about Zohara. Maybe he just wanted me to feel free to talk without interruptions.

It may have been the way he listened to me that made me grasp certain things I had never really thought about before. For instance, that Zohara was a real person, not just a stranger whose name could go unmentioned for so long. She had existed once upon a time, as a woman with a face and a body and moods and childhood memories, and a voice and thoughts of her own, and she had wandered through the world, with a smile on her lips when she was happy and tears in her eyes when she cried. She had been alive.