Quite a few years ago, one summer, I went to Sozopol. The hitchhiking went well and I got there before lunch. To make the most of the day, I decided to look for a room in the evening, and with my little rucksack of luggage on my back I set off north in search of some wild, rocky cove where I could swim far from the human hustle and bustle.
My way took me through the central beach, then through the “Royal Beach”, whose sand was very fine and which did look truly royal. At its far end I started coming across completely naked people, and a few minutes later there was nobody but them, mostly foreigners. As a boy I'd heard of “Adam's” and “Eve's” beaches, but now, evidently, nudist ones were all the rage. Among naked women, with a rucksack and swimming trunks, I felt slightly awkward. I remembered Odysseus, the songs of the Sirens, and how he made his sailors stop their ears with wax and had himself tied to the mast, so that they could sail past the dangerous island without the Sirens luring them ashore.
I sat down in a less crowded spot, my gaze supposedly lost in the sea. The women here walked about without any needless vanity, like children, and quite a few men were squatting and building sandcastles. Soon, by the force of human conformism, it all began to look perfectly natural to me – and why not? After all, life on Earth first began in the water, and we're all born naked.
I undressed and swam off. I felt like a blissful child of God in perfect harmony with nature. My blood was fizzing as if carbonated with the rapture that had seized me and the caressing touch of the sea. I swam front crawl, breathed evenly and ploughed confidently out to sea.
Sadly, this didn't last long, because the idiotic thought crossed my mind of what I must look like, swimming stark naked. Presumably my genitals were swinging left and right. My grandfather loved fishing in the river with a “spinner”, which consisted of a few colourful metal twiddly bits, like earrings, some shiny little wheels and, at the end, two little hooks. He'd explained to me that to predatory fish the spinner looked like a small fish and they rushed to gobble it up, even though there was no real bait.
If the rivers had fish like that, the ones in the sea must be even more predatory, and I swam for the shore in a panic using only my right arm, guarding my “spinner” with my left. This swimming style wore me out completely. When I finally got out unharmed, I hurried to pull on my trunks and lie down further away from the sea. Once the sun had warmed me up, I realised that for the last few minutes I'd been a prisoner of my own sick imagination, and I felt ashamed.
In the evening I found a room, and before falling asleep I thought back on the nudie beach. If someone had told me the day before that I'd end up on a beach like that, I'd have laughed in their face. According to my notions at the time, nudists were looking for an audience for their good-looking bodies, but on their beach I'd seen people for whom that hardly applied. In fact, I'd liked it there. In the morning my young landlord recommended a “nudie beach” to the south, past “Kavatsite”, and I headed that way. Right at the start of it I heard:
“Hey, Boga, come and join us!”
It was my fellow student Vlado, who had stood up amid a group of people and insisted on introducing me to everyone. Still in my trunks, I smiled awkwardly as I shook their hands. I sat down next to him, and he started telling the company funny stories with me at the centre of them. They liked the stories, and some of them began sitting up to have another look at who this Boga was, while I nervously lit one cigarette after another and dreamt of my friend finally shutting up. Yesterday's beach had been a nudist one too, but there I'd been anonymous, whereas here I'd been proclaimed the Joke-Slayer, which to me sounded more like “Ivanko, the Slayer of Asen”. At one point one of the girls said:
“Honestly, Vlado, this friend of yours is so wonderfully unforced!”
She was obviously hinting that they were nudists and I wasn't, but I played dumb and started explaining to her that I'd been like that since I was little – I talk too much and I love a good laugh.
A little later another babe from the group threw in:
“Boga, you'd better take your trunks off – being dressed here is downright indecent!”
I must confess that at that moment I could feel my penis had been gripped by an inexplicable bashfulness and had huddled away somewhere in the “depths” of my trunks. Right then I wouldn't have taken them off for anything in the world. For the information of my female readers, let me explain that female vanity is nothing compared to male vanity when it comes to our attribute. When frightened or embarrassed, it shrinks like a snail into its shell. I glanced at the one who'd spoken and went completely to pieces. She was pretty, and that settled my decision.
Years earlier, as a soldier, I had to have an enema in a hospital. An elderly nurse had come. She told me to take my pants off and lie on my side, which I did. At that moment a pretty young nurse had come in and the old one had gone out. At the sight of her I'd immediately pulled my pants up, gone as red as a lobster and even apologised to her – something it hadn't even crossed my mind to say to the old one.
“Come on, come on, Boga, off with those trunks!” the first girl urged me cheerfully.
“All right, all right,” I replied, stood up and took them off. Everyone burst out laughing, because underneath I had another pair, and that was the last thing they'd expected.
“Fancy a swim, Boga?” she asked me again a little later.
“Of course!”
I went into the water in my trunks and swam after her. In front of me her naked body was wrapped in bubbles, exactly like the ones in my blood. She swam like a nymph, and I was ready to follow her to the bottom of the sea. Around us there were naked swimmers too, who clearly weren't afraid of predatory fish the way I was. Happily, the babe swam for quite a while before heading for the shore. As we got closer to it, I felt ashamed that round there I was probably the only one, the capricious maiden, in trunks. I took my trunks off and clamped them between my teeth so they wouldn't get in the way of my swimming. We came out onto the shore together. At the sight of the trunks in my mouth, the company burst out laughing and, with an ovation, declared me “forced”. And “my girl” had announced to them:
“Don't laugh at him! What else could he have done? He's not the first man to eat his trunks at the sight of my body!”
From the conversation in the group it became clear that everyone in the company were students at Sofia University, only Vlado and I were from the Technical University. And that nobody here was anybody's boyfriend or girlfriend. Despite the widespread opinion that we at the Technical were dry old sticks, Vlado and I were the centre of attention, spouting jokes and suggesting games. It got interesting, and until lunchtime we didn't even think about swimming. The subject of sex was absent.
In the end we lay down and each of us wrapped ourselves in our own thoughts. I felt sleepy, but I considered that insulting to the four women. I was wondering whether to ask “my girl” for a swim. It wouldn't have been very fair to my girlfriend back in Sofia, but swimming with this girl again seemed far too tempting. I was still dithering when two police vans pulled up on the road near the beach. Four men in uniform came over to us and ordered us sternly:
“Get dressed, we're taking you to the station to check your papers!”
“Hang on a minute, why?” my friend asked.
“For violating public morals!”
“We're not disturbing or corrupting anybody! Look – everyone around here is naked!”
“The others look like foreigners, and we're not supposed to bother them!”
In those days our state was waging war against the harmful Western influence among the young. The police stamped the legs of girls in short skirts, roughly cut the long hair and beards of young men, and on a report from someone from the Communist Party or the Fatherland Front you could be thrown out of university like a dirty kitten. We all started getting dressed, only “my girl” went on lounging about naked, pretending to be asleep. I began to get annoyed that if I'd plucked up the courage to ask her earlier, the two of us would now be swimming without a care in the world.
The senior policeman, trying not to look directly at her, said to her sternly:
“Come on, you too, sonny, start getting dressed, what are you waiting for?”
She stood up slowly, red with anger, and said to him:
“It seems you tried to be delicate and called me ‘sonny’. You noticed that I've got no swimsuit, but not that I'm a woman! And I'll thank you not to be so familiar with me!”
Among the company we silently gave her a huge “Bravo” and felt a bit ashamed of ourselves. The sergeant blushed and his subordinates grinned. At the station they threatened us that a second such offence would mean a fine of 20 leva and an entry in our official character references. For the next two days our company went to the North Beach, and then we went back to the South nudist beach again. We began a game of hide-and-seek with the police. Our most discussed topic was their “delicacy”.
By now one of us was always on watch, and if need be, we'd get dressed in a panic. We joked that with these tactics of ours, their only possible move was to send us a naked policeman to catch us red-handed. Which, however, would mean that we'd have “forced” him too, and it would be our triumph. Besides, he couldn't very well show us any ID as an officer of the law. Our fantasies on the subject even livened things up a bit. I was especially pleased that “my” girl didn't push me to become a couple. We liked each other and even kissed, without taking on any commitments.
Years later, by then married, I persuaded my wife and some friends of ours to become nudists together with our small children. When it happened, I noticed that our 4-year-old daughter was unusually quiet on that beach. I got to thinking whether, as a little boy, I'd have wanted to be at the seaside with my naked parents. At her age I probably wouldn't have minded, but later on – most certainly. I realised that she was already an individual whom I hadn't taken into account. I apologised to the others for my stupid idea, and soon we went back to the ordinary beach, where our daughter was cheerful again. The subject of gender, and especially of their parents' sex, is rather disturbing for children, and in that respect they're usually strict moralists.
From my nudist period, two images have stayed in my head which, if I were a painter, I'd turn into oil paintings: “Nudist Woman Arguing with a Policeman”, in which an angry young lady tells off a uniformed man with his head bowed, and “The Forced Man”, in which a man with his trunks between his teeth runs out of the sea towards the shore after a naked woman.
