The Zigzag Kid Read online

  “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.

  And she had also been the wife of my father. Yes, suddenly it was clear to me: Dad had loved her. Maybe she’d been the only love of his life, and he could never love another woman.

  Strange that I hadn’t understood it this way before. Maybe because I’d always heard the story of their love from Gabi, and in Gabi’s stories she was the central character, she and her love for Dad, and her disappointment in him, and her hope that he would stop mourning for Zohara one day and come back to life, or rather, to her. But it was only then, on the beach with Felix, that. I realized how unhappy my father was. He was the sad, lonely one, the one who was in mourning for Zohara, even today. And these were not mere words from Gabi’s story, words she’d recited so often even she forgot how painful they were. Then a question began to torment me: Why did he still never mention her, even to me? Wasn’t I grown up enough to know about her with my bar mitzvah coming?

  And why had I never questioned him? He might have told me about her if I had. Yes, maybe to me he would talk. Maybe he was just waiting for me to ask. I could have brought it up, starting with some silly topic, in the days when we used to work on the Pearl. I could have crouched down by the tires with the white stripe from the days of the Blitz and asked him something, like where had he met my mother, for instance, and what they used to do together, and how she died; and if he didn’t want to answer, he could pretend he didn’t hear me. So why didn’t I ask him then? It’s hard to start asking questions after a silence of thirteen years, and maybe it was too late now.

  “I don’t know anything about her,” I reflected. Felix leaned closer, but didn’t say a word so as not to disturb me.

  “Nobody ever told me anything.”

  I felt a pressure in my throat, as if someone were choking me, and a sharp pain in my eyes. Maybe if I dipped my head in the cool blue water it would go away. I had never talked about such things on dry land before.

  Once, when I was four or five years old, Dad and Gabi had this huge argument about whether or not to tell me. I was in another room, and I heard Dad say angrily that some kids aren’t happy even though they have a mother, and that I would just have to get used to it, and Gabi said maybe a child could never get used to a thing like that, and he said that for me it was normal to grow up without a mother, that I had practically been born without a mother, and if I started brooding about it I would end up feeling sorry for myself, and if there’s one thing my dad can’t stand, it’s self-pity, and a lot of his friends were killed in war, but he tried not to dwell on them, because that’s the way it is, you get no insurance in this life, and not everyone makes it to the end, and those who do must never look back.

  He doesn’t know I heard him, that I faithfully obeyed his command. I wasn’t going to disappoint him. I rarely thought about her. And when she did steal into my thoughts sometimes, I would shut my eyes tight as I could and gently but firmly push her out. I had a special voice for this, a kind of humming noise I made inside my head and between my teeth to stifle any thought of her. I was very good at this, except in the sea, as I mentioned before, when I dived into the waves, and I would feel something circling me, nestling against me; but then I would come out of the water and dry myself briskly and just forget. Only, this time a new thought occurred to me: What if he still loves her? What if he, too, sometimes looks back?

  “I know that she died young. At the age of twenty-six.”

  Twenty-six was only twice as old as I was, I realized to my astonishment. Thirteen plus thirteen was not so much older than I was that day.

  I hugged my knees and bit the inside of my cheeks, and dug my fingernails into the palms of my hands. I stayed this way for a few seconds, till I felt a little cal
mer. I didn’t say a word, didn’t even wipe the sweat from my forehead. My back and shoulders were as stiff as a board. I was afraid that if I opened my mouth now and pronounced her name, my neck might snap. Felix gazed at the spot on the horizon where the sun was setting. The black dog on the dune would not stop barking in my direction, with his head toward the sky and his tail pointing out behind him. I dug into the sand with my finger, searching for the place where the sand gets wet. A light breeze was blowing, and a flower fluttered its pale white petals.

  “If only …” I began, choking on the words. If only I had known her as a little girl. There, that’s what I wanted to say.

  All at once this became my most pressing task in life; everything else was irrelevant and annoying. I couldn’t understand why I had never wondered about her before. It was as though I had been living in a dreamworld or something, and I couldn’t figure out why I had awakened just now to ask Felix, this person I barely knew.

  “So where were we?” I asked uneasily, but couldn’t go on.

  His silence was oppressive. I didn’t have to look at him to feel it grow heavy and deep, too heavy and deep. His breathing sounded wheezy and harsh to my ears. It suddenly occurred to me that a change was about to take place and that I had better start paying attention. I turned to him and saw a tiny muscle twitching like crazy in his cheek.

  Something inside me turned hollow and pale.

  “Why?” I asked feebly. “Did you ever meet her or something?”

  11

  Stop In the Name of the Law!

  Shortly after we left the beach, as we were driving down a country road, another police car passed us with flashing lights and whirling siren. The policemen inside ignored us, since they were on the lookout for a black Bugatti with yellow doors, not an old green buggy. A prince as opposed to a frog. But as soon as they were out of sight, Felix reached for his leather suitcase and started rummaging around in it as he drove. He pulled out a pair of heavy glasses and something else I couldn’t identify, a hairy gray switch, all limp and disgusting, which for a moment I thought was a live animal, or one that used to be alive.

  “Close your eyes one moment, Mr. Feuerberg,” said Felix. “Now we will put on Purim costumes, because I see police are getting nervous.”

  I closed my eyes and kept them closed for five minutes or so. The Beetle swerved right and left. I figured he’d taken his hands off the wheel.

  “Is okay now for you to open.”

  I opened my eyes. There beside me sat an old man with a bowed back and heavy glasses. His pointy chin stuck practically into his chest and his lower lip pulled down to the right in what seemed like a constant tic. In place of his wavy white hair, there was a mat of wispy gray. He had changed out of the white suit with the rose in the lapel into a threadbare jacket, had sprouted a drab mustache, adopted a feeble smile, and let his jaw hang loose as though he were toothless.

  “Under your seat you will find your Purim costume,” said Felix. Even his voice had changed and sounded squeakier than ever.

  Like an idiot I almost asked, “Is that you, Felix?”

  He had changed his entire character. He wheezed and he panted, and even his nose looked different, longer and redder. Felix the panther with the gleam in his eye was barely recognizable. I reached down and pulled a big paper bag from under the seat. I peeked into it and saw a skirt and a blouse and a pair of girl’s sandals. And a black wig with a long pigtail.

  “I’m never putting that on!”

  Felix quietly shrugged his shoulders. I touched the wig with disgust. There was no way of knowing where the hair had come from. Why, it might even have belonged to some dead girl. How could anyone wear a thing like that?

  Another police car went by with a loud wail.

  “Tsk tsk tsk, very nervous, our police …” said Felix. “They are all in fuddle. Perhaps I tell them now what really happened in the train?” He gurgled with silent laughter.

  I was still fretting over what Felix had revealed to me earlier on the beach. “I knew your mother very well,” he had said. “I knew her even before I knew your father!” Your mother and your father. He had joined them together in a single phrase, and all of a sudden I had two parents who were husband and wife.

  “Your mother was very strong woman,” he said, “and very beautiful. She was strong like only very beautiful people are.” He seemed to be choosing his words with care, not paying her a compliment. There was too much caution in his voice. I didn’t dare ask why. “Very strong and very beautiful,” he said. What did he mean by strong? Physically strong? Spiritually strong? “And very beautiful.” So Gabi didn’t stand a chance. “She was strong like only very beautiful people are.” What did he mean by that? That she was tough or something? Tough like Dad? That she liked to be independent and do things her own way? I didn’t ask, and Felix said nothing. In the only photograph at home she really did look beautiful: seated with Dad peeping out behind her, her face animated and her long black hair falling over it, as if the wind had been blowing while the picture was snapped, and her wide-set eyes with a childlike twinkle, dark and radiant.

  Because of the strangeness of her eyes I began to think that perhaps it wasn’t a photograph at all but a drawing. Someone had cut the chair she was sitting on out of the picture. But why? Why were there so many secrets? Sometimes when I was rummaging in Dad’s drawer, I would find that cutout picture facedown, always facedown. But was it a drawing or a photograph? Because the eyes seemed exaggerated, the way an artist might have drawn them. But the rest of the face seemed alive. A photograph? Who cut it out? And why did they cut it out? And what kind of strength do the very beautiful have? I didn’t ask. I sat beside Felix in the car and said nothing. My fate lay in his answers to my questions, yet I didn’t dare ask him. And Dad was in the picture, too, with his arms around her, looking not at the photographer but at Zohara, at her mouth, his hesitant smile unconsciously mimicking her irrepressible laughter, as though he, too, wanted to be wildly happy, with her help … The sun set and disappeared. Felix was silent. So was I. All I had to do was ask a few more questions and then I would know everything. But suddenly I didn’t feel strong enough to know everything.

  “If you want, I will tell you …” Felix began.

  “Later,” I interrupted, standing up. “And you can tell me why you said she was tough—but later.”

  “But I didn’t say ‘tough.’ ”

  “Fine, whatever. We’ll talk about it later.”

  Felix, still sitting on the sand, looked up at me. “Yes,” he said, “I, too, think it is better to wait awhile for this story. After dinner, perhaps?”

  “Yes, I’m getting hungry. Let’s go,” I said, because I was tired of standing there; my heels were burning.

  “It is for you to decide when you hear this story,” said Felix, watching me closely. “Is your story, after all.”

  “That’s right. And later you can tell me everything.”

  “About their castle and horses and everything, later.”

  Oh no.

  “Horses?”

  “Certainly! Their house was like castle. On lonely mountaintop, not far from border, your father built castle for Zohara.”

  “A real castle?” My knees buckled under me, and I sat down facing him.

  “Not like castle of Napoleon or King Carol of Romania, but for them it was like castle.”

  I can’t take this any more, I thought. Now he’ll start telling me what they were like together, what Dad was like while she was still alive, and I realized that not only was I completely ignorant about my mother, I knew very little about my father, too. What a lousy detective I was. For hours, days, weeks, and months I had thought about nothing, I had neglected the important questions. All those afternoons when I lay in bed, just staring at the ceiling. What exactly did Dad build for her, and why did he build it on a mountaintop, near the border, and where did they get the horses?

  “You see, it is very strange story I have to tell you,” said Fel
ix, and as he spoke he took a fine leather wallet from his pocket and began filling it with sand. “Your father took Zohara to lonely mountaintop not far from Jordanian border, and all around were only mountains and wind and wolves, and there he built their home; she was queen and he was king, and no one ever came there, because it was dangerous, and your father watched over Zohara …”

  His face looked almost tender now, and I curled up and listened.

  “And they kept horses there and nanny goats for milk, and sheep for wool,” he said, and put the sand-filled wallet back in the pocket of his jacket. I asked nothing and understood nothing. I didn’t have the strength to take in all he was saying and all he was doing. “And they wanted no electricity, no telephones in their Garden of Eden …”

  No no. I shook my head, shook everything out of me, the story, the exhausting surprises. I didn’t want any of this. Not now. It was too frightening to think of them that way, of Dad that way. I wasn’t ready yet. I needed time. It takes me a while to understand things, and this was tearing me up inside, the suddenness, the longing—

  “And how she galloped on horseback, she would fly—”

  It wasn’t a chair, stupid Nonny, it was a horse your father cut out of the picture. He cut out the horse together with the mountain and all the rest of his life with Zohara.

  Like a whirlwind the images swept around me. Their Garden of Eden. Why had he never told me about it? And why had he never taken me there?

  “Why did they go so far away?”

  Felix reached over and touched my forehead with his finger, right on the boiling point, which burst with a flash inside my head, and I shouted, “Were they running away from something?”

  “You want perhaps to hear whole story here and now?”