The Brooklyn Rail

Helen Benedict’s new novel, The Good Deed, follows four refugee women whose lives suddenly collide with an American tourist’s on the Greek island of Samos after she rescues a drowning child. To write the novel, Benedict, a Professor of Journalism at Columbia University and a winner of the Ida B. Wells Award for Bravery in Journalism, drew from four years of interviews with refugees in Samos as well as her past coverage of the Iraq War. Kirkus Reviews praised The Good Deed for “prompting the reader to consider why and how we ask a person to prove their own humanity.”

The sea around this island is so brazenly blue it puts even the unblemished sky to shame. How mystifying it is that the ancient Greeks had no word for the color. Wine-dark sea. Like living in a forest and having no word for tree.

I am without canvases here, my brushes forever abandoned, but were I a painter still, I would be afraid of this blue. Afraid that I could never render it, even in abstract, because the sea here is an ever-spinning whorl of blues – turquoise, aqua, cyan, indigo, cerulean, slate – all overlayed by darts of black and white, amethyst and silver, green, pink and violet, constantly changing with light and current. To capture this, one would need a moving painting – not video but oil. A flood of multi-colored oils streaming over the canvas, lit by an Aegean sun.

I’m watching these blues from the mountain apartment I rented through Airbnb, its stone terrace veined in pink and gold. Every evening, I sit here with a glass of wine, looking over the bay to Vathi, the town on the far side heaped like a jumble of sugar cubes at the bottom of Mount Thios – a town that my host, a gnarly Greek with the voice of a frog, lost no time in telling me holds the most overcrowded refugee camp in Europe.

“These people, they come here from Africa to get rich, and so many are thieves, Miss Hilma!” he insisted, pronouncing the H in my name with the same guttural splutter with which my grandmother used to pronounce Hanukkah. In fact, as a quick Google in my phone affirms, by far the majority of the people in the camp have fled the war in Syria.

“They took the honey from the beehive of a poor little old lady – her very own honey! And two of them, they broke into an empty house to sleep and left their rubbish all over the floor!”

Tut tut. But then those hives were not mine and nor was that house. I’m not a Greek islander trying to scrape by on tourists who won’t come anymore or on the honey I can barely sell.

When he’s not spouting misbegotten opinions, my host, Kosmos Constantinides, seems a kind enough man. Somewhere in his early seventies, more than a decade older than I, he’s just past the age of handsome, skin a fine nut color from the sun, hair the silver of an olive leaf, eyes a murky blue, face square if sagging. On the day I arrived, he was proudly showing me his view when a furious wind sprung up out of nowhere, inciting a nearby pine tree to pelt us with cones and needles – surprisingly painful. Mortified, he rushed me inside his disorderly kitchen, sat me in a wooden chair, and bustled about, his squat, muscular body moving with the confidence of a laborer, preparing me a plate of perfectly cubed honeydew and watermelon while explaining that Samos is prone to these sudden squalls -- Poseidon throwing his tantrums. Kosmos’s flaw is that he listens to his neighbors too much; a flaw that many of us, of course, share.

But I didn’t come here to argue with Airbnb hosts or anyone else. I came to recuperate. Doctor’s orders.

Why I chose to do my recuperating on an island with a refugee camp is simple. I didn’t know. I don’t read about tragic matters anymore. I used to, when I was the person before the person I am now. Not any longer. No, I chose to come here to Samos because I’m interested in the mathematician and philosopher Pythagoras and this was his supposed birthplace. Because I fancied the view of the Turkish mountains poking up behind Vathi. I came because myth has it that Aesop of the fables talked his way out of slavery here, and because this is Greece and therefore timeless. I came for the Aegean blues.

If Theo, my son, had not stopped speaking to me, I would invite him to join me here. As a boy he had a passion for the sea, the sing and sway of it, the fish little colorful packages put there, he used to think, just for him. He would have loved the beaches with their multi-colored pebbles as perfect as eggs, the sea as clear as a mermaid’s eyes.

Linnette would have loved it here, too. But Linnette is forbidden.

Theo not only refuses to speak to me, he won’t look at me, either. The last time I was in his presence, in a Manhattan courtroom, he turned his head away and stared at the wall.

Theo is a lawyer for Amnesty International, a job that takes him to the most godforsaken corners of the earth to help the most godforsaken people. I used to see the toll it took reflected in his face, back in the days when he let me see his face – the withdrawals, the impatience with trivial conversation, the grim exhaustion. Were he here with me on Samos, he would be over at that camp already, advocating for any and all who ask. I might go there myself. Just to see what I can see. And maybe -- if he ever talks to me again – tell him about it.

Part of my recuperation program is not only to avoid arguments, but to swim. Strap on my mask and snorkel, dip myself into the turquoise, glide into the cobalt, churn through the aqua. The marble stones on the sea floor here, pale beige and fuzzed with blond weeds, hide many a treasure. Tiny striped fish wagging their way lazily through the current. Urchins balled as tight as hedgehogs.

In the month I’ve been here, I’ve found two beaches within easy reach of my Airbnb, one a short drive away and “official,” which means littered with rentable umbrellas, deckchairs and half-naked Germans sunning themselves like pink whales; the other just below the house and “unofficial,” which means untended and isolated. Today I’m in the mood for the latter, a small cove I can only reach by clambering down a stony, ankle-twisting path lined with thorn bushes and the promise of snakes, but where at least I can be alone. All the beaches on this side of Samos are shingle, covered not only by those egg-like pebbles but rocks the size of melons, so on with my water shoes and most practical swimsuit and down the rubbly path I go. The only sign of civilization down here is a small white house, which has remained deserted during my entire stay, and the little rowboat I’ve noticed before anchored near the shore, bobbing in the waves.

The sea is choppy this morning, last night having delivered the most brutal storm I’ve witnessed yet on Samos, the wind yowling and hammering at my shutters like a banshee, the waves sucking in great breaths and spitting them out again with a crash against the pebbled shore. But the air is already heating back up to its July highs, so in I wade, battling the surf, and after an initial flinch at the cold, head out to deeper waters, where it looks calmer.

How I love the weightlessness of swimming, the exhilaration of cutting unfettered through the waves. Water crystalline and clean, those wagging fish. The sun projecting a light show on the seafloor, a spangling honeycomb of hexagons dancing over the sand; the brown sea grass rippling in the current like a field of wheat in the wind. I lose all sense of time, as I can only do when swimming. I fly through the water as though it’s as yielding as air.

A splash dives into my snorkel tube, so I raise my head to empty the water out and take in where I am. Far – a great deal farther than I thought. The little rowboat has shrunk to the size of a bath toy. I’m not tired but I am sensible. Time to turn back.

Just as I do, my eye catches a spot of color, an orange object bobbing a short distance away... a buoy perhaps, or else a polluting plastic bag I ought to remove. I swim closer.

It is not a buoy. Or a bag. It’s a lifejacket. With somebody in it. A pitifully small somebody.

A fist closes around me, pulling me to a halt, my breath suddenly short and airless.

Not again. Please.

The little figure is ominously still – no sign of swimming or flailing. No movement at all.

The fist grips tighter.

Not this time, Hilma. You can’t.

With an effort, I wrench free of my paralysis and push myself closer. Then again, the fist.

The water, too, is resisting me now, no longer as yielding as air but viscous and stubborn, as though I’m swimming through glue. I look around for a rescue boat. There is no rescue boat, no sign of anything but the endless azure, the ropes of waves and spume of whitecaps. A sea as wide as the earth.

Fighting away the fist, I force myself to keep swimming. I’ve lost all my weightlessness now. I’m as heavy as cement.

Be alive. Please.

When I’m close enough to call out, I spit away the snorkel. “Hello?” My words feeble against the great seethe of the sea. “Hello?”

No response.

“Yassou!” I try in Greek. “Hello?”

Nothing. I swim closer, able to see the figure’s face now, a tiny oval under a long tangle of wet black hair. A girl, a very little girl. Her eyes are closed, lips gray. She hangs suspended in the lifejacket like a collapsed marionette.

Then begins a macabre chase like something out of a fever dream because the nearer I draw to her, the more the waves caused by my strokes push her away. Again and again, I reach for her lifejacket only to send it spinning beyond my grasp. So I speed up and circle her like a shark, spiraling in nearer and nearer, the fist still trying to stop me, still trying to drag me away. Again, I make a grab for her. Again, I miss.

I dive underneath her instead.

Her legs dangle as limp as seaweed, swaying in the current. Chubby, little girl legs. Pink leggings. Bare feet as pale as the underbelly of a fish.

Oh god, please.

Coming up beneath the lifejacket, lungs ragged, I reach out yet again, trembling so violently I can barely control my hand. This time, though, I manage to grasp hold of a strap. Pull her close.

Please please be alive.

I touch her arm, my fingers shaking. Her skin is a hard cold, but not, I think, the cold of death. Treading water, my legs throbbing now, I feel for the pulse in her neck.

She is alive. But so cold and still... how long could she have been here – all night? All the way through that storm? I stroke her baby cheeks, rub her head. Nothing. So I touch her eyelids.

That does it. She jerks back, her eyes flipping open a liquid brown and terrified, and vomits a spurt of seawater. Only then does some color return to her lips.

“You’ll be all right, sweetie, I promise, just don’t fight me,” I babble, unlikely as she is to understand. Lying on my back, I pull her face up onto my chest and wrap my left arm around her. Using my right to stroke, I start the swim back to land, frog kicking to avoid splashing more water into her mouth. Kick gently but firmly, I remember from my high school lifesaving class. Remain calm but steady.

Calm but steady.

The way is long, the water cold and colder, the wind picking up, and far from fighting me, the child is entirely limp and growing heavier by the minute. Gone is my welcoming Aegean, its soft and cradling hands. It only drags on me now, no longer a friend but an adversary, its steely waves slapping and punching.

If I can’t make it to shore, I’ll swim to the rowboat.

Kick and pull, kick and pull, heart straining, lungs searing, legs burning, mouth raw with salt. How could I have swum so far out? Whenever I crane my head around to see the rowboat, it looks no nearer than it did before. The harder I pull and kick, the longer I seem to stay in place.

The girl still hasn’t made a sound. Keep breathing, please.

Kick by kick, stroke by stroke, legs trembling under the strain, I inch with excruciating slowness closer to the boat. And finally, the breath almost gone from my lungs, I reach it.

My plan is to heave the child aboard, swim to where I can stand and pull the boat in by its rope. But I’ve lost the strength to lift her and am still out of my depth, so have nothing to use as leverage. I try, over and over I try, only to sink and splash more water into her face. Her eyes are closed again, the gray back in her lips.

The only choice is to keep swimming.

My arms are burning as much as my legs now, as if every muscle is tearing from its bone, and whenever I reach a foot down to feel for the sea floor, I sink and have to flail to the surface again, terrified that I’ve pulled her down with me. Only after scrabbling and kicking even longer do I feel stones beneath my feet.

This part is harder than the swimming, carrying her out against the powerful suck of the sea. Normally, when the surf is this rough, I crawl out, but that’s not possible now. I nearly fall countless times, staggering wildly as I try to stay upright with her in my arms, the waves pummeling and pulling in their effort to knock us over. She has grown even heavier now without the water to hold her up, her lifejacket and clothes sodden, her body as inert as a sack of sand. When I manage to stumble out at last, clutching her to me and gasping, the waves still snatching at my ankles, I collapse with her onto the stones.

Quickly, I flip her on her side to let her vomit out more water, and then to her back, preparing to pump out what remains of the sea in her lungs and give her mouth-to-mouth, not that I really know how. But she is breathing normally, thank god, although every breath comes with a shudder. Her eyes are still closed, lips no longer gray but purple.

She is so young. Four or five at most.

As quickly as my frigid hands will allow, I unstrap her lifejacket – not a real lifejacket but some cheap knockoff that I’m amazed held her up at all – and peel off her clothes: the leggings and, oddly, three dresses. Wrapping her in my towel, mercifully warm from the sun, I hold her close and rub her gently, both of us shivering violently. The towel is losing its warmth already, the wind lashing us as if to punish.

She moans, opens her terrified eyes again and stares at me, although what she sees I can’t tell. Struggling with her to my feet, I carry her up the stony path to the house, a path that had seemed as short as a stumble but now feels as long as a mile. Only later do I wonder where I found the strength.

Rushing into my apartment, I turn on the shower and step under the warm water with her, clutching her to my body, rubbing her gently all over with a washcloth, careful not to let the temperature get too hot or cold. She hangs in my arms like a waterlogged doll, but the purple does gradually recede from her lips, although her skin is still clammy and her eyelids keep drifting closed. I vaguely remember that hypothermia must be handled extremely carefully but can’t remember what carefully is, so all I can think to do once I’ve dried us off is to get into bed with her, swaddle us both in warm covers and pillows, and hold her close with one hand while frantically Googling what to do on my phone with the other.

I learn that I must keep her awake, still and warm; cover her head; elevate her feet. That I should exhale into her mouth so she can inhale my warm breath. That we must stay here for a long while. That as soon as she is fully awake, I should give her something warm to drink, a dribble at a time.

She shivers for many minutes before she flips open her eyes again. Deep brown, huge.

Mama.

I see the word form on her lips, although she makes no sound.

“Little Linnette,” I whisper, half unconscious myself, “don’t be scared, I have you safe now, sweetie. I have you safe with me.”