The Zigzag Kid (37 page)

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 …”

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.”

“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 criminal, 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?”