“We can finally see it all—see the green and the wide and the bright, and the empty, too: the empty and totally scary vista of suburban Long Island.” Fiction by Nicole Krauss.
Much of the house had to be torn down, but our quixotic father saved its two most spectacular rooms, a grand living room and a chapel with twenty-five-foot ceilings, both of which were Jacobean and had been dismantled in England, shipped to America, and reassembled here. Around these antique, wood-panelled rooms, the architect our father hired—German and famous for his brutalism—planned a modern masterpiece, but one whose artfulness forwent comfort and livability.
There was also Luigi, from Calabria, who, in his white T-shirt and painter’s pants, with black orthotic shoes and a ring of frizzy hair horseshoed around an otherwise bald pate, had the look of a clown in our father’s experimental theatre. His English was limited. He relied heavily on gesture, and his face was always exploding into grins or grimaces that did the work of the language he didn’t have.
In those years, our father was still in the family business with our grandfather. They owned two factories, one in New York and the other in Israel, both of which produced high-precision gears. The Israeli factory made replacement parts for a fleet of French Mirage fighter jets that the Israeli Air Force had purchased in the early sixties and which had contributed to Israel’s victory over Syria, Jordan, and Egypt in the Six-Day War.
Our father went immediately to the Israeli Mission, which had an office in the city on Third Avenue, and was, in those days, a thin cover for the Mossad. They told him not to worry, that they would follow up and “take care of it.” But as our father was unsure of what that meant, and they were not inclined to give updates, he gathered the workmen and applied them to the task of raising a ten-foot chain-link fence around our property’s perimeter.
Our parents knew no one on Long Island, and, suspicious of the locals, they had no interest in changing that. We were saved from total isolation thanks only to the fact that our father’s sister, Magda, and her husband, Zolly, decided to buy a plot of land down the street, had a house built, and moved in, along with our three cousins. There were then five of us. Our small tribe rode bicycles through the neighborhood, always looking over our shoulders for the kidnapper’s ominous black van.
In other words, criminals were all around us, and this pervasiveness of criminality, its commonplaceness, also entered into our deepest sense of being. It’s been said that in any family it takes only two bounces to get to a criminal, but no one needed tell us as much; we knew it through an instinctive grasp of statistics, calculated in the gut. Indeed, there were times when we wondered, stumbling onto our own stores of guilt, whether that criminal was within us.
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