The Zigzag Kid (30 page)

Let's hear what they have to say now. Like Mrs. Marcus, who was always so eager to have me expelled from school, maybe she would wipe her eyes and say, “No, he wasn't emotionally disturbed, he was a zigzag kid, that's all, with the soul of an artist, only we didn't realize it in time.” And the other teachers would be on the phone to each other by now, saying, “It was him. Poor thing. Maybe we drove him to it. We should print up a nice little booklet in his memory. There was something special about the boy, though he could get a little wild sometimes.”

I wondered what Chaim Stauber was thinking now, and if this would change anything. And whether he would discuss it at home.

I stuck my hands in my pockets to slow myself down. Why was I running? Look before you leap. But there I was again, in front of Lola Ciperola's house. The streets all looked the same to me. I walked down to the corner. I passed the newspaper headlines again. Maybe even Golda Meir had taken time out of her busy schedule to ask her special advisor on crime whether the police were making every effort to save the boy, and whether he would divulge the boy's name to her, in strictest confidence, of course, and the advisor would whisper my name in her ear, and the Prime Minister would say, “Aha!,” neglecting, for the moment, other pressing affairs of state.

But what was Felix doing, all alone by the kitchen table? This man, the partner with whom I had just spent the two happiest days of my life, had entered the headlines and become a stranger and an enemy. As I walked away, I had seen the life drain out of him. Why was it so
vital that I believe him? Why had he been trying so hard to show me a good time?

He'd offered to share my vegetarianism.

And I'd promised (in my heart) that I would be loyal to him.

I betrayed him. But he betrayed me first.

I sat on the curb, wondering what to do.

A police siren went off down the street. All I had to do was go over there now and I could be done with this. But then I would never learn the secret Felix wanted to tell me. And I couldn't ask him any more questions. Dad would never tell me the story. He didn't want me to know. Not even Gabi was allowed to discuss it with me.

And Felix said he had known Zohara.

He knew about her life in the mountains with Dad.

But what about the horses they kept there? And what was it like for them together?

He said he had kidnapped me so he could tell me the story.

The story. The story. There was no end to the buzzing of this story. For thirteen years the story had been silent, and now it wouldn't leave me alone.

But wait: the photo. The one he'd showed me on the train.

Oh, God.

In that photo of me and Micah, I was wearing a coat. Which meant Felix started planning this operation last winter. So much thought and effort had gone into it: and for what, so he could tell me a story? What about the Bugatti he had had shipped to Israel, and the Beetle that succeeded it? And maybe there was more to come. I had heard him say to Lola, This is Felix's final operation. His farewell performance.

He knew something about me. Something that was important to him. Otherwise he wouldn't have put so much into it. My story was important to him. And if he didn't tell it to me, no one would. Because no one ever had, not in thirteen years.

I'm not afraid of Felix, I told myself anxiously. I can go back now if I want, hear his story, then turn him over to the police.

That would be great, I tried to work up a little enthusiasm.

Father-detective catches a felon, and ten years later, son-detective catches same. Full circle.

What a crook, I fumed: how did he convince me that Dad agreed to all this? I asked questions and he answered. And, in fact, he hadn't lied to me. That was the strange thing: he hadn't lied to me once since we'd met. Except for that time with the gun when he was trying to make me laugh. And even then he wanted to tell me about himself. And everything he had told me was true (or so it seemed to me), as if he had to have someone, even if only a kid, with whom he could be totally honest.

But why me, the son of the detective who had apprehended him?

I decided to go back. Felix had never lied to me or tried to harm me in any way. He had made no attempt to stop me from leaving. Why did I not hear what he kept telling me, then? “You decide. The choice is yours.” It was all up to me. If I had the courage, I would know everything. If I didn't, I could go home now to a hero's welcome for having escaped from the kidnapper. Only I would know the truth.

Slowly I climbed the stairs. Yes, I was coming back of my own free will. I would listen to his story and lure him into a trap. That's what I would do. That's how I would make up for all I'd done with him, and Dad would have to forgive me.

Just as I was about to knock on the door, I stopped. Be reasonable, I told myself, he has a gun. He's desperate. This is your last chance to turn back. If you go in now, you may never come out alive.

I knocked on Lola's door. There was no sound inside.

He's probably run away by now, I thought. That's typical. Yeah, well, was he supposed to wait patiently for me to return with the cops? He had run away, and now I would never hear the story. I felt a pang of regret. In part because the story had been lost to me forever and in part because I realized that I would miss that crook.

I touched the handle. The door opened. I squeezed in sideways so it would be harder to hit me. All of Dad's instincts were at work in me now.

Silence.

“Is anyone there?” I asked cautiously.

The curtain stirred and Felix emerged from behind it with a gun in his hand. I knew. I had walked right into his trap.

“You come back,” he said, his pallor showing through the tan. His hand was trembling. “You come back alone, without police, right?”

I nodded. I didn't dare move, I was so frightened and angry at my own stupidity.

He tossed the gun on the carpet and covered his face with his hands. He pressed his eyelids. I stood perfectly still. I didn't make a lunge for the gun. I waited for him to get hold of himself, for his shoulders to stop shaking. When he moved his hands away, I saw his eyes were red and swollen.

“You come back,” he muttered. “This wonderful, Amnon, you come back.”

He tottered away, dragging his feet, and his hair was wild and sticky with perspiration. I waited for him to go to the kitchen. Then I quickly picked up the gun and put it in my pocket. Now I felt more secure. But my heart was beating faster than ever, I don't know why. I stood in the doorway to the kitchen. Felix was drinking a glass of water. He sat down with a sigh and rested his forehead on his hands. His face was deathly pale, as pale as the face of a corpse in a forensic photograph. There was a pen on the table and a sheet of paper with a few lines scrawled on it. When he noticed I was looking, he quietly picked it up and crumpled it into a little ball.

“You don't know what it means to me that you come back,” he said.

“Were you about to run away?” I asked. There was still some harshness in my voice, but the hatred in it had dissolved.

“By coming back you save my life,” he said. “Not that life of Felix Glick is worth very much anymore. But when you come back you make it worth something again … Do you understand what I tell you?”

I didn't understand.

“Five minutes later, and we would never see each other again,” he said.

“The story!” I puffed impatiently. Again I regretted coming back. I had given up my chance to make a clean getaway, to go home and forget all about this bizarre episode. “You promised a story, tell it to
me now!” If only I had walked up to the police cruiser in the street before, I could by now have been talking to Dad on the telephone.

“The story is about one woman,” said Felix hesitantly. My heart was pounding. Zohara, Zohara, the blood throbbed in my temples. Felix reached into his shirt. Unthinkingly I touched the trigger on the gun in my pocket. My instincts were faster than my thoughts, unnecessarily so, it seemed. He wasn't going for a weapon. He was merely pulling out the gold chain with the one remaining ear of wheat and the heart-shaped locket.

With a flick of his finger he opened the locket, handed it to me, and said with a croaking voice, “This woman both I and your father loved.”

There inside the locket Zohara was smiling at me, with her beautiful face and wide-set eyes.

Once upon a time there was a little girl. On her sixth birthday, the little girl had a party. The guests gathered around the flower-festooned chair where she sat and lifted it in the air, once for each of her six years of life. But when they raised her high for the year to come, she announced with a beaming smile that she had decided to die exactly twenty years from the day. A hush fell over the crowded room. The girl gazed bewilderedly at the mute and pain-filled faces that surrounded her. Then she laughed and said, “Don't worry, there's still plenty of time!”

She had a narrow face with prominent cheekbones that gave her a hungry look, and her gangly arms and legs were usually covered with ugly scratches she inflicted on herself in her sleep at night or in her daylight reveries. She would sit for hours staring out the bedroom window through dark, half-lidded eyes, and even when her name was called, she didn't hear. At a later age, she would devour books, or rather, be devoured by them herself. She would read anything and everything, whether for children or adults, nurturing the precious secret that she was not a little girl at all but a spy sent out to the world from her favorite book of the moment, to try to live an ordinary life among ordinary people, and never be discovered. And if anyone discovered her pretense of being a real person in the guise of a little girl, a grave punishment would follow. I'm afraid she never confided in her diary what this punishment would be, but now that I'm older than Zohara
was when she died, I think I can guess: the spy would have to abide with humanity forever.

When she was a little older, Zohara (or Pippi Longstocking or Anne of Green Gables or Huckleberry Finn or David Copperfield or Dorothy or Lassie or Romeo and Juliet—rolled into one) would write lengthy descriptions in her diary of a place she called “the land of death,” or the land of the dead, and the families that lived there together, in death, and she would draw pictures of the infants born there: little white babies with no eyes. Various doctors she was taken to could find no way to cure her sadness. One doctor suggested that playing a musical instrument might help, so they bought her a recorder in a small music shop in Tel Aviv, and though Zohara seemed eager to play it, usually, after a few moments, she would withdraw in silence again, with the recorder still in her mouth and her fingers fluttering over the holes to a secret tune no one else could hear.

On her rare good days, Zohara would sing like a little sparrow, happy to have survived the winter storms: all brightness, she would chatter merrily and skip around, hugging her loved ones and pressing her cheek to their beating hearts. On those days her face shone brightly and the disfiguring lines of pain and anger vanished beneath her skin. Dressed in clothes she was too young to wear—long scarves and gaily colored hats—she would promenade with her mother through the streets of Tel Aviv, like some rare postage stamp, taking in the looks of astonishment on the faces of passersby, as though laying away supplies for a long and lonely voyage.

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!