The Zigzag Kid

by David Grossman

  “There is just one little problem,” said Felix. By now I was familiar with the quiet, catlike tone beneath his surface politeness, and I felt a little uneasy. The engineer’s face turned redder.

  “Because we two must to get off from train before Tel Aviv,” Felix explained apologetically. He took a handkerchief from his pocket and fastidiously blotted a drop of perspiration which had formed on his brow during the struggle with me. There was a faint smell of perfume in the air.

  “In half an hour we’ll be getting to the station. Go wait quietly in your car!” shouted the engineer. His fingers turned white on the handle of the brake.

  “Beg pardon!” Felix corrected him patiently. “Perhaps you do not understand me, because my Hebrew it’s not so good: we must to get off train before Tel Aviv. Before that forest. In maybe three kilometers.”

  I peeked through the dusty window. The train was now traveling through a plain of yellowing fields. Something dark loomed ahead, a clump of trees, apparently. I glanced at the big clock on the wall: it showed 3:32.

  “Now is only two more kilometers,” said Felix amicably. “You must to slow down, Mr. Engineer.”

  Suddenly the engineer veered around. He was a big man, but his anger made him even bigger. “Unless you two get out of here this minute …” he said, and the veins on his neck swelled like muscles.

  “Now is only kilometer and half,” said Felix calmly, peeking out the window. “Nu, our car is waiting for us, Mr. Engineer, please to start to stop.”

  The driver turned to look out the window, and his eyes grew wide with amazement. There by the tracks was a long black car with yellow doors. I, too, was amazed: Felix had mentioned earlier that a car would be waiting for us at 3:33, but who would have believed something like this could happen, in the middle of nowhere …

  Like two mechanical dolls, the engineer and I turned slowly back to Felix. Then we saw what he was holding in his hand. No! I thought. It can’t be, this is just a bad dream! The engineer realized how bad it was before I did, but it was definitely no dream. Heaving a sigh, he reached for the brake and set about stopping the train.

  He must have pulled the emergency brake, because I nearly jumped out of my skin. A burning smell filled the locomotive. Compressed air escaped with a shriek. Sparks flew. The brakes screeched, the train lurched forward and groaned, and then everything was still, except for the hissing, whooshing sound of the engine.

  No one moved.

  Not a sound came from the cars behind us. People were too stunned to talk, I guess. Then somewhere in the distance a child began to cry. I looked out the window and saw that we were in the middle of a new-mown field. There was a row of gray beehives in the area, as I recall.

  “Come, we are in hurry,” said Felix apologetically, pulling me up from the bench and leading me toward the door.

  My legs wobbled. He had to bolster me up, and with his other hand, the one that held the gun, he pulled the door open, and I slowly made my way down the steps. Again and again I felt my legs buckle under me as though my knees had been temporarily removed.

  “Goodbye for now, Mr. Engineer, and thank you for all your help,” said Felix, smiling at the dumbfounded man, who leaned back against the instrument panel with two growing pools of sweat under his arms. “So sorry if we inconvenience you.” He approached the radio transmitter hanging next to the engineer and, swift as a snake striking, tore it down from the wall and cut the coiling black wire.

  “Come, Mr. Feuerberg,” he said pleasantly. “Our car awaits.”

  8

  Mischief In the Toy Department

  Shiny black. With lemon-yellow doors. And big, biggest I’d ever seen. It was parked obediently beside a dirt road in the middle of the field, like some huge dog waiting patiently for its master. There weren’t many cars like it in Israel at the time, not a one, in fact. It was brand-new, sensational. I thought it must be a Rolls-Royce, but it was something even better.

  “Come, please, I open door now for Mr. Feuerberg!” said Felix, and he ran ahead, spry and light-footed, and opened the door to a glorious world.

  I slid into the car, buoyed up on the plushy seat. Dad and I had once owned a vintage car we used to tinker with together. It was a Humber Pullman from the forties, like Queen Elizabeth’s automobile and the one General Montgomery raced in through the desert. We called it the Pearl. Dad had found her scrapped at a junkyard and spent years restoring her piece by piece; I got to help him as soon as I was old enough. In the end, we had to give her away. A sad, sad story. But compared to Felix’s car, our Humber looked like a jalopy. I wasn’t much to look at either just then.

  Because of the shock, the commotion.

  Gabi used to say that I rated a nine out of ten on the IBS (International Brat Scale), and that at the mere mention of my name in the teachers’ lounge, twelve men and women would start stamping and snorting and furiously pawing the air. Yep, that was me. But on the train with Felix, and those people he’d locked inside the compartment, and the engineer and all, I had passed beyond brattiness into a world of grownups and guns and real crime, like in real movies, and I just floated through the storm in a trance.

  With a sudden screeching of tires, Felix took off. A cloud of dust rose up around us, and we emerged from it, black and shiny.

  The car was spick-and-span on the inside, too, with red velvet upholstery and a mahogany dashboard. There was a glass partition between the front seat and the back, and a fine silk curtain on the rear window. Never before had I been in such a car, or taken command of a passenger train, or experienced so many “never befores” in a single day.

  “The black button,” said Felix, pointing.

  I pressed it. A little door swung open and a light went on inside, revealing a sandwich on a plate wrapped in cellophane, a quartered tomato, and slices of melon. There were also slices of some other fruit I didn’t recognize at the time, probably fresh pineapple, which as far as I knew grew only in books and cans. I carefully picked up the plate. It had a gold rim around it, like the gold rim around Felix’s watch. I ran my finger over it: for the first time ever I was touching gold.

  “I thought maybe you will be hungry, and prepared for you sandwich. Cheese, this is kind you like, no?” I nodded limply. The contrast between the train hijacking and this cheese sandwich really slew me.

  “Are you taking me to Haifa?” I asked.

  Felix laughed. “Oh-ho, you are too impatient! But we have bigger plans for you!”

  “Who’s we—you and Dad?”

  “Ah yes! We two. Each looking after his own end of plan.”

  We drove in silence for a while. What exactly did he mean? I had hundreds of questions and didn’t know where to start; everything had happened so fast, it was utterly fantastic: how could my dad have planned something which involved breaking the law, like hijacking a train, at gunpoint no less! Okay, supposing he went along with Gabi’s modest first proposal (not very likely, but supposing he did) and started developing it into a kind of action film for me, then why didn’t Gabi intervene? “A hair-raising adventure,” he’d written in the letter, but wasn’t this a little too hair-raising? There’s something wrong here, I thought to myself, this is too dangerous for a kid my age.

  I listened, but didn’t hear Dad say that at my age he practically ran his father’s factory. Maybe he realized he’d been carried away. A sudden wave of fear numbed my face and body. Because what if I was making some terrible mistake?

  “If you are worried, I take you back right away,” said Felix.

  “You mean, back to Jerusalem?”

  “In just one hour. This is a Bugatti, fastest car in Israel today.”

  “And will that be the end of the game?”

  “If you wish, I take you there later this evening. Or perhaps tomorrow evening, if you wish. Is for you to decide, me to obey, yes sir!” He saluted with a wink.

  “Is that what Dad said?”

  “Soon you have your bar mitzvah, young Mr. Feuerberg, and th
en you will be grown-up man!”

  But not quite yet, I thought. True, I had secretly smoked a couple of cigarettes down to the butt, and inhaled, too, and true, I had kissed three girls in my class, only on a dare, though, and then Semadar Cantor went and told her giggly girl friends that I’m a two-timing wolf. But sitting next to Felix in that car, leaving a whole trainload of people behind us in a state of shock and indignation, I knew I was only a thirteen-year-old boy, or would be, come Saturday, and that this weird adventure was a bit over my head.

  Those last moments on board the train started flashing through my memory: the look on the engineer’s face when he saw the gun in Felix’s hand, the way his eyes nearly popped out when Felix slashed the radio transmitter so he wouldn’t be able to call for help. And then, after we jumped off the locomotive, Felix took something tiny out of his pocket and tossed it in the air. I didn’t really see what it was, I only noticed the glitter of gold as it spun around in the sunlight, and then I heard a faint tinkle, like a coin hitting the floor.

  We drove on in silence. The tires stirred up more dust on the path, but inside, the car was cool and fresh. We turned down a narrow road. The car spanned all the way across it. We passed through a small village or kibbutz, I didn’t really notice. I was deliberately slacking off on Dad’s training. I didn’t read the road signs, or make a mental note of landmarks, or check the speedometer to see how many kilometers we’d driven so far, or invent memory aids using the initials of the turnoffs north and south, etc. I was angry with Dad and his wild ideas. I wanted to betray him the way he had betrayed me. And there was this rumbling inside me, telling me that a bar mitzvah surprise should make a kid happy, not scare him half to death.

  “You wish to go home, no?”

  “No!”

  I barked the answer, and Felix peered at me and began to slow down, till the car was hardly moving. He stared silently at the road ahead.

  Okay, I told myself, this is going to be tough, and you almost gave up just now. Try to be stronger. It’s true you’ve just been through a lot, and you’re still out of kilter, but actually, nothing so terrible has happened. Here you are, riding around in the most beautiful car in the world, nibbling pineapple (apparently) and cheese from a gold-rimmed plate, and if you’re brave, this Felix person will take you on adventures no child has ever had before. And I don’t mean fantasy adventures either. So enough of your whining. Sit up straight. Put a smile on your face. Don’t pretend to be a man. Start by being yourself, Nonny, as Gabi put it in the letter.

  I liked these little pep talks. I used a special voice for them, a gruff interior voice that addressed me in staccato slogans, like a general transmitting orders during battle. It helped sometimes.

  Really it did.

  I stretched out. There was plenty of leg room in the car. I devoured the sandwich, and fed on the fabled pineapple, allowing the taste to melt on my tongue. I pulled my shoulders back and sat up straight. And I whistled softly to myself. There was one thing I knew for sure: nothing would ever be the same after that pineapple.

  Felix drove on, glancing at me quizzically in the rearview mirror from time to time, as though wondering whether perhaps Dad had misled him, and I wasn’t really mature or brave enough yet to participate in what he had planned for me. The next time Felix looked my way I looked steadily back at him. The way Dad taught me: Steady eyes are a declaration of self-confidence. Like making a muscle. That was a very important trick for a skinny kid like me. It worked on Felix. He smiled. I smiled back. He pressed a button, and over my head the roof opened slowly, revealing the vast blue sky. Never before, etc.

  It was warm and pleasant outside. I turned on the radio without his permission. American music filled the air. I felt American. I smiled like an American. Felix threw his head back and laughed. Finally, a grownup who thought I was funny.

  “We have a Humber Pullman,” I told Felix.

  “Ah yes! Fantastic auto! Six-cylinder engine, yes?”

  “Yes, and it’s black, like this car.”

  “A Humber Pullman is always black! And only black!”

  Except the fenders, which were striped white, because the car came from England during the Blitz, when roads were dark during the blackouts and people had to put special stripes over their car fenders so pedestrians would see them approaching at night.

  “Dad found her in the junkyard. Before I was born.”

  “How did this Humber get there?”

  “Dad thinks it must have belonged to a British officer during the Mandate. Maybe he got drunk and smashed it up.”

  “Yes sir! Anything is possible! British soldiers like to drink! Johnnie is always shikker!”

  “Dad and I work on her every Tuesday,” I lied. Because we did once. We used to.

  “That is important! Cars like that need work! You drive her often?”

  “Yes … but only behind the house, up to the fence and back. Dad’s afraid to take her out on the road.”

  He used to be afraid, that is. We used to drive her up to the fence and back. We used to work on her. Everything in the past.

  “She’s a real pearl.”

  She was a real pearl. That’s what Dad called her. “Come on, Nonny, let’s polish the Pearl,” and out we would go with our rags and buckets and baby shampoo. Working together, two hours at a time, we rarely spoke about anything except the car. When we’d start her up, the sound of the motor was like music to our ears. Dad could really make her sing when he put his heart into it, and then the three-meter ride to the gate and back was like gliding on velvet wheels. Or sometimes we’d dip into our savings and call Roger, an ace mechanic from Nahariya who specialized in vintage cars, to come up to Jerusalem and adjust the brakes and the shock absorbers.

  It gives me a pang to remember the effort we put into her. Once we took a trip to Tiberias just to buy special desert tires from a rare-car dealer. But that’s all in the past. To this day I feel guilty about what happened. I think Dad must have aged ten years the day he had to turn her over.

  “But why you never drive your automobile on the road?” asked Felix in surprise.

  “Dad says that a car like that … it wouldn’t be right to take her out on the bumpy streets of Jerusalem. In our back yard she’s protected.”

  “Aha!” said Felix mockingly. “Is safe to drive Humber in desert, but too dangerous in Jerusalem?”

  “I guess so.”

  I, too, had found it strange that our Humber never left the gate, as though we had to keep her caged in the yard. When we gave her to Mautner in compensation, he had no fears about driving her, but he didn’t know how to treat her, either. The first time he took her out of town, she went out of control and rolled over. He told the neighbors she’d gone wild like an animal the moment she hit the open road, and no matter how hard he pressed on the brake, she raced ahead, a car with a curse, he swore to everyone, and Dad heard him and smiled bitterly, as though he’d known all along what would happen. I wince just thinking about it. Mautner sold the Pearl to a used-car dealer. We haven’t heard anything about her since. Or spoken about her. That was that. She was dead.

  “This car is Bugatti,” Felix said again. “You never hear of Bugatti before, eh?”

  I admitted that I never had.

  “There are six cars like it in all this world,” he explained, “built by genius sculptor named Ettore Bugatti! Every car is specially designed! Unique!”

  I took a closer look at this masterpiece I was privileged to be riding in.

  “And Mr. Bugatti himself decides who will buy his six cars. He decides: kings are worthy enough so his first Bugatti he sells to King Carol of Romania, who once I saw touring in his private car!”

  “And this one? Which king was this one for?”

  “This one? For King Feuerberg II. Felix brought you this car by ferryboat, one month to get to Israel, very long trip!”

  “For me?” I was astounded. “You mean you brought this car here for me? A car like this?”

 
; “No, I am sorry to say, it is not present for keeping, only for today. So we will have lovely time together. To make our trip special.”

  “You mean to say you brought a car here for one day? For me?”

  “Oh, that. Someone in Italy owed to Felix debt of honor. Also another gentleman in France, his former partner. They think Felix is dead. For ten years they hear nothing from me. Suddenly comes telephone call: brrring brrring! Got to hurry! Old friends run here, run there, for debt of honor! So this Bugatti arrives in Israel for one week, then it goes back to museum, and no one any wiser, good day, thank you, and shalom!”

  My lips were dry. Maybe there’s a special prayer you recite the first time you ride in a Bugatti. Too bad no one in my class could see me now. Too bad there had been no photographer following me around all day. Because I knew that even if they believed me about driving the locomotive all by myself, and blowing the whistle and stopping a train, no one, not even Micah, would believe that the automobile of a real king had been sent from overseas just for me! A convertible, yet! Who cares if they don’t believe me, I thought angrily. Why should I have to impress them? Does a king have to impress anyone? He’s the king, that’s all.

  “He sure was scared, that engineer …” I said with a forced laugh, because every time I thought about what happened in the locomotive I’d get this wave of anxiety again.

  Felix shrugged his shoulders. “And gun was only toy,” he said.

  I was relieved. “Only toy?”

  He shrugged his shoulders, took the gun out of his pocket, and handed it to me. It was a small gun, fairly heavy, as heavy as a real gun, its handle inlaid with mother-of-pearl. I’d seen a real one like this once in a display of impounded weapons. Dad took a long time inspecting it, caressing it, peering through the sight. When I asked him what it was, he quickly put it back in the case and sneered, “It’s only a woman’s gun.” But I didn’t tell Felix that.

  In this pleasantly expansive mood, I ran my fingers over Felix’s toy. It was the second gun I had held in my hands that day, the first being the one the fake policeman carried. Ho-hum, what a boring life this was.