The Zigzag Kid

by David Grossman

  He moistened his lips with his tongue, and his eyes darted to and fro. He wanted to tell me the story. He couldn’t wait to tell me. Which was strange. Why was he so eager? We had just met, we barely knew each other, what did he want from me?

  “No! Tell me later,” I said abruptly, my final decision. I got up and stood over him.

  He was startled for a second, as if I had awakened him out of a dream. “When later? Maybe there will be no time later!”

  “Later. Not here.” I wanted to go, to be on the move. No more sitting around. “Come on. Let’s get out of here.”

  He looked at me, then sighed and reached for my hand. I helped him up.

  We brushed the sand off. We covered our tracks in case anyone was following us. We’d both had practice covering our tracks, each for his own professional reasons. From time to time he would look at me in astonishment. I couldn’t explain to him what I was going through. I’d have to hear the story later. I covered my tracks with both feet as well as with a branch I found lying on the ground until no trace remained. He could tell me the rest later. Why rush? There was time. Time to get used to it…

  Slowly we walked away. The black dog of the sand dunes began to trot along, at a safe distance. It wouldn’t stop barking at me, but Felix said I shouldn’t worry about the dog barking at him, because dogs always barked at him. I didn’t feel like getting into an argument, telling him about all the dogs that had attacked me for no reason, as though it was something about me, a smell I had, that drove them out of their doggy minds. But actually it was this dog that made me like Felix again, and I figured we would gradually get used to each other, and that it wasn’t absolutely necessary to blurt out all our secrets right away; the important thing was to know there was a secret, a secret we shared.

  We zigzagged over the white sand, and I could almost feel her walking with us. I even looked back once to see if she had left any footprints between his and mine. I think Felix understood what I was looking for, because he smiled at me and put his arm around my shoulder, and that was how we walked back to the Beetle, he and I, swaying with laughter like a couple of drunks.

  Very strong and very beautiful and tough.

  Tough? The way a professional has to be tough? Wait a moment: maybe she worked with Dad? Maybe she was a detective, too? My mother the detective?! Maybe it was because of her that he was so determined to fight crime. Why had I never thought of that before?

  I curled up even tighter. Better not think about that in the midst of our journey, the midst of the adventure. Later on there would be time. Tonight. Or tomorrow.

  So he built her a castle. A home on a mountaintop not far from the border. With nanny goats and sheep and horses. No electricity, no telephone. Maybe he wanted to be alone with her there. In purity and innocence. Like Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. He even gave up the force for her sake.

  A police car passed us with a screaming siren. It startled me.

  “Mr. Feuerberg,” Felix reminded me, “this will be our last chance.”

  If they catch me now, I thought, I’ll never get to hear the story about her, and them.

  I pulled the clothes out of the bag. A red skirt and a green blouse. Bright colors, a bit on the loud side. How could I put on a girl’s clothes? I’d die of shame. I’d vomit. It would be easier to hijack another train than to put on a skirt. Some things are not a matter of courage but a matter of… what? What do you call it?

  I climbed into the back seat to change my clothes as we drove on. For a minute I saw my face in the rearview mirror. I looked like someone who was about to swallow a particularly bitter pill. Once my father had to dress up like a woman. He was working on a case involving a con man who had promised ten different women he would marry them in order to get at their money. Dad, for all his professional experience, was so disgusted at the sight of himself in a skirt that he talked Gabi into being the bait instead, which is how, says Gabi, she got three proposals: the first, last, and only. I took off my trousers. I put on the skirt backward, naturally. How was I supposed to know? I twisted it around my hips. At least you didn’t have to take a skirt all the way off to turn it around. I put on the delicate sandals with the twisted straps. There now, I was wearing my disguise. So what? It went with the job. And if I did fool someone with the disguise, would that mean I was more of a pro than Dad? Or less of a man? Because I’d always thought that being a pro meant being a man, but now I was confused.

  And all the while I kept trying not to think about the girl these clothes had belonged to. They were a perfect fit, only they looked kind of old-fashioned, not the style girls in my class wore. I wanted to ask Felix where he had picked up the clothes, but I didn’t. Why didn’t I? Why didn’t I demand an explanation about where an old man like him had found girls’ clothing? But I just kept still and fought off the evil thoughts whirling inside my head. If I hadn’t known Dad trusted Felix, I might have worried, not frantically or anything, but I might have been just a little wary. A light chill emanated from the clothes. They had a peculiar smell, too, the smell of a cool, dark, secret place. Maybe they had been folded up for a long time in a cupboard.

  I tried on the wig. The lining was leather, or maybe rubber. It was like putting the inside of a soccer ball over my head. My scalp started itching. I was sure the wig was full of ants and that they were crawling all over my head. The rubber gripped the roots of my hair and pulled out one after another. If this kept up, I was afraid I’d never be able to go without a wig. The pigtail made the back of my neck itch. I pulled it out of the collar, but the minute I turned my head, it slid back in. I tugged at it, and again it bounced up and then settled in again. And all this time I kept thinking, What would Micah say if he saw me now?

  “Hey, Nonny, you’ve got a pigtail!”

  I climbed into the front seat again. Felix regarded me admiringly. “Perfecto!” he said. “To achieve success you must to go the limit! Change all rules! Do and dare! Courage! This is what means to be brave!” He scowled till he looked like the old man again with the lower lip pulling to the right. And then he muttered in his new voice: “Grandpa Noah and little Tammy are going to picnic. Goody-goody-good!”

  Tammy?

  I was dumbstruck. The wig was killing me. It made my head sweat. Under far less trying circumstances I might have gone crazy by now, but when I looked down at my legs peeping out under the skirt, I saw that they were thin and smooth, and my feet looked different, too, in those sandals, like the feet of a girl.

  If I’d had a sister she would have looked like me.

  And if I’d been born a girl this is what I would have looked like.

  And I would have moved like a girl and grown up to be like my mother, not like Dad.

  These thoughts were irksome.

  Five days from now I was supposed to turn into a man, and here I was being turned into a girl. It was downright insulting that I could switch this way. A boy in my class named Samson Yulzari shaved already, and here I was, wearing a pigtail.

  Still, if I had been born a girl, this is what I might have looked like.

  A girl. A little sharp-featured, but a girl all the same.

  And I would have led a completely different life.

  It was frightening to me that if a boy could impersonate a girl so well, maybe a part of her would stay in him forever.

  Felix cast another glance at me, and for a moment he almost forgot he was holding the steering wheel. This was exactly how he had looked the first time he saw me through the window of his compartment on the train: like a person who sees someone who reminds him of someone else, and enjoys the nostalgia.

  Who am I? I wondered. I was perplexed, a stranger to myself. Who am I?

  The black pigtail, dry as straw, bounced against my back till I felt as though someone behind me was trying to make me turn around. The clothes fluttered out, brushing against my skin, caressing me and blowing away with the breeze, which taught me that when you wear a skirt the wind can get in from below.

>   And then—

  A large black motorcycle suddenly appeared at Felix’s window, and the driver, a policeman wearing a helmet, waved him over to the side of the road.

  “We’ve had it!” I whispered, bitterly regretting that we had been caught, that the strange adventure was ending almost before it began.

  “Enjoy yourself,” said Felix in his normal voice, as we watched the policeman stride toward us like a cowboy trying to make an impression.

  12

  I Uncover His Identity: The Golden Ear of Wheat and the Purple Scarf

  “License, please.”

  As the policeman came closer we saw that he was a lanky young guy whose nose—like the rest of him—was long and thin, and whose cheeks were covered with pimples. He didn’t look so tough in his overlarge uniform with the fraying insignia. He reminded me of the fake policeman with the prisoner I’d met earlier that morning, a million years ago, and for a moment I hoped that he, too, was only acting a part in the performance Dad and Gabi had planned for me, but alas, he was only too real.

  Felix presented his license. The policeman studied it.

  “This is my granddaughter Tammy, Mr. Policeman,” said Felix in his doddery voice. “We are on our way to beach for picnic. I didn’t break any driving laws, I hope?”

  The policeman looked him over and smiled. “No, you drive just fine, Grandpa. But I doubt this car of yours will last very long.” And he fondly tapped on the door of the Beetle.

  “I have this car already fifteen years.” Felix chortled so gaily that bubbles of saliva sparkled in the corners of his mouth and dripped from his gray mustache. It was kind of disgusting, but amazingly convincing, too.

  The policeman took off his helmet. He had wispy hair that fell over his pimply forehead. “You didn’t happen to see a flashy black car go by, did you?” he asked.

  My heart skipped a beat.

  “Black car?” Grandpa Noah didn’t grasp the question, and cupped his hand to his ear, the better to hear him.

  “A big black car!” the policeman shouted in his ear. “The kind they have in America!”

  “Did you see this car, little Tammy?”

  Somewhere inside me, the word “no” was rattling around, trying to find its way out. I shook my head twice. The pigtail bounced against the nape of my neck.

  “Something like a new Chevrolet. Or a Lark. The kind of car you don’t see a lot in Israel. With a man and a boy inside.”

  “Ah!” Grandpa understood at last. “It is their car?”

  “No. Seems it was stolen. A strange thing happened: it was parked in an orange grove where witnesses saw it last night, and today a man and a boy drove away in it, after they jumped off a train.”

  “Jumped off? How can that be!” Felix feigned surprise, and his eyes opened wide behind the heavy spectacles.

  “We don’t know for sure yet. It seems the man forced the engineer at gunpoint to stop the train. The boy got off with him. The engineer is still a little confused, and we haven’t managed to get a clear statement from him yet. It was a kidnapping, apparently. Our guess is that he kidnapped the boy and used him as a hostage to stop the train, though we still don’t know for certain.”

  In spite of my fear, I could barely keep from laughing: a kidnapping, that’s rich!

  “And where are they now?” asked Felix, brushing a speck of dust off the policeman’s sleeve.

  “God only knows,” grumbled the policeman, with a hand over his eyes, as if to shade them from the sun, when actually, I noticed, he was trying to conceal his pimply forehead. “We found some other suspicious characters among the passengers,” he said, and snorted with contempt. “Grown men in costume! Would you believe it? On the regular Haifa run?”

  “Costumes?” gurgled the old grandfather in utter amazement. “You mean, Purim costumes?”

  “Purim in summertime.” The policeman chuckled, leaning against the window so that we could see him only up to his eyebrows. He really had to plan ahead to hide those pimples, with endless little acts of deception. “We found a couple of clowns, an acrobat, and a magician.”

  So that’s it, I thought, the magician must be the man in the top hat, the one I called the executioner.

  “And a fire-eater, and a juggler, and a contortionist, an entire circus …” He chuckled again, as though embarrassed by these silly things he was telling us.

  For a second I regretted all the surprises I had missed by landing at the end of the game with Felix. Not that I’d missed anything really important. You can see clowns and fire-eaters in the circus any old time, but there was only one Felix.

  But how did Gabi and Dad organize it all? When? And where was I when they met the fire-eater and the contortionist? What else in their lives did I not know about?

  “This is an all-out investigation,” the policeman reported mysteriously, and I knew it was the admiring, helpless look in Felix’s eyes that was making him feel so mysterious. “I happen to think it was a setup,” said the policeman, lowering his voice to a secretive whisper. “I’m telling you, the circus bit was only a way of distracting the passengers’ attention from the guy who threatened the engineer … My nose tells me we have a mystery here,” he said with a finger to his nose. “And this nose of mine never lies!”

  “What is this country coming to?” said Felix, spreading his hands in sincere dismay and rubbing his lips over his gums as though he were toothless. The policeman could easily have seen that Felix had teeth, but he didn’t. “What is this country coming to? I tell you, Mr. Policeman, things have changed! In old days someone simple like me could leave his door unlocked and nothing happened! No one would steal from you anything! But today? Today?!” he croaked with distress, till even I forgot for a moment that far from being “someone simple,” Felix was the very type thanks to whom Mr. Simple couldn’t leave his door unlocked anymore.

  “The little girl, your granddaughter, shouldn’t she be in school today?” asked the policeman as he returned Felix’s license.

  “It’s August, summer vacation!” said the old man reproachfully. “Somebody must to listen to Grandfather’s boring stories, eh, my little Tammy?”

  I smiled my brattiest smile, and played with my pigtail. I was beginning to enjoy this.

  “Ah, she is shy.” Grandpa smiled. “But her report card: all A’s! She is good, sweet little girl!”

  “My wife is expecting,” said the policeman all of a sudden, and a blush spread over his cheeks. “In two months, our first child.”

  He didn’t have to tell us. Felix never asked him. He volunteered the information. It burst out of him spontaneously and landed like a gift in Felix’s outstretched hands. I’d realized by now that this is how it always was with Felix: people confided in him almost immediately. His eyes, his smile, made you want to entrust something valuable to him, your most cherished secrets. The way the policeman blurted out the story of his expected child, or the way I told him about Zohara, and even the engineer, though he tried to fight it, eventually agreed to let me drive the locomotive. And I couldn’t understand it, because—how shall I say this without offending him—Felix is sort of a con man, you know? And what if Dad was wrong, what if you can’t read a person’s character in his face? But why should someone with such a trustworthy look about him choose the life of a con man?

  And what of me, with the seven deadly sins in my heart and the face of an angel?

  Felix’s cheeks melted with pure pleasure. “Yes, Mr. Policeman, your life will be transformed after this first child is born!” A nostalgic smile lit up his face.

  “Yes.” The policeman smiled with him. “All my friends with children say the same thing.”

  “I tell you from my own experience, young man,” continued Felix, radiant with joy, “once your child is born you are someone else. Someone new. Something changes in here, in here!” He hit his narrow chest with a trembling hand and immediately started coughing.

  The policeman slapped him gently on the back, still smiling shy
ly at all the things that Felix had told him. It was only then that I noticed what nice eyes he had, big almond-shaped eyes with long lashes. He stood leaning over Felix’s window, and you could sense how much he was enjoying the closeness, as though he believed that in some strange way this wise old man could pass on his life experience.

  It was the kind of moment you can’t time with a clock, only with the beating of your heart. Even I felt left out of the warm bubble that enveloped them. I completely forgot that Felix was only acting. That he’d told me himself about the terrible way he had neglected his daughter, and how sorely he regretted it. I had forgotten. I didn’t want to remember.

  The policeman savored the moment, and then with a sigh he looked into my eyes and said, “Have fun with Grandpa!”

  “This Saturday is my bat mitzvah,” I chirped.

  I didn’t have to say that. No one asked me. But I said it just the same. I blurted it out, and in the appropriate voice for Tammy-with-a-pigtail. The policeman threw me a smile, tapped Felix on the shoulder, glanced again at his driver’s license, to remember his name. “All the best, Mr. Glick,” he said with a wave, then mounted his motorcycle and zoomed away.

  Mr. Glick?

  That was the name the policeman said.

  He had read that name on Felix’s driver’s license.

  Glick. Felix Glick.

  “Mazel tov on your bat mitzvah.” Tammy’s grandfather chuckled as he started the Beetle. Oh my God, I thought, I’m on the road with the one and only Felix Glick.

  The man with the golden ears of wheat.

  “I never knew you have so much talent,” said Felix.

  “What talent?”

  “Acting talent,” he said. “Perhaps someone in your family was once actor?”

  “Uh-uh, don’t think so,” I said, averting my eyes so he wouldn’t see how excited I was. Felix Glick had once been the most notorious criminal in Israel. He had squandered his millions, after robbing banks all over the world and swindling governments and shaming the police. He had had a private yacht, a thousand mistresses.