The Zigzag Kid

by David Grossman

  8.

  “Eight.”

  The pointer moved.

  I was getting tired. This process was killing me. The moment I closed my eyes, I went into trance. I was afraid of this moment. My heart was heavy, plunging deeper into an abyss of black quicksand.

  “I can’t go on,” I whispered to Felix. “I think I’m about to faint…”

  “Keep trying,” he pleaded. “Don’t stop yet!”

  Rows and rows of numbers floated before me like a giant account ledger, where the sixes and sevens and eights danced by, confusing me, tempting me to choose them, but I shut my eyes and squeezed them as hard as I could, searching for Zohara in their midst…

  I saw her with Dad in their happier days together. He and she on the round side of the mountain, and Zohara at dusk, watching the pure and glorious sun go down, her belly swelling with me inside! Nonnik! She washed herself in a metal basin, and even though she didn’t truly love Dad, she tried to be happy in the warm nest he had built and feathered for her, and perhaps this was the last time she made a sincere effort to be happy for his sake, content within the small circle of their home …

  0.

  Zero? But my lips were hesitant. It wasn’t actually zero. Not a perfect zero. It was round, yes, but with a swelling, like a pregnancy? Yes, and yet not a zero! Not empty the way zero should be! Because something was amiss there; something was kicking and writhing inside the zero, trying to break out of it, something that even then, during her happy days with Dad, was sharp and cutting, pushing through the peace of her pregnancy and the feathered nest—onward and upward!

  5?

  “Try five,” I muttered.

  “Just one more number,” whispered Felix. “Is time for last number.”

  This is ridiculous, I brooded; here I sit with my eyes shut, looking serious, and making a complete fool of myself as I try to guess five arbitrary numbers someone thought up thirteen years ago. I mean, really.

  And I was so tired, I felt as if my soul had been drained out of me.

  But again, the moment I looked inward, I could feel her loneliness slinking around me. Her baby was born. And she loved it, that’s certain. But later it was like waking out of a dream. She looked around at the bald hills. Dad bored her, though she didn’t like to admit it. And disappointed her a little. She already knew, already felt that she didn’t belong here or anywhere else, and sometimes she would gallop to the jagged side of the mountain, to the edge of the cliff, and look down at the vastness calling her to fly down, like an anguished bird, to speed herself out of her life like an arrow released …

  7, I thought.

  “Seven,” I said.

  “Are you sure?” whispered Felix. “Think carefully. This is last number.”

  “Seven,” I said.

  Silence.

  And then I heard the pointer turning around the dial.

  And a little click, like a key turning in a lock.

  And Felix’s breathing.

  A small lid creaked open.

  I opened my eyes. Felix was there, his white hair standing on end. In his hand he held a long wooden box with a note stuck to it.

  “You did it,” said Felix faintly. My mouth was dry. I was wearier than I’d been the entire trip. All I wanted now was to curl up and go to sleep, even on the floor. To be no more.

  “You read her from inside,” said Felix, croaking with astonishment. “That is blood talking.”

  He handed me the box. On it was a note in a shaky young hand:

  “For Nonnik, a bar mitzvah present. With love, from your mother.”

  “Should I open it?” I asked in a whisper.

  “Not here. There is no time. We must to get out of here. You can open it later.”

  I put the box in my pocket. The minute I touched it, my strength flowed back to me. Felix closed the safe-deposit box, this time forever.

  “I can’t believe how dumb I am,” I said when I had finished. “I should have guessed immediately that those would be the numbers she’d choose.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Because it’s the date of my birth. The twelfth of August, ‘57.”

  Felix pronounced the numbers: “One and two and eight and five and seven! Bravo!”

  He looked at me and I looked at him, and we both started laughing.

  “You see that this is most important day for her,” he said. “Remember that.”

  “Let’s get out,” I said, “before anyone notices we’re down here.”

  “Wait, Amnon. Felix makes promise, Felix delivers.”

  He pulled the fine chain out of his shirt, took off the last ear of wheat, and gave it to me. All that remained was the heart-shaped locket. He weighed it in his hand, looked at the bare chain. “That is all.” He tried to smile, but his face fell. “No more ears of wheat.”

  I held the little ear of wheat in my hand. I slipped it on my chain, next to the bullet.

  We walked out through the first iron door. Then the second. And then we noticed—simultaneously—that something wasn’t quite right. We exchanged looks: the guard had left his table. Felix recoiled. He stood against the wall, narrowing his eyes like a panther. The cruel line over his lips turned white.

  “They caught me,” he rasped, and grimaced at himself for having been outsmarted. “La dracu! They caught me, damn them!”

  He squeezed his way behind the iron door, as though trying to vanish into the wall. His eyes darted hither and thither. Beads of sweat broke out on his forehead. He was in a full state of terror now that he couldn’t move, or change, or get away.

  As we turned to the staircase, a gun barrel appeared. There was no time to waste. No time to think. Everything depended on my speed and my professional skill. I drew the gun, my mother’s pistol, and cocked it, spreading my legs for balance and supporting my right hand with my left. I raised the gun to eye level. All that took less than a second. I didn’t have to think after the hundreds of hours of training of my instincts. “Don’t think. Act!” he had taught me. “Let your instincts work for you! Draw!” I closed my left eye. I focused a little over the gun barrel facing me.

  The man holding it was careful not to show his face. He moved cautiously and slowly down the stairs. Hearing his steady, circumspect steps, I knew that this was a real professional. But I wasn’t afraid. My thousands of hours of training with Dad had prepared me for this moment. My finger was on the trigger, poised.

  Then the hand that held the gun came into view.

  Thick and tan.

  And then the face.

  Broad. And the rugged body. The head attached to it by a minimal neck.

  “Don’t move! Police! Glick, two steps to the right. Nonny, throw me the gun.”

  Dad looked weary and unshaven.

  29

  Will Wonders Never Cease

  Now what?

  “Don’t think! Draw!” How many hundreds of times had I heard him shout that at me. “The first one to draw will live to tell the tale to his grandchildren!” But I was the grandchild here! “Let your instincts work!” Which instincts exactly had he been shouting about during all our years of training? The instincts of a pro or the instincts of a son? And what about the instincts of a grandson who wants to defend his grandfather?

  (From his own father.)

  What a situation!

  “Throw down the gun, Nonny,” said Dad again, tense and quiet.

  His gun was shaking. So was mine. We traced a wobbly circle over the other’s body. Suddenly Dad’s eyes nearly popped out of their sockets.

  He recognized the gun in my hand.

  The woman’s gun with the mother-of-pearl handle. Zohara’s. The one which had wounded him once before and changed the course of his life.

  I could see the memory strike him from out of the past. Suddenly they were face-to-face again in the chocolate factory … I was forgotten for the moment. He didn’t even see me: their guns took aim at each other. Only the two of them existed just then. And I, too, was los
ing my grip: the two guns were engaged in a snaky dance of defiance, of push and pull.

  “Throw it down now, damn it!”

  He shouted the words in despair.

  But I didn’t throw it down.

  To this day I feel bad when I remember that moment. The older I get, the less I think about myself just then and the more I think about Dad. About what must have gone through him when he saw his son pointing that gun at him. As if all those years he’d been with me and taken care of me were wiped out the moment I picked up her gun.

  As if she had beaten him twice.

  “It’s okay, Dad,” I whispered. “Don’t worry. I’m not going to shoot.”

  “Lower the barrel now, relax … and drop the gun.”

  “Okay.” I slowly lowered the barrel.

  And stopped. “But what will happen to Felix?”

  “Glick will go back to jail, where he belongs.”

  “No.” I raised the gun again. “No. I refuse.”

  “You—what?”

  I recognized that expression, and it scared me. His face went red, his eyes turned small and mean, and the horrible exclamation point between them stood out like a wand or a stick waving over me.

  “I said I refuse. Let him go.”

  “Nonny, don’t be crazy! Throw that gun down right now.”

  “No. First promise me you’ll let him go.”

  His face looked distorted with rage. “He kidnapped you, do you understand me? He kidnapped you!”

  “No, it wasn’t a kidnapping,” I said.

  “Shut up!” he roared. “I didn’t ask you!”

  “Let him go, or else—” I started to say, and a red fog spread over my brain.

  “Or else what? What will you do to me?” said Dad, jeering at me, furious, his gun trembling in his hand.

  “Or else I’ll … I’ll shoot!”

  “Shoot who?” they shouted in unison, Dad and Felix.

  “H-h-him …! Felix!” The answer came to me.

  I tried to understand myself.

  “I don’t get it,” said Dad. “You want to shoot him?”

  “I don’t care! I don’t care about anything! Not about him and not about you! You’re both driving me crazy! Let him go or else I’ll shoot him!”

  The fog thickened. The events of the past few days were like a whirlpool in my brain. I’ll shoot him. I’ll shoot myself. I’ll shoot all three of us. We’ll have a general massacre, verging on mass murder. First I’ll commit suicide and then I’ll run away. I’ll fight good, I’ll fight evil. I’ll live beyond good and evil!

  I screamed, I blurted out incoherent words, I kicked the wall, I banged my head against the iron door. Mount Feuerberg was erupting! Anyway, I wanted Dad to watch me explode so he’d understand how dangerous I can be when I’m angry.

  I don’t know how long I raved like that, but there’s one thing I’m sure of: at that moment, the moment I turned it into an act, I lost my ability to go wholeheartedly berserk. (Is that what Lola meant when she said, “Those who use emotion to make other people feel lose it for themselves”?)

  “Wait a minute!” shouted Dad through the clouds of my theatrical fury. “Why do you say it wasn’t a kidnapping?”

  He sounded less sure of himself. Maybe my act had worked, after all.

  “It’s the truth!” I stamped my foot, but a little less vehemently, the kind of stamping that could start negotiations. “I went with him of my own free will! He didn’t kidnap me!”

  “What do you mean? Explain!”

  “It all started with a mistake,” I said. “I got into the wrong train compartment for the game you arranged.”

  Dad was listening morosely. “And what the hell was he doing on the train?” he said, tracing a circle of disdain around Felix with his gun.

  Felix, who until that moment had been crouching as though frozen in mid-flight, now slowly stood up, relaxed his tense muscles, smoothed down his hair, and said sweetly to Dad, “What is problem, Mr. Father? I only want to look at him, what is wrong with that? Maybe he is not my grandson.”

  I was shocked when he smiled like that and pointed broadly at me as though showing off his own creation, because I realized how much he had managed to change me and distance me from Dad in only a few days. And maybe this was his greatest revenge.

  I was so shocked; in fact, I couldn’t move. Because if this was true, then he had done something extremely devious and cruel. He had used me against my own father … On the other hand, if he hadn’t kidnapped me, I would never have heard the story about me and Zohara or gotten the present she had left me; on yet another hand, even if Felix had started out intending to get revenge, in the end he did what he did for my sake, as a partner, or a friend. And most of all—as a grandfather.

  Dad gave a groan, pounded the wall with his fist, and roared at Felix: “Nonny is not your anything! You’ll never come near him again, you hear? Not you and not that old woman up there doing a melodrama on the floor.”

  “But Lola is my grandmother!” I yelled, affronted.

  He turned slowly toward me, like a weary bull. “So you know now. They’ve told you everything.”

  “Yes, everything. About my mother and about you. But don’t worry. That won’t change anything.”

  “It’s no use …” muttered Dad, his gun drooping down with his head. “I didn’t want you to know. You’re too young for that.”

  All his anger suddenly vanished, and he sat on the stairs with his gun hanging down between his knees. At last I could look at him to my heart’s content and try to read the story of the past few days in his face. He was staring out, holding his head in his hands. I searched his features for a trace of the young man who had jumped up on the crane that night and almost drowned in a vatful of sweetness; the young man who had visited Zohara in prison every day and built her a palace on the Mountain of the Moon; my father, who had delivered me with his own two hands and cut my umbilical cord.

  But I couldn’t find him.

  His face was sealed. The face of a man who must constantly compress his lips to keep the memories from bursting out in a tidal wave. And he apparently succeeded: they didn’t burst out. Not then and not ever. When I was younger, I could feel them bubbling up inside him, like molten lava. Nowadays I’m barely aware of them. He succeeded too well.

  All I could see was the face of the policeman, the professional. The one who had been punishing and torturing himself for the past twelve years for having fallen in love with a criminal, for having followed her on the journey she proposed, a journey beyond the laws of ordinary people. The man who cruelly refused ever to forgive himself for one great error, what he considered to be a great error; and with him, as we know, to err was unforgivable, and to punish himself he renounced anything that could bring him joy or relief or consolation.

  He was his own prisoner, a prisoner of his character.

  “I was planning to tell you everything, Nonny,” he said gravely. “I just thought I should wait till you were a little older, that’s all. I was afraid you weren’t—uh—mature enough yet to hear about the whole mess. Now you know, and I’m sorry.”

  “Yes, but I’m okay, nothing’s happened.”

  A lot had happened, of course, but this was not the right moment to go into troublesome details.

  “He treated you well? He didn’t harm you?”

  “Felix is great, Dad.” You’re very much alike, I added silently.

  Dad looked at Felix, Felix looked back at him, and I understood, in spite of my youth, what was passing between them as they gazed into each other’s eyes. There was more than enmity between them. A special destiny bound these two men who had loved the same woman.

  “So what will we do now?” asked Dad. “The police have been chasing you all over the country.” He sighed. But it seemed to me that he was purposely saying too much. “And I came here alone because I figured that your final stop”—here he stared hard at Felix—“would be to pick up the present Zohara left for Nonny …”<
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  “You come here alone?” There was a spark of interest in Felix’s eyes. His tongue ran quickly over his bottom lip.

  “All by myself,” said Dad, staring at him blankly. “Why, did you want to make a proposition?”

  “Lord, no. Who is Felix to make proposition to Mr. Father? Is just something I am thinking.”

  “Let’s hear it.”

  “I am thinking perhaps we do like so: I pull out gun, yes?”

  “Then what?” said Dad.

  “Then I hold gun to Amnon’s head and say, If Mr. Father does not let me go, I shoot, yes?”

  “And then what?”

  “Nu, you have no choice, so I get away.”

  Another silence. They didn’t need too many words to understand each other. “You mean”—Dad chuckled heartily—“you mean, you beat me? You know what the press will make of that? And the police?”

  “Who cares about police?” asked Felix with a grin. “Forget police. You catch Felix once, now you catch him twice. No other policeman ever did half so good. Think about that.”

  “But if I let you go, who’ll know I caught you?”

  “Ah, but you will know,” said Felix, looking pious. “And your Amnon will know, and that is what is important, yes?”

  Dad nodded and nodded. He was always quick to make up his mind.

  “Oh well,” he sighed. “Any other solution would hurt us all. Especially the boy. Go on, tie us up.”

  He rose to his feet, put his gun back in the holster, and took his belt off. Felix and I watched him tensely. I was still holding the gun, because what if he jumped me? Dad halted halfway to the stairs. He saw the expression on our faces and my gun following his movements, and he heaved a sigh.

  “Ah, Nonny,” he said with the trace of a bitter smile, “I know you’re only doing what any professional would do in this situation, but for some reason, that really depresses me.”