The Zigzag Kid (3 page)

My voice sounded choked and shrill, yet they smiled happily enough as they twirled me around in an effort to move past without bumping me with their handcuffs. On we danced, arms flapping, until finally they figured out a way to sit together. I collapsed on the seat facing them.

“Quit staring!” barked the policeman, shaking a finger at the prisoner.

“Honest to God, I wasn't staring!” swore the prisoner, hand to heart.

“I saw you eyeing me before!” the policeman upbraided him.

“I swear on my daughter's life, I wasn't looking at you! Did you see me looking at him?”

His question was addressed to me. Why me? What did I have to do with it? Now the policeman leaned forward with him, waiting for my answer, waiting so intently he began to chew on his mustache. Their
movements were disturbingly theatrical, yet strangely fascinating, too. I wanted to get out fast, but I couldn't move.

“I … I think you were looking at him just a little,” I sputtered.

“Aha!” The policeman raised a triumphant finger. “You look at me one more time and you've had it!”

The prisoner stared fixedly out the window. We were passing through a pine forest. A herd of goats grazed in the underbrush. A she-goat reared up and started munching on the foliage of a young tree. The policeman looked away, in the direction of our compartment door. I was afraid to look in either direction, but I was also afraid to shut my eyes. I only wished I could disappear.

“There! You looked at me again!” shouted the policeman, springing to his feet and falling back on account of the handcuffs. “You looked!”

“I swear on my daughter's life, I wasn't looking at you!” cried the prisoner, likewise springing up and waving angrily, then falling back on account of the handcuffs.

“You're still looking!” roared the policeman. “You're staring me in the eye! Stop it!”

But this time the prisoner held his ground. He pushed his big face right into the policeman's. What was this? What was going on between them? Some weird kind of staring match: they gawk at each other, then look away. The prisoner leaned forward, and the more the policeman tried to avert his eyes, the more the prisoner would squirm around him, trying to catch his eye. He was practically on top of him now!

“Hey … let me go …” muttered the prisoner.

“Shut up!” the policeman grumbled back at him. “Shut up and look out the window! Not at me! Out the window!”

“Let me go …” whispered the prisoner in a new insinuating voice. “It wasn't my fault… you know I had no choice …”

“Tell it to the judge!” snarled the policeman, and gritted his teeth.

“Give me a break, I have a little daughter …”

“Oh yeah? Well, so do I! Out the window!”

And still the prisoner stared fiercely at the policeman, slowly forcing him to turn his head around. It was a distressing sight, and it filled me
with a sense of foreboding: the policeman kept trying to resist. I watched him as he struggled, hunching his shoulders to avoid the prisoner's gaze. But it overpowered him. It bored into his head until gradually he surrendered, relaxing his shoulders with a deep sigh, squinting at the prisoner and snickering boyishly, till his eyes began to look weary and glazed.

“You've had a long, hard day, Avigdor …” cooed the prisoner. “You had to chase me down all those alleys, shooting and yelling, and everything by the book …”

The policeman rolled his eyes.

“Sometimes it's hard to be a lawman …” whispered the prisoner. “So much responsibility … never a moment's rest…”

Now I, too, was gaping. That's just what Dad used to say when he came home from work in the evening and flopped down on the couch; those were his exact words whenever he complained, either to me or to himself, “so much responsibility and never a moment's rest.” At times like that I used to imagine having a mother who would massage his stiff neck. But we didn't have a mother, we had a Gabi, and she wouldn't dare.

The prisoner reached cautiously into the dozing policeman's belt and pulled out a large set of keys, at least ten of them. He chose one and unlocked the cuff. His liberated hand did a merry dance in the air. There was a deep red imprint around his wrist.

“It was worth being cuffed just for this,” he said.

Then he pulled off his striped shirt and prisoner's cap and set them down on the seat beside me. And I froze. He was going to bolt now, I would be an eyewitness to a prisoner's escape, yet for all my experience and training and my dad and that, I couldn't so much as move a finger.

“Would you please hang on to this for a second?” he addressed me pleasantly, and handed me the black gun he had just taken from the policeman's holster.

I recognized it at once: a Wembley service revolver. Dad had one just like it at work, one I'd held in my hand at least a thousand times. I'd even shot blanks from it at the firing range, but I had never been in a
situation like this before, facing a real criminal with a gun in my hands. What was I supposed to do? Kill him? My finger twitched on the trigger. How could I shoot him? What did he ever do to me? I had only one wish—to see the round face of Uncle Samuel as soon as possible. I would run straight into his arms, transformed forever into a model citizen.

“Thanks, kid,” said the prisoner, taking back the gun and sticking it in his belt. And then he carefully unbuttoned the sleeping policeman's shirt and slipped it off, as though he were a baby. The policeman, Avigdor, slept on in his undershirt and never even dreamed of waking up. You could nudge him, shake him, bounce him around—and still he went on sleeping! I was furious: Dad hadn't been late for work in twenty years, he always took on the most dangerous cases, even when he was sick with a temperature, while this crooked cop here …

The prisoner dressed him quickly in the striped shirt and set the prison cap on his head. Then he slipped free of the ball and chain, locked it around the policeman's ankle, squeezed himself into the uniform, put on the police hat, and turned to the window.

“A good detective thinks like a criminal.” I knew that, too, and I knew exactly what would happen next, that he would open the window and jump out of the moving train, to freedom. Do something! I ordered myself. Jump! I told myself.

But nothing happened.

The prisoner looked out at the hilly countryside rushing by, then took a deep breath of freedom, heaved a sigh, and sat down beside the oblivious policeman. Gloomily he slipped his hand back into the open cuff that dangled from the sleeper's wrist and locked it. Once again they were bound together.

“Wake up! You fell asleep!” blared the former prisoner, nudging the policeman with his shoulder.

The policeman sat bolt upright and glanced around bewilderedly.

“Huh? What happened?” he asked. “What did I do?”

“You fell asleep,” shouted the former prisoner, drawing closer, with his visor in the policeman's face.

“I did not fall asleep,” muttered the policeman. He fumbled with the handcuff, then felt down his leg to the ball and chain, stopped in astonishment, wrinkling his brow in an effort to remember something, gave up and slumped back in his seat like an empty sack. A few more ghastly moments went by, and the ex-policeman turned to the man in the uniform sitting beside him.

“Let me go …” he whispered.

“Shut up!” barked the big former prisoner.

“I'm innocent,” pleaded the ex-policeman. “You know I never …”

“Tell it to the judge,” drawled the other indifferently.

“The judge?” repeated the policeman. He sat hunched over on the seat with a drooping mustache. It suits this guy to be a prisoner, I thought. This was the most profound thought I could dredge up just then.

“Give me a break …” he started again with a mournful smile. “You know, I have a little daughter at home …”

“Oh yeah? Well, so do I.” The retired prisoner cut him short, glanced at his watch, and said, “Get up! 'Tenshun! Make it snappy!”

“Where to?” asked the policeman, turning pale.

“To the courthouse!” ordered the prisoner. “Forward march!”

“Already?” whispered the policeman, shuffling his feet. The prisoner bullied him out of the compartment and closed the door behind them. There. It was over. I still couldn't move. For a second I saw the former prisoner's face again, framed in the glass of the compartment door—a smiling face, a friendly face, in fact. He looked back at me and put a finger to his lips, as though asking me to keep mum about all that I had witnessed. One moment he was there, the next he was gone.

That was that.

Even now, some thirty years later, the memory of that moment troubles me, and I'd like, if I may, to let off some steam and tell you that in the next chapter I plan to introduce something new: from here on in, every chapter will have a name, a name that hints at its contents.

Or a nickname.

I wished the train would turn in its tracks. I wanted to go home, to
Gabi and Dad, especially Dad. I mean, he is an expert on crime, and I wasn't up to this sort of thing yet, sorry to disappoint you.

And then I saw the envelope on the former prisoner's seat. But what was it doing there? It wasn't there before they entered the compartment. And the weirdest part was that I saw my name written on it in a large, familiar scrawl.

“Greetings to the Bar Mitzvah Boy, and may the gods grant you length of days and brevity of nose. I hope you were not too upset by the little prank we played on you, your dad and I, and that even though it may have been somewhat alarming, you will, ere long, forgive us, your unworthy servants.”

What was I supposed to do? Scream? Stick my head out the train window and shout, “I am such an idiot!” Or write a letter to UNICEF complaining about the way Dad and Gabi were treating me?

“But before you write your letter of complaint to the United Nations,” Gabi went on, “consider this: first, the good folks there are tired of deciphering your hieroglyphic scribbles, and second, it is customary to give the accused a chance to speak before sentencing.”

The words danced slowly before my eyes. I had to stop reading. How did they do it, she and Dad? How did they think this up? When did they find the time to plan such a caper? And where did they come up with those two, the policeman and the prisoner? Could it be that … But … I am such an idiot … I leaned back and shut my eyes: what if they were only actors … I could run through the train and search the other cars … but they'd most likely changed out of their costumes by now, so I wouldn't recognize them among all the passengers.

I turned from the letter and stared out the window at the scenery. The whole thing was Gabi's idea, that much was certain. I felt a little guilty for being so ungrateful after the trouble she'd obviously gone to,
but I just sat there, stunned, and kind of gloomy, though I didn't know why.

Maybe their extravagant surprise hadn't left enough room in me for gratitude. If Gabi had had children of her own, I mused, then stopped myself. It wasn't nice even to think something like that. But she really did seem to enjoy shocking people at times, and liked to say the wickedest things and embarrass them half to death. Dad once remarked to her that it must get kind of tiring, having to be so special all the time, and Gabi flashed back that he spent so much energy keeping a low profile, he was half erased by now.

Gabi has a dangerous mouth on her, but Dad's no slouch either: a few well-chosen words from him would cut her like a knife, you could tell how deeply from the look on her face and the way she gasped and flapped her hands, breathless and speechless. And the words would still haunt her years later, no matter how much Dad tried to reassure her that he hadn't meant it, he had just been angry. But she couldn't put the insult behind her. He had called her insensitive, said something to the effect that she had the hide of an elephant, too. It was this “too,” this unfortunate allusion to another elephantine feature that made her leave.

This sort of thing would happen once every few months. Gabi would run out of the house and disappear. At work, she would be inordinately courteous to Dad and about as friendly as a cold fork. She would follow his instructions to the letter and type his reports, but there were no smiles between them, no familiarities. Behind his back, she would phone me twice a day so we could work out strategies. Normally it would take him about a week to break down. First he would start grumbling about the food in the cafeteria, and then he would complain that the shirts he ironed himself were a disgrace to the department, and that our house was filthier than a jail cell the morning after. I knew he was trying to drag me into the fight, so I held my tongue. I refrained from pointing out that Gabi was not our servant, that she only kept house for us out of the goodness of her heart (and because she was allergic to dust). It was obvious to me that he missed her a lot, not merely as a cook or a laundress but as our Gabi; he was used to her being around the house,
to her never-ending chatter, her emotional outbursts, and the jokes he tried not to laugh at.

And he also missed her, I knew, because she made it easier for him to be with me.

Why this was so, why the two of us needed Gabi to feel close to each other, I can't explain. We both just knew it was good to have her there, because she made us, him and me, into a kind of family.

So then we'd have a few more days of sulking and grumbling. And eventually Dad would try to find a pretext to engage her in friendly conversation at work, and she would harden her heart and say that unfortunately his subtleties were lost on her, due to a certain pathological condition of her hide. And he would beg her to return and promise to be nicer, and she would answer that his request had been duly noted and that he could expect her final decision within thirty days. And Dad would shout, “Thirty days, that's insane! I want to make up with you here and now!” And Gabi would roll her eyes and announce in a voice like the one over the loudspeaker at the supermarket that before entering any agreement, she would present him with her NRP's, or New Relationship Provisos; whereupon, with head held high, she would exit the room.