To the Greek Who Helped Me Jump In
You’d spotted us, thumbs out, on the shoulder of the road snaking along the Aegean. It was near sunset. I’d met Martyn only that morning, at a youth hostel in Athens. Both bound for Patras, it made sense to go together. In that summer of 1970, he was a grad student at Oxford and I was an American who’d spent my freshman year shouting in the streets, fervently believing in the power of activism, counterculture, and sourdough bread to end a war and usher in a just world. But then friends started disappearing into communes, shots rang out at peace marches, and a bad trip sent a friend off a bridge. At eighteen, I’d sobered up from the dream, salvaging only my weary self and a terrible sense of drift.
Now, standing on that road, darkness falling, we desperately needed a lift. Still, when you pulled up in your truck, I hesitated. I’d never hitchhiked before. How do you recognize someone who will hurt you? How do you know?
When you opened the cab door, I could see you were stocky—green eyes, thick black hair, olive skin, not too tall, smiling. We climbed aboard. I spoke only English. You spoke only Greek. Martyn knew classical Greek, which proved useless. So we all made silly sounds and gestured like silent film stars. We pointed to road signs, and you pronounced them to give us a sense of the route. It became a singsong routine: Eg-i-on, Pent-i-on, Gaf-i-on, Cor-i-on, Patras! like catching a fly. Patras! like Gotcha!
Over your shoulder was the sea, lit with a gentle phosphorescence. It blurred with the late day sky, and I felt as though I were traveling through an endless space of sacred blue, the color of jeweled lapis that was used to swath the Virgin in Byzantine paintings. Breathing in the briny smell of the Aegean and an occasional whiff—strong and woody—from beneath your arms, I softened into the seat between you and Martyn and, for a moment, closed my eyes.
But then, a half hour down the road, on a deserted stretch, you suddenly stopped, said something we didn’t understand, and jumped out. I thought you were abandoning us, or maybe this was the ambush I’d been expecting. I held my breath as you scrambled down a rocky step, then reappeared below on the beach. You stripped bare, jumped into the water, called, and waved. You were inviting us for a swim!
We followed you down there. Martyn, built like a praying mantis, stripped to his baggy underwear and dove in. I—a virgin and not sure where this was going—hesitated on the shore. Finally, I waded in with all my clothes. No one even mentioned it. The water was warm. I thought—here I am, five thousand miles from home, jumping into the sea with strangers who, right now, are everything to me.
“I think of that night now as a return from the land of the lost—a place of disappointment so deep I thought I might never get back on the map toward a hopeful life.”
Since I was wet and the night was hot, I climbed into the open flatbed and sat on your cargo, slabs of Pentelic marble. Martyn joined me. I dried off in a breeze fragrant with the sediment of civilization upon civilization, imagining myself breathing in molecules that had previously been exhaled by ancients, connecting us across what seemed an eternity. A great darkness gradually filled the sky, and the stars burned with an intensity I’d seen for the first time that summer. On the archeological dig I’d just left, our young surveyor, Fouad, would take us American dirt movers deeper into the Negev. He’d show us vivid constellations—the Dancer, the Fish Mouth, the Plunging Eagle—and tell us stories he’d heard from his Arab grandfather. Now, as we rode, Martyn and I sang out into that glowing Mediterranean night, Irish folk songs and protest songs we both knew but no longer believed.
It was well past midnight when we reached Patras. You parked. There was just enough starlight to decipher a city of white stone. I thought Martyn and I would sleep on the beach but, as I was forming my goodbye, you gestured for us to come with you. Again, my instinctive fear kicked in. But Martyn followed you, and I had little choice but to follow him. You led us into a building, then up a dark, winding staircase. I could barely see. At the top was a door. You knocked. At first, there was silence, then suddenly it flung open and your aproned wife gave us a boisterous hello. She cooked us midnight omelets that made the air smell of onions and feta melting through mild, sweet eggs, cut by tart tomatoes. Soon, your chubby young son, Aristotle, warm from sleep, appeared in his underpants, and sat on my lap. Later, Martyn and I crashed in sleeping bags on the floor of his room.
As I lay there, I felt luckier, freer, and perhaps more at home than I’d ever been. Here I was, in a little apartment in a foreign land where strangers had trusted one another. I think of that night now as a return from the land of the lost—a place of disappointment so deep I thought I might never get back on the map toward a hopeful life. But you helped me, carrying me a distance down the road. I understood, even then, that I’d just received my portion of unearned good, had lived my magic night on earth, one that would beckon me back when I needed to renew my faith. In a world where everything had gone wrong, it was a night where everything had gone right.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Robin Reif is a writer, storyteller and sometime brand strategist who lives in Manhattan. Her work has recently appeared in The New York Times’ Modern Love column, McSweeney’s, and Yes! Magazine. Her story Oranges will be published in The Missouri Review in early 2022. Visit Robin’s website here.
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Header photo by Mihail Minkov.