The Zigzag Kid (17 page)

Sometimes I would ask myself why a genius like him was so keen on a kid like me. I mean, compared to him (artistically speaking), I was kind of backward and still had a lot to learn. Even then I realized with an aching heart that I might never become like Chaim, that I might live my whole life as a lowly soccer player, a climber of telephone poles, an artiste of make-believe.

Sometimes Micah would join me in the tree house and ask what the
matter was and why I always kept to myself. I would silence him with a wave of my hand and point to the source of Chaim Stauber's music. And Micah would shake his heavy head and say that music bored him. Once or twice I flew into a rage over his contempt for meaningful things, but eventually I gave up and just felt sorry for him.

The minute Chaim Stauber finished practicing he would come flying out to play with me. All the culture and serenity would fade away. His mother had no inkling of what happened to him when he left the house. Thanks to my face and my cautious behavior whenever I paid them a visit, she was sure I was a mild-mannered, responsible boy like Chaim. From Chaim's stories I gathered that eventually she would make friends with the neighbors and start to ask them questions about me, and when she found out who and what I was, she would realize I had been putting on an act around them, pretending to be a sensitive, dependable child, when in fact I was just the opposite.

Though not really the opposite, I felt, and even cried out in protest against the inevitable verdict, and wished I could explain it to her: because in non-opposite reality I am like that, even though I'm not like that. I could never be sure what I was going to be next. And yet whenever I was at their house, I was truly good, almost innocent. Unbeknownst to her, the week before the final contest I clipped my pinky nail. A wave of devotion and responsibility would engulf me whenever she walked into Chaim's room and asked us softly whether we'd like a nice drink of fresh-squeezed juice now and a plate of butter cookies.

I knew she'd find out, though. It was a miracle that she hadn't already.

But Chaim Stauber had.

No, not that I was wild, and sometimes more than just wild. That he liked, which may have been the problem: that was all he liked about me. Once I'd finished showing him everything I could do, and taken him to all my secret places and taught him how to crawl through the sewer pipe, and scare drivers with death-defying leaps from the sidewalk, how to swipe cakes from Sarah's store, and how to glue a dog and cat together with rubber cement, and how to take money out of
the charity box in the synagogue, and how to make a yellow scorpion commit suicide, and a hundred and one other tricks I knew—then he got a little tired of me.

I have to write the truth about it, even though it still hurts.

He got tired of me, all right. It didn't take him long to explore my depths.

I realized this before he did. I had long prepared myself for the moment of abandonment. And when I saw his eyes go blank when I started to tell him something, I felt awful and empty and unwanted.

My mind started working overtime. For example, I came up with the idea of going over to the university and catching some gambusia fish in the pond outside the Canada building. Is that allowed? asked Chaim Stauber, and when I answered no, he asked, a little disappointed, “Is that all, just no?” I immediately answered that in fact it was absolutely against the law, it was stealing from a scientific institution, and he said, “Cool—let's go!”

So we went off to catch gambusia fish with nylon bags, and poured them into the big fountain at the entrance to the university where the tourists throw coins. We did it five or six times, and a month later the fountain was so full of gambusias, they had to change the water.

Great, that was over; now I had to think of something new to light up his eyes. Because that's what he wanted, for us to share adventures, and ever more daring exploits; only, it got too complicated, because all I wanted was to be with him, to listen to him talking about the Civil War and the Incas and Mozart and the Gypsies, and all the other things he would tell me in his calm, gentle way, without showing off. I wanted to look at the thick black hair combed back from his high and handsome forehead. That's all I wanted. That and no more. I think he must be the only boy I have never tried to sell or rent something to for an hour. If he expressed interest in something of mine, I'd just give it to him as a present. For me, his friendship was a present.

I blush to remember the pranks I planned to keep Chaim with me. If Dad had discovered some of the things I did, he would have sent me to juvenile court. One night Chaim and I sneaked out and poured sugar into the gas tank of our principal's car, which ruined the motor, and
for years the car stood dead in front of his house with a dead motor, a sign of our wickedness.
¹

But I couldn't help it. Chaim found new friends who were apparently more interesting. Maybe they could talk to him about Mozart and the Incas. Maybe they understood what he meant by “a full life.”

And I was stuck with Micah. I was mean to him. I tormented him. He didn't understand what was going on, or maybe he did. Maybe he liked my tormenting him because that made the ugliness in me stand out even more.

One day in class, Chaim Stauber said something about bullfights, that in Spain there are six bulls killed in every bullfight. When I came home that day I did what any decent citizen would do after hearing a thing like that—I called the police.

I told Gabi to stop whatever she was doing and tell me everything she knew about bullfights.

Gabi took a cab to the public library. She came home with a sheet of paper on which she had copied out what the encyclopedia said. We hurried to the kitchen, where she read it to me. She didn't ask any questions. With one swift glance she saw the whole story on my face, muttered, “Knowledge is power, eh?,” and went on reading. I closed my eyes, letting her every word imprint itself just where my brain was sore with jealousy.

Next morning I found an opportunity to tell Chaim that the little sword they plunge into the bull at the beginning of the corrida is called a banderilla, and that it's shaped like a bee's stinger so it will pierce the hide and be hard to take out. Chaim listened earnestly and said he didn't know that, but did I know the difference between a matador and a torero?

Gabi worked hard to solve that one. She called up some friends and
even one of her old professors, and the conclusion was that a torero is anyone who participates in a bullfight, but only the matador kills the bull.

The next day at recess I blurted the information out to Chaim, explaining that in Portugal they don't kill the bulls, and in Spain an outstanding matador receives the bull's ear as a prize, sometimes both ears, and if he's absolutely tremendous like Paco Camino (“the greatest of them all,” I added), he receives the tail as well. There was a flickering in Chaim's eyes. He said his father had promised to find him postcards of a real bullfight which he would then be able to show me. And I made the innocent suggestion that he should look for postcards showing the banderillas, because “they're really spectacular” (I swear, that's what I said!), so we'd see the bright paper ribbons hanging from the barbed darts.

And I walked off.

And Chaim followed me.

And then cautiously, in a roundabout way, he returned.

Day after day we would exchange useful information about the corrida, the costumes, the different sorts of knives and lances. He would finish practicing at five-thirty and hurry to my tree house, where we would spend a couple of minutes, limiting our conversation to a single topic. This was the suitable thing to do. Our revived friendship was too shaky to overburden now. Maybe Chaim sensed how raw with pain I was.

There was an unspoken pact between us, a pact of mercy, and we were careful not to speak of things he knew about but I didn't. He truly was one of a kind.

We would chat about the famous matadors I knew of from the material Gabi found for me, or about those tragic instances when a bull killed a matador, or the various methods of thrusting a sword. With a shiver of delight, we would savor names like Rafaelo di Paula, Ricardo Torres, and Luis Machaniti, and quiz each other on their famous fights and where they got an ear or a tail and where they had surrendered their glorious lives … And after a few minutes of such small talk, flimsy as a cobweb but iridescent in the light, Chaim would politely
take his leave, and I would recline on my back for an hour, content and benevolent enough to tolerate Micah's face slowly rising through the branches.

“What's happening, Nonny?”

One week, two weeks. A fine thread. If it tore, I would plummet to the end of time, I could not endure another such blow. Gabi worked like a demon. Every day she would phone the cultural attaché at the Spanish embassy and pump him for more information. She went to visit her parents in Nes Ziona and came back with a book of poems by García Lorca, who wrote about bullfights; I, meanwhile, began to spy on Pessia, the cow our neighbor Mautner brought with him when he left his kibbutz. Pessia had never been dehorned, so she now boasted two splendid bony protuberances which were of no use to her whatsoever. Pessia had a quiet, easygoing nature. She loved to stand in the little meadow behind Mautner's house, chewing the long grass with a sideways movement of her puffy lips, so dreamily content that her black eyes shone with something nearly human. One day I ran before her, waving a red towel I had swiped from the clothesline. As she watched bewilderedly, her tail started swishing like a pendulum, and I wondered if maybe she had some Spanish blood. That evening, in a mood of sublime pathos, Gabi recited “The Goring and the Death” from Lorca's “Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías,” a poem in memory of a dead matador. There were lines like “The bass strings began to throb at five in the afternoon. The wounds burned with the heat of suns at five in the afternoon. Horrifying five in the afternoon!”

Gabi finished reading. Her face was dark. Her hand trembled, and her head fell backward as though it had been severed with a sword. I shivered under the covers. Lorca's words passed through me like a heady wine. I pulled the blanket over my head and my bed seemed to burst into flames. Later, after the horrible incident, Gabi remarked that if she had foreseen how Lorca's poem would affect me, she'd have stuck to
When We Were Very Young
. But all that night she let the words resound through the room and flash blood-red behind my dreaming lids … The next day, at the water fountain, I announced to Chaim and Micah that I'd made up my mind. I had decided on my goal in life:

To be the first Israeli matador.

Silence. The skies of Spain turned red above me.

“You've got to be kidding,” whispered Chaim in awe. “You're going to break into Mautner's yard?”

“Yeah, sure, why not? I'll fight that bull if it's the last thing I do.”

And it probably would be. Because Mautner was a very tough character.

“She's a cow,” observed Micah. “Pessia is a cow.”

A wave of terror, terror of myself, washed over me. The little motor in my head was buzzing like a wasp.

“Well, she does have horns,” Chaim answered slowly, beginning to grasp that what I was proposing here was the wildest, wickedest exploit yet, the ultimate proof of my friendship.

“So, are you guys in?” I asked. “I'll need two picadors with swords.”

There was a moment's silence. Gory visions whirled through my brain with piercing cries and shrill admonitions. But then Chaim's eyes lit up like torches, and we both began to titter nervously. Micah looked on with contempt, or maybe glee, because he'd already guessed what would happen. I ignored him. I didn't want to see his boring face anymore. What did he know about courage, and madness, and friendship, and thrilling escapades, and a life of meaning? Chaim and I joined hands and started jumping up and down and screaming, but quietly, lest his mother turn up and see my seven deadly sins upon us.

“Ah what a meal!” said Felix, setting his fork down and smiling with contentment.

A rosy dimness spread over the restaurant. Petal-pink candles illumined every table. My tummy was round and full, and on my plate were the remains of the best dinner I had ever eaten in my life. For an hors d'oeuvre, Felix ordered goose-liver pâté, followed by cream of asparagus soup and duck à l'orange. I could barely resist the juicy steaks I saw on passing trays, but I controlled myself and dined on rice and fried potatoes instead—incredibly delicious rice and fried potatoes! Twice I asked for a second helping, and then I ordered fresh mushroom soup and stuffed peppers with almonds and pine nuts, and three servings of chocolate mousse for dessert, and when Felix asked what I thought of the food, I answered sincerely that the chef at the police cafeteria had a lot to learn.

“Best of all, today and tomorrow you and I will do great things!” rasped Felix in the voice of Grandpa Noah.

“Like what?” I asked warily, and immediately repeated the question in Tammy's voice so no one would suspect anything.

“Perhaps we make this world more exciting.” He laughed. “When people hear what we did, they will say, ‘Oo-la-la! Such finesse! They were so daring, those two!' ”

“But what will we do?” I whispered.

“I don't know. You decide. Anything. There are no limits! No laws! Only courage! Nerve! You must to dare.”

Hah. I must to dare. Easy enough to say. But what do I really want? To sneak into the movies? To break into the teachers' lounge at school? To steal the skeleton from the science room? I realized these wishes would sound pitiful to a man like him. I had to try harder, to liberate myself, to be worthy of Felix, to take risks, to be crazy, to be a criminal. I must to dare …

Should I climb up to the roof of one of the embassies and change the flag, as Dad did once before he joined the police force? Or steal a zebra from the zoo and ride away on it?