Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia (22 page)

And now the trainer moves in for another kill: all these events were your fault. If you were sacked—your fault. Raped—your fault. You’re all full of self-pity; you’re all victims. Now break into pairs, he orders, and tell each other your worst memories, but retell them as if you’re taking responsibility, as if you’re the creator, not the victim, of your life. This will go on for hours. And as you retell the worst moments of your life as if you were the creator, the one who made everything happen, you start to feel differently, you feel lighter, more powerful. Now you look at the life trainer a little differently. He’s bullied you and then he’s lifted you up and then confused you and made you cry, and now something else entirely. Without noticing you have been in the room twelve hours, but the time has just flown past, you’ve lost all sense of it.

You feel soft by now, somehow rubbery. You feel very close, closer than anyone you have ever known, to the other people in your group, as if you’ve always been meant to meet them.

“Transformation,” “effective,” “bright”: as you walk home these words ring through your head like gongs. You think about seeing the trainer tomorrow. You want to please him, to let him know you didn’t smoke, as you had promised. You feel a wave of warmth when you think about him. He’s tough, but he means well.

You get home toward midnight. Your relatives or roommates notice that you seem strange, but you shrug it off. It’s just that they’ve never seen you outside your comfort zone. You do the homework: detailed notes on everything you don’t like about yourself. Everything you want to change. You get to sleep at 1:00, maybe 2:00 a.m.

At night you dream about the trainer.

In the morning you’re there early. So is everybody else. When the doors open everyone rushes in, keen to show that they made it here on time. The doors are shut at 10:00 and any spare chairs removed. One guy comes in late, but there’s nowhere for him to sit. The trainer screams at him:

“You promised to be on time. You made a pledge. Why are you late?”

“I was hesitating whether I should come at all,” says the young man.

“Yesterday I saw you didn’t confess to any painful memories. You just looked at the others as if they were a show. That’s how you see everyone, entertainment, and now you want to run off. Is that the case?”

And if you were sympathetic to the young man when he was late, you now find yourself shouting: “A show! You think we’re just a show for your entertainment!”

The young man squats in the corner of the hall, ashamed. “Yes,” he admits later, “I was just afraid to leave my comfort zone.”

The trainer begins to draw more diagrams—arrows that show how you are going in one direction, and the people you know at home and work are going in another. That’s why they might not understand you after you do the trainings. You’re changing; they loved you for the person you were before, but you’re growing. This is a test for them: only the ones who really love you will be able to cope, to love the new you. And for those who don’t accept you, you should ask yourself: Are those relationships holding you back? Should you lose them?

The girl who yesterday talked about unspeakable things that happened in her childhood takes the microphone and says she regrets confessing now: some people in the hall seem wary of her, she says. But instead of feeling sympathy, everyone in the hall turns on her: “You’re just a victim,” they shout. “You’re enjoying showing off your feelings.” The life trainer doesn’t even have to tell them anymore what they should think.

Now the trainer’s talking about death. Death is no big deal. The other day some Russian tourists died in a bus explosion in Egypt. Is it a good or a bad thing? Well? It’s neither. A friend of his died recently. It’s neutral. Just a fact of life. Everyone here will die. You all, you all will die.

“Who remembers that girl Ruslana?” says the life trainer. “The model who killed herself? Jumped from a skyscraper. I knew her well. Her ‘inner monologue’ was ‘suicide.’ You know she had five attempts at suicide before she came to us?”

(This is new: none of her friends, colleagues, or family remember suicide attempts. Quite the opposite: they all say how well-balanced she appeared.)

“And did you know,” he continues, “her mother was taking money from her? She once borrowed 200 bucks from me to pay for her apartment in New York. And she was a supermodel!”

(New again: everyone else has told me how close she was to her mother.)

“Ruslana,” says the life trainer, “was a typical victim.”

After he says this one girl puts up her hand.

“But don’t you feel bad that one of your students killed herself?”

“Sometimes it’s better to commit suicide than not to change. And the fact you’re feeling so sorry for this girl means you’re a victim too. It was her choice to do it.”

And everyone in the room agrees: it was Ruslana’s own choice to do it. And who could possibly disagree with that?

Toward the middle of the day your head will start to feel light, like bubbles are rising through it. There are role-playing games and team-building games. Everyone has to walk around the room shouting at each other, “I need you, I like you,” if they think the person is transforming, or “I don’t need you, I don’t like you,” if they think the person is not. The girl who felt bad after she told everyone what happened during her childhood now takes the microphone and admits she’s a victim and she’s ready to transform. Everyone’s applauding her, the life trainer is saying how proud he is of her, and you’re sitting there just waiting for him to praise you and frightened that he won’t.

During the lunch break you’re told to sit quietly for half an hour. Not a sound. Just think about all your mistakes in life. All the relationships you messed up, all your failures in your career. When you come back inside the hall there’s dancing, lots of fast dancing with loud, banging music, and you’re happy now and hugging people. Then the music changes to ambient. You’re told to stand in two lines opposite each other. You look into the eyes of the person opposite. You look for one, two, three, four minutes. Longer. It’s uncomfortable to look into the eyes of someone you barely know. You feel it’s the first time you have really looked into someone’s eyes. “Now take a step to the right, look into the next person’s eyes, imagine they’re your mother,” says the life trainer, “how she raised you when you were small. Her lullabies. How she felt when she sensed you growing inside her womb, how she looked at you when you were in the cradle.” Everyone softens. “Now imagine the eyes of someone you have lost. A loved one.” Ruslana thought of her father, Anastasia of her best friend, a fellow model who had died in a car accident the previous summer on the road between Kiev and Moscow. Everyone’s eyes are wet. “Now take a step to the right, look into the eyes of the next person, and imagine it’s the person you’ve lost, and think of all the things you didn’t have a chance to tell them.” Everyone is crying by now. The volunteers are walking around with tissues. You use dozens and put them in your pockets, and your legs grow wet from the number of wet tissues you are using. “Now take a step back to the left, look into the eyes of the person opposite, and imagine, for a moment, the person you lost is back with you, they’ve returned. Now you may hug them.” At this point everyone breaks down.

You’re lying on the floor. The trainer tells you to close your eyes. Breathe deeply. His voice takes you through a deep wood; the wood is your life, then you find a hut, in the hut there’s a room, and in the room are all the times people have let you down, betrayed you; beyond that is another room, where are all the times you let others down; and now you’re running, running free through the woods, ready to change, to lead a bright, effective life.

As you walk home you feel warm inside. Everything around you, the whole evening, seems to be dissolved in a slightly fuzzy light. People look beautiful. The trainer has given you homework: you’ve been told to walk through town and hug at least ten strangers. And you do it. You can do anything. You feel free. They look at you funny, but no one reacts badly. You’ve made them smile. You can break free of all barriers and limits, you can change. A bright, effective life. You won’t be a victim. You’ll take responsibility.

At night you lie awake buzzing so powerfully you can’t sleep. After a couple of days of the training many women find their periods have suddenly started earlier than usual. The life trainer has warned that you will suffer from stomach cramps, and you get these, bad. The people you live with say they can’t recognize you. You smile. They say you’ve changed. Of course you have. Looking back forty-eight hours, you can’t even remember the person you were before the training started.

You’re back at the training next morning a good half hour before it starts. You want to be the first to tell the life trainer you’ve managed to hug ten people as he told you to. The others are there, too. No one has slept. Everyone is so glad to see each other. When you go inside the hall everyone swaps stories about how they hugged people on the street. Others rang their neighbors’ doorbells and said they wanted to be friends with them, phoned long-lost friends or parents they barely speak to. The ones who failed in the homework confess to failure. You attack them for being weak, victims, not transforming. The life teacher barely says anything; he just stands at the side: you’re doing it all yourselves now. And then you’re playing another game. You’re in little groups of seven all screaming at each other, “I am your aim” or “I am your obstacle,” and you have to scream past your obstacles to reach your aims. Everyone is screaming, but instead of being painful it’s like rocket fuel, and now you’ve been told to stand opposite each other and the other person is shouting at you, “What do you want? What do you want?” And it’s like that for forty minutes. Your desires start to come out of you like intestines, first cars and houses and all the easy stuff and then the silly stuff like painting the floorboards yellow or dressing up like a fairy queen, and then the really heavy stuff about wanting to hit your mother or stab the ex who dumped you. By the end you just feel free, and for the first time you can see what you really, really, really want. Then the life trainer comes out and says if you want your dreams, now that you’ve finally realized what they are, you can achieve them if you pay another $1,000 and come to the advanced course.

There’s a one-on-one consultation afterward with a volunteer. You sit at a table with that person, who says that if you sign up for the advanced course this week, then you can get a hundred dollar discount. You say, “there’s something funny with my head right now, I can’t think critically,” and the volunteer says, “but that’s good you’re not thinking critically, the trainings are all about learning not to think, your thinking holds you back, you’re learning to use your emotions, don’t you agree?”

“Yes . . . but I’m not thinking. . . . ”

“ . . . and because you’re not thinking you should sign up now. Don’t you want to live a bright life? Transform? Become effective? Take responsibility?”

And every time you hear those words your whole body starts to rush.

You delay a bit, though there are plenty who are signing on already. The next day comes the phone calls. Alex is sitting with me and the psychotherapist Vita in her office when the calls from the Rose start to come in. Alex switches on the speaker. There’s a woman from the Rose on the other end.

“Alex, don’t you want to live a bright life? Full of real emotion?”

“Of course. But I don’t have money at the moment. I’m sorry, I can’t go.”

“But that’s your challenge. Find the money. That shows you can be strong.”

Alex is half laughing: in a way the manipulation is so crass. But he doesn’t hang up.

“Come on, Alex,” says the volunteer from the Rose. “Don’t you want to change? Transform? Take responsibility?”

The words set off a Pavlovian reaction inside Alex. He starts to relive the last few days, the most intense days of his life, all his most intense experiences, most secret memories. He hangs up the phone, and though on the one hand he can tell quite clearly that the people at the Rose are toying with him, all of him is still desperate to go back there.

“Those bastards. They reach into your most sacred places and then wrap it around them.”

He starts to laugh, then cry. Then laughs again, but in a way that sounds very forced. His pupils are dilating. He seems to be splitting in two.

Ruslana and Anastasia would be called by the Rose of the World daily. When they were with friends they would get a call and then leave to talk and not come back for hours. At first their friends thought the girls were talking to boyfriends or parents; when they found out it was the Rose they were confused. Why talk to them when you’re with your friends already? One time, sitting in a London restaurant with Masha, Ruslana was talking to the Rose, then put the phone down and ran into the street and started stopping people to retie their laces. She came back grinning and slightly sweating. It wasn’t that the task they’d given her was so weird, it was just the way she dropped everything, the dinner, their conversation, to run and do their bidding.

Alex’s friends keep a close watch over him the next few days; they’re worried a call from the Rose will entice him to go back. Over the next weeks his sleep is ruined; he starts to wake up in the middle of the night and yearns to go back inside the training. Alex is the only one from the group not to have signed up for the advanced course. Every time anyone mentions words he heard inside the training he starts to feel nauseated. He dreams of the life trainer, can hear his voice.

The real problems start in about two or three months. Alex loses his appetite. He starts to skip deadlines and fuck up at work, shouts at his editor. Everything hurts. He starts to cry in the middle of the day, for no reason.

“I just can’t find my way back to myself,” Alex tells me when we meet. He’s shaved his hair off and lost weight.

At work they tell Alex he needs medical help. When Alex goes to see the doctor, he takes one look at Alex and prescribes a course of antidepressants, massages, acupuncture.