“Ready?” called the weightlifter. He didn’t wait for an answer. He just started jogging.
No one cheered. There were no spectators. The old Soviet sanatoriums above them were empty, their windows like dead eyes. The only witness was the Black Sea, grey-green and indifferent. Naked May Day in Odessa
For ten glorious minutes, Lev was not the man Katya had left. He was not the ghost in the library. He was a creature of blood and bone, utterly vulnerable, utterly present. He felt the sun, the wind, the solidarity of other fragile bodies. They were all naked. No one was better or worse. They were just Odessa, raw and real. “Ready
Lev froze. The cold returned, but it wasn't the honest cold of the sea. It was the cold of a police station waiting room. Of a fine. Of a record. Of having to explain to the library director why he was detained for “petty hooliganism.” No one cheered
But for the first time in ten months, he wasn’t looking for the shore. He was just floating. Waiting for the trouble to pass. Waiting for the May sun to get a little higher.
For Lev, it was the day of the Naked Run.
So at dawn on May 1st, Lev stood shivering on the pebbles of a forgotten beach below the Vorontsov Lighthouse. He was surrounded by a dozen other citizens of varying ages and shapes. A retired weightlifter with a tattoo of Brezhnev on his bicep. A violinist from the opera house, her long hair doing the work a silk robe usually did. A nervous young accountant who kept his hands clasped over his groin as if protecting a state secret.