It was a typical winter afternoon at Odessa City Beach, damp and chilly. The sky was low, flat, and grey. The sea was restless, smacking resentfully against the long concrete breakwater, tumbling over itself onto the beach, then hissing as it slowly drew back from the wet, grainy sand. 

Drifts of purple mollusk shells were piled amongst the tangle of seaweed and plastic bottles lining the high-water mark. The birds scavenging amongst them were not seagulls but crows; they’d flown in from somewhere to fossick through the shell scraps, aggressively tossing them about while calling out to each other unnecessarily loudly. There were gulls at the beach, but they hung on rigid wings high above, staying aloof from the uncouth racket below. 

On the horizon, where the lip of the water met the sky, perched a line of cargo vessels waiting to come into port, their ordered black and red hulls, like matchboxes, floated out to sea. 

I was standing on top of a pile of crumbling concrete slabs, which, for some forgotten reason, had been bulldozed to this corner of the beach and left. They were an ugly sight, and the rusty spikes of reinforcing steel, sticking crookedly out of their sides, made them even uglier. But I had clambered up here to get a vantage point, and now I could see the whole two-kilometre length of beach stretched out in an even crescent. At its far end, on a low rocky promontory, a small white lighthouse stuck up like a candle.

Just at the base of my concrete plinth, half buried in the sand lay the remains of a wooden deckchair. It had once been painted, and traces of blue and green still showed in the grain of the soft, scoured wood. It looked as if it had been washed out to sea and back to shore many times and now had finally come to rest. Beside it, half embedded in the sand was a green wine bottle, empty, its label long gone. Together, they looked like the remnants of a long-forgotten beach party. Who had lounged in this deckchair – some long-limbed Odessa girl? A bronzed, pot-bellied grandfather? A teenage boy, the night before he was conscripted into the army? And who had drunk the wine?

When I arrived, the day had been calm and still, and it had been pleasant, strolling along the firm sand at the water’s edge. But now a harsh, cold wind got up, smelling of salt and oil, stinging my eyes. I turned my back to it. That left me looking toward the port, marked by a bristling cluster of red and yellow cranes. Out over the water, big rolls of dark clouds were assembling, getting ready to move in and dump rain on the city. 

Here and there, people were walking along the beach, muffled up in coats, beanies, and scarves. From somewhere behind me, a raggedy tan-and-white terrier ran into view, its tail tucked between its legs. It stopped and looked back anxiously, the whites of its eyes showing. A woman in a purple padded jacket with a fur-fringed hood trotted awkwardly after it across the soft sand. The walkers were mostly couples, pressed close together against the cold, with occasional groups of youths smoking and laughing and pretending to push each other into the water. I saw one other person alone, a woman standing by the pier, and she was talking to someone on her phone. 

I was the only person alone, here on this winter afternoon. 

In theory, I had better things to do with my time, but I didn’t want to go back to my rented flat, which was only big enough for sleeping and writing, and I had nothing particular to do in Odessa, other than walk around streets I already knew well enough. It is the perpetual problem with these short-term UN assignments; you get to know the outline of a city, but you’re not there long enough to make friends. The people you’re writing reports about are too suspicious of you to be social, and unless you frequent the girlie clubs, you end up spending your leisure time alone. 

I looked down again at the half-buried carcass of the deckchair. No doubt it had been one of a brightly-coloured row set out on the sand every day in summer. Perhaps it had got broken, and the club owners discarded it; or maybe a big tide one night had captured a few chairs carelessly left on the beach, unwary wooden wildebeest, and dragged them out to sea. The salt wind was really stinging my eyes now, and I wiped tears away with my handkerchief, trying to decide whether to stay or leave.

In five minutes, my mind was made up for me, darkness began to close in. The clouds I’d seen marshalling themselves out to sea were above, spitting rain. The lights of the ships at anchor glowed yellow in the thickening dusk. It was time to walk back up the hill to the main road, where I could catch a tram, in one direction home, in the other to the city centre. I’d decide which when I got up there.

I clambered down from my plinth and plodded through the soft sand to the path that wound, through stunted trees and scrubby bushes, up to the carpark, and, beyond it, the road. It was only a muddy track, and I had to watch my footing in the gloom. About a hundred meters along, I saw a long shape on the ground not far off the path. As I got closer, it resolved into a man lying on his face under some low bushes. I could see only dark, indeterminate clothing and the dirty white soles of a pair of sneakers. For a moment, I thought of a dead body, but no, he’d just be drunk; you don’t come across corpses lying around on the beach every day here, while  in any city of the former Soviet Union, you see drunks lying all over the place, in doorways, bus shelters, parks. But whether dead or drunk, I decided to leave him to his own devices. In either case, there wasn’t anything I could do for him. If he needed help, there would be other people walking along this path, local people who would know better than I what to do. 

As I reached the wire fence of the car park, with the rain getting heavier, I knew I had to go back. Even if he were only drunk, I couldn’t leave a man lying in the bushes, in the rain, with the cold night coming on fast. Nobody would see him in the dark, and perhaps he wasn’t drunk, but he’d had a heart attack or been beaten up. I began to scramble back down the slippery track. Nonsensically, I thought of those folk tales in which someone helps a frog, or a fish, or some such, which turns out to be a magic creature that showers them with gold or wishes. That wasn’t going to happen here, that was certain.

I went some way without seeing the prone figure, and I began to think he must have got up and gone on his way. But then I came upon him, still lying in the same position. Kneeling, I grasped his shoulder. It was warm. 

I shook him, then gripped his shoulder more firmly and tried to turn him over. Don’t move a person who might have an injured spine, I remembered being told at school. Well, it was too late; I’d moved him. He flopped onto his back. His face was dark with stubble and flabby under the chin. His eyes were rolled up in his head, the whites showing under half-closed eyelids. I bent down, trying to hear him breathing; there was a rank smell of vodka. 

For a second, I was almost annoyed. I’d slithered back down this muddy path in the darkness, telling myself it was my duty to help a fellow human, and here was some fellow who’d simply drunk himself into a stupor and wouldn’t thank me for waking him, even if I could’ve. Ashamed, I realized I should be glad he was nothing worse than drunk. 

But then, with rain running down my neck and water seeping through the knees of my jeans. I didn’t know what to do next: go up to the road and enlist some passer-by to help? But help do what? Or maybe it was all right to leave him there after all, maybe he was used to sleeping out overnight when he’d had a drink.

Just then, a light shone on me, throwing a black shadow over the prone figure. I looked up to see the indistinct shapes of two men, one shining the torch in his phone. I tried to explain, in my clumsy Ukrainian, that I’d found this fellow here, but they didn’t need any explanation. One knelt down beside me and put his hand to the unconscious man’s neck, feeling the pulse in his carotid artery. Of course, why hadn’t I thought of that? The other, stabbing at his phone with his forefinger, made a call, speaking too quickly for me to follow. Then he said to me, in fair English, “Don’t worry. Ambulance is come. Thank you. He will be OK.” 

I was free to go.

Absurdly, I felt somehow disappointed. I must have imagined, delivering him into the hands of the medics, brushing aside thanks, a good Samaritan. You really are a dunce, I told myself. You deserve a hard kick in the backside for such self-indulgent conceit. All I’d done was try, quite ineffectually, to help a fellow human. I’d never see him again, he’d never know I turned back for him, and if I’d left him alone, he’d probably have been all right anyway. The whole episode came to nothing. In any event, I wasn’t needed here. I set off back up the hill. At least the rain had slackened to a drizzle. 

It struck me that the man lying there dead drunk was himself the flotsam of a beach party, his own private beach party, sitting staring out over the sullen choppy water, nursing a liter of vodka, watching the gulls swirl overhead. And now, like the broken deckchair, he was more or less washed up on the shore, the difference being that tomorrow he’d be functional again. At least until next time the sadness got hold of him. 

What had made him drink himself unconscious, alone by the beach, I’d never know. But I did know that except for the most broken-down old alcoholics, who can only register the need for the next glass, there’s always a reason why a man drinks like that. There’s no great variety in these reasons, either; usually, something to do with a woman, some kind of loss, and there are many kinds of loss. But getting drunk alone is altogether different from getting drunk with your friends. A man drinking heavily, alone, is always in pain. 

And life is not generous to those in pain. Like the ocean, indeed exactly like the Black Sea, life ebbs and flows in its chosen patterns without our concurrence. It doesn’t even need us, not as individuals, anyway; there are always plenty more players coming to the table. So if you are suffering, if you are an outsider, if you are not floating comfortably on the general tide, you can find yourself washed up somewhere, beached, left stranded by life. 

Just before I reached the main road, I saw a Number 5 tram approaching, its red number standing out like a jewel in the gloom. I ran for the stop and climbed on board. The carriage was nearly empty. I gave the conductress in her faded orange jacket five given and sat on the hard, narrow seat looking out at the darkened buildings along Frantsuzky Boulevard, the passing streetlights like big fuzzy stars in the light rain. I was going in the direction of my apartment; the tram had decided my destination for me. 

I was returning, alone, to a serviced flat containing a laptop, a handful of books and printouts, and a suitcase’s worth of clothes. Tomorrow morning, I’ll make my own breakfast and sit down to write a report. In three weeks, I’ll return to Brussels, and from there I’ll be sent, alone, on another posting just like this one. The prospect looked bleak, and I had to admit, there was no other prospect in view. 

The tram stopped, and the doors banged open. Cold air poured in. An elderly woman climbed laboriously up the dented metal steps and found a seat. The driver rang the bell shrilly,  the tram jerked into motion, and I went back to staring out the window. Maybe I was beached, too, stranded in life. But I didn’t want to consider that possibility, especially not tonight, after what happened at the beach. I tugged back my coat sleeve to look at my watch, hoping that the liquor store on the corner of Seminarskaya Street would still be open.