The Zigzag Kid (7 page)

“Come, Mr. Feuerberg,” said Felix. “We must to go now.”

“Why do you call me Mr. Feuerberg?” I asked. It sounded funny, but kind of annoying, too.

“So how I must to call you, please?”

“Nonny.”

“Non-ny?” He tried my name out. “No, no, I cannot call you Nonny … We are not major friends yet.”

“Why not?” I know, that was stupid of me. It was true that we weren't. But I wanted us to be. So we wouldn't have to waste time on details. That's the kind of person Felix was, he made you want to trust him right away.

“But everybody calls me Nonny.”

“Then I must to call you Mr. Feuerberg, because God forbid Felix should do what everybody else is doing, correct?” He looked at his reflection in the window and adjusted his tie.

“Perhaps later,” he said, “when two of us are major friends, it is possible I call you Amnon. Only then. Because too close is not good. A person must to have boundaries, yes? For now you will be Mr. Feuerberg to me, and afterward we see, all right?”

Let it be Mr. Feuerberg, then. Somehow, coming from him it sounded fine. I had a teacher once who used to call me that in class, as though she were holding my name with a pair of tweezers. But there was a big difference between her and Felix.

The memory of this teacher brought out the chutzpah in me.

“So why do I call you Felix? Don't you have a last name?”

He turned to me with an approving smile. “It is enough for now, till we get out.”

“Out of where?”

“Out of here, this train, this locomotive.”

“How are we supposed to get out of the locomotive?”

“We cannot get out of locomotive until we get into it, correct?”

Something cold and white fluttered around my heart, touched it for an instant, then passed, so quickly I didn't have the chance to figure out what it was. A twitter of alarm, perhaps, or a warning. One painful spasm, and that was all; I forgot.

We hurried out of our compartment and headed toward the locomotive. Felix walked quickly ahead of me, alert and catlike. More and more I suspected him of being a
Shushu
. He kept glancing around all the time, like the bodyguard of some VIP. Only I was that VIP, apparently. It was fun to trail behind him with a blank expression on my face, hoping some cold-blooded assassin would come after me and give Felix the chance to pounce on him and knock him out, and then, as I coolly made my way past the cheering crowds, I would whisper to my followers, Such a bore, these assassination attempts.

But it was not an assassin who approached me, it was the man in the top hat. I saw him get up as we passed compartment 3, his mouth opening in a soundless cry and his hand raised as if to stop me. All at once I understood: he had been waiting for me patiently, thinking I had disappeared because I didn't have the nerve to play this game, and suddenly here I was again, but instead of turning to ask “Who am I?,” I walked right by and continued the game without him!

Felix noticed him as well. A single glance, sharp as a whip, was enough for him: he grabbed my hand and yanked me past the door of the compartment. He looked so determined, so stern and tough, that for a moment I thought maybe it was no simple prank Dad and Gabi had planned for me but something far more meaningful and important, practically a matter of life and death.

But there was no time to stop and ponder what was going on. It all happened so fast. I was hurled down the corridor, past the the man in
the black top hat, though I couldn't quite figure out why I was supposed to run away from him, why Felix didn't simply stop and explain that young Mr. Feuerberg here had decided to skip phase one of the game; and what's wrong with that, Mr. Feuerberg is a free agent!

I looked around and couldn't believe my eyes: there was Felix, leaning against the door of compartment 3 with the silver chain in his hand. No mistake about it: it was his silver watch chain. With one vigorous pull, he managed to tear it out of his pocket and wind it around the door handles, with the watch still attached to it! His hands moved so nimbly, it crossed my mind that he would have made an excellent pickpocket, or perhaps he had been one in the past—and here I'd thought to warn him about pickpockets! I stared at him round-eyed: he couldn't have cared less about the people he was locking into the compartment. As he wound the chain tighter he pursed his lips, and a fine shadow of cruelty played over them, the cruelty of a predator.

And the same shadow appeared over my own lips. It emanated from me, in a fine white line that rose to the surface, like a scar. My brow, too, was creased with effort, like a pro's. Even our hands moved in sync, and I could actually feel the sensations in his fingertips, their tingling nerves, because I had touched them.

The people on the other side of the glass stared at him uncomprehendingly. They were transfixed. The man in the top hat bent his knees as though he couldn't make up his mind whether to stand up or sit down, with one hand hanging limply in midair and his mouth forming a mute, astonished O. The other man, the roly-poly bald fellow, gawked at Felix with a silly smile of disbelief. From behind those two, the woman who looked like Grandma Tsitka peered out, her lips stretched tight with amazement, just like Tsitka, though unlike Tsitka, she didn't say a word.

And neither did I. It was the most fantastic thing I'd ever seen in my life: here was an adult, an old man, in fact, doing things that would have gotten a kid like me permanently expelled from school!

And maybe this is what was so thrilling about it: that someone could be like me and still be an adult.

Felix had no time to waste on the passengers. He made sure the doors were chained fast, grabbed me by the arm, and pushed me toward the locomotive, flashing a smile like blue lightning. “Everything all right now! We must to go!” he said.

“But—but,” I protested, “the people in there are … They won't be able to …”

“Later, later! In the end will come explanation! Hi-deh!”

“What about the watch?” I groaned. Please, let him take the watch at least.

“Watch is not important! Time is important. Not to waste it! Hideh!”

“What does hi-deh mean?” I shouted as we ran.

Felix stopped in surprise. “Young Mr. Feuerberg does not know what hi-deh means?”

We stood face-to-face, both panting. The train rocked as we rounded the bend. Sounds sort of like Heidi, I thought, but wisely said nothing.

“Hi-deh is like ho-pah!” Felix laughed, grabbing my hand and bounding ahead with me. “Like ‘Go go go!' Like ‘Giddyap!' ”

“Ah.” I understood at last. “Like ‘Yempa!' ”

We ran through car after car, as the scenery went flying by, outpacing us on the wooden legs of the electric poles. A long green line of eucalyptus trees rushed past, and then a field of sunflowers, and mounds of earth, and straight ahead, more corridors and cars and doors. Sometimes the passengers seemed to glance up and raise their hands in a mute cry of surprise. Maybe they were the people Dad and Gabi had sent to meet me, only I couldn't stop, Felix was pulling me so fast, not that I wanted to stop, and suddenly we were in the very last corridor, where a sign on the heavy door said:
ENTRANCE STRICTLY FORBIDDEN
, and Felix, who may or may not have known how to read Hebrew, pushed the handle till the heavy door gave way, and there we were, inside the locomotive.

The noise there was even louder. A giant in a filthy undershirt was standing with his back to us, leaning over a big steel box.

He didn't turn around as we entered but only roared, “Engine's running
down again! Second time today!” Felix closed the door behind us and bolted it shut. It was blazing hot and right away I started sweating. And the noise, I already told you how noise affects me.

Felix winked at me and tapped the engineer on the shoulder.

The engineer raised himself heavily, turned around, and gaped in surprise.

He must have been expecting somebody else, an assistant or a mechanic or someone, and he demanded to know who we were and why we had barged into the locomotive. He had to shout to make himself heard over the din, and Felix smiled at him so bewilderedly, it was enough to break your heart. Leaning toward the engineer, he shouted in his ear that he was truly sorry, he knew he had broken the rules, but what could he do when little Eliezer here begged to see just once, for the first and last time in his life, what a locomotive looks like.

Those were his very words. And as he gently smoothed my hair, I saw him give the engineer a significant look, with a nod in my direction.

At first I didn't understand what he was saying. He seemed to be lying to the engineer, lying through his teeth, pretending I was, say, a kid he was taking on a farewell trip around the world, to grant my last wishes before I died, God forbid, of some dread disease.

Impossible, I told myself: the noise in there must have made me hear wrong. I smiled at my own stupidity, a nervous little quarter-smile, because how could such a distinguished gentleman concoct a ridiculous lie like that. I mean, as far as I knew, I was a healthy devil with only the mildest of allergies to grass. But when I looked into the engineer's eyes and saw the dismay there, I began to think perhaps I had been right in the first place, perhaps Felix really had said those terrible things in his amiably gentle, sincerely plaintive way.

As for me, I was gone, glued to the side of the locomotive, with the engine roaring up from my heels into my brain. The heat had melted what remained of my wits. It didn't occur to me that my father would never have allowed Felix to involve me in something like this. I trusted him implicitly. Nor did I shout at him to stop, or tell the engineer he was lying. I merely stood there, gazing at him as though I were in a dream.

How did he make up an excuse so quickly and tell such a bold-faced lie?

It would take me years to learn how to control my face the way he did: people can always tell straight off when I'm lying, except Micah, maybe, who for some reason finds my lies extremely fascinating.

But Felix was an adult—and he had told a lie! And a whopper at that, big enough to stun the engineer. Definitely the wrong kind of lie to tell, if only for superstitious reasons!

I stood there, frozen.

But I had to admire him.

Against my will, albeit aghast at his chutzpah, I admired him.

That is the bitter truth.

I was outraged at what he was doing, yes, but also humbly resigned to it. It was as if I had been obliterated, completely wiped out, together with all I'd ever learned and every single finger that had ever wagged “No, no, no!” in front of my nose, and the ghastly furrow between Dad's eyes that grew ominously deeper whenever he was angry, and loomed over me like a permanent exclamation mark. At the last moment, a faint cry seemed to escape my lips, “No! It isn't so! This is all wrong!” But just then a joyful squeal went through me, to the accompaniment of the roaring engine and the rattling locomotive, as if I had been whisked off to another world where such things were permitted, where everything was permitted, where there were no stern-faced teachers or forlorn-looking fathers, and you didn't have to make such an effort to remember what you were and were not allowed to do all the time.

In fact, no effort of any kind was required of you. As soon as you said a thing, it came to be.

Like when God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light.

Yes, I admired Felix for tying those people in there, behind the door, just like that, and wasting an expensive silver watch, and for daring to go through a door marked
ENTRANCE STRICTLY FORBIDDEN
, and for telling the engineer such a horrible lie, the kind of lie it's wrong to tell. As if it was all a game to him and the only law was his law.

But I didn't know the half of what he was capable of yet.

He was deep into his lie by then and believed in it completely, which is the way to lie if you want others to believe you, like a detective working undercover, and as I watched him, I could feel the heat of the buzzing between his eyes. For the first time in my life I sensed that itch in somebody else, and Felix was lying with so much conviction now, looking at me so pityingly, that I, healthy if mildly allergic imp that I was, began to go into a decline; the morbid gray veil in Felix's eyes floated around over me, cloaking me in blissful languor.

That was how it started, the new sensation, the pleasant lightheadedness that nearly made me faint. I wish I could say I fought it off for a while, that I displayed more strength of character. But I didn't fight off or display a darn thing. In a matter of minutes, Felix had made me his accomplice. He didn't even have to train me for the role; it was as if he knew me so well, all he had to do was blow the dust off the real Nonny. The false one, that is … Who am I?

I leaned back against the wall. Felix was staring at me, and so was the engineer. I grimaced with pain and shrank into myself. Life, my own precious life, was ebbing away. I felt cold all over. It was sweltering hot inside the locomotive, yet I was shivering. I had converted the shiver caused by Felix's astounding lie into a shiver of sickliness, of melancholy and gloom. I was heartbroken over this terrible disease which even now was consuming my body, and by the velvety black curtain closing on the stage of my young life. My right hand began to tremble like a little animal in the throes of death, a symptom of my illness, no doubt, and totally spontaneous, while my arm flapped at my side, what a trouper, who would have believed it, too bad Gabi wasn't there to see, not that I was thinking about her just then, I put that in just to cover my embarrassment, though I was not in the least embarrassed at the time; in fact, I was proud of myself for having put on such a wonderful act. Felix's eyes grew wide with wonder as I writhed and grimaced and gasped for breath. I was proud that Felix was so pleased with me, as though I were his prize pupil. At long last I was somebody's prize pupil; I mean, acting is an art, isn't it, and writers make up stories, don't they? And isn't a story a kind of lie? I felt the blood throbbing in my temples as the train chugged on, and I gazed feebly at the engineer, pardoning
him in advance for thwarting me, with a look that said, “Yes, I know there are rules and regulations, Mr. Engineer, and I don't blame you, friend, for not wishing to bend the rules and bring a little happiness to a child like me. I mean, what is one child's suffering compared to rules and regulations, rules and regulations make the world go round and the sun shine and trains depart on schedule, and there are so many kids like me at death's door, but only this one, very special locomotive.” “Oh, thank you, thank you, kind sir,” whispered my parched lips when the engineer reached out in the nick of time to stop me from collapsing and offered me a bench, because a lie doesn't have a leg to stand on …