Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia (19 page)

I had “access,” that magical word all documentary makers and TV producers crave. A friend of mine knew Ruslana’s friends and family. In the months since her death they had refused documentary makers, but they would make an exception for me. I phoned TNT, excited. It was the story that had everything. There would be supermodels, suicide, and parties. There was Moscow, New York, London, and Paris. Glamour and tragedy. It was the easiest commission I ever had. I was even given a larger advance than usual to produce the film.

“But don’t make it too dark,” TNT said, “Remember we need positive stories.”

•  •  •

She died on Water Street, at the corner of Wall Street, Manhattan, where the financial district meets the East River. The evening I arrive is cold and wet. During the day it’s crowded here with office workers, but after 6:00 p.m. it goes quiet quickly. Just the last clerks in pall-bearer black suits hurrying home, the coffee bars already closing. Ruslana’s apartment is the only residential building on the street. It’s a twelve-floor concrete jagged thing, the floors at different angles that fold awkwardly to fit onto the corner. Few families live here, just the tired travelers of trade and commerce, the foot soldiers of globalization: a Pakistani wool trader, a Malaysian PhD student. Jobbing models handed Ruslana’s apartment down to each other.

The police report of her death shows photographs of her rented rooms: there are no books, no photos on the wall, no paintings. The door was locked from inside. The door to the balcony was open. There were cigarette butts on the floor—she would always smoke there. The balcony was covered with thick black netting from the building site next door. On the floor of the balcony there was a kitchen knife. There was a long cut through the netting: she must have taken the knife and sliced it open. The balcony is set at an angle away from the street. She couldn’t have jumped from there; any fall would have been broken by the floors beneath. There was a small gap through the scaffolding to the building site. It was so small only a lithe girl could make it. When the police arrived none of them could slither through.

Next door the frame of the new fifteen-floor office building was already built. A concrete shell, complete with stairs and dividing walls, but with no front. The police report doesn’t specify how long she spent wandering the empty building site. Several levels up one of the floors juts out into the street like a diving board. Could it have been from there? The police report doesn’t specify where she jumped from.

The street was nearly empty the Saturday she died. It was the hottest day of the year, a headache-making hot New York high summer. On weekends the bankers are away, and in high summer anyone who can flees the financial district. At 12:45 a city laborer working on the street heard a loud thud: “I thought a car had hit a person. I turned around and there was a girl lying in the middle of the road,” he told police. She was lying right out by the dividing lines, 8.5 meters away from the building—8.5 meters. The supermodel didn’t take a step off and fall. She took a run and soared.

The night before her death Ruslana was with Vlada Ruslakova, the Chanel girl. I’m lucky to catch her in New York—she’s about to fly off again, to somewhere in Asia. They’re nothing like their images on paper, these girls. Brittle, with lost looks not quite sure on what to focus. I suppose it’s only when they strike a pose for work that they become resolved; until then they are oddly in-between. But Vlada’s face is perfectly proportioned: she holds the center of the shot very well during the interview.

“We had dinner in Manhattan, at our favorite bistro. We were planning for her to maybe come to Paris in a few days’ time. Later that evening I took a plane to Paris myself for a shoot. She texted me when I landed—to see if I had arrived okay. That must have been morning in New York. And then a few hours later . . . a few hours later I saw on the news she was dead.”

“Did you notice anything out of the ordinary?”

“No. But she had spent much of the last year in Moscow. So we hadn’t seen each other much recently.”

“Was she upset about anything?”

“No.”

“Was she high?”

“No!”

“Why do you think she killed herself?”

“I refuse . . . I can’t . . . I don’t believe she did.”

Vlada describes Ruslana as “sweet,” “honest,” and “intelligent.” “Like a child.” She repeats this: “like a child.” Behind me Ruslana’s mother is there during the whole of the interview. Vlada only agreed to talk because the mother asked her to, and I can’t quite tell whether she’s revealing all she knows. I can hear the mother gasping for breath like one holding back tears throughout our conversation. When it’s her turn to give an interview, she runs out of the room weeping after just a couple of questions.

“I should never have let her go. Never. She was a child. She wasn’t right for this world.”

The mother has the same eyes, the exact same eyes, as Ruslana, and as I talk to her it can seem as if Ruslana is somehow present. She speaks in a small, sharp voice that cuts the ears ever so slightly.

Valentina hates the media, TV, journalists—anyone who had taken possession of and tried to tell her daughter’s story.

“Why do they all say she was a drug addict, a prostitute? How dare they? How can you just take someone and talk about them when you never knew them? What right do they have?”

I tell her I will be different. Samples of Ruslana’s organs and blood are kept in a vault under the New York coroner’s office. Valentina allows me to send blood samples for a full test to see whether there are traces of heavy drug use. She also insists we test for Ruffinol and chloroform or any other drug that could have been administered to knock her out.

“She would have never killed herself,” both Valentina and Vlada insist. “She wasn’t like
that
.”

•  •  •

Ruslana grew up in Almaty, Kazakhstan. The family was Russian: Ruslana’s father was a Red Army officer, and Kazakhstan happened to be the last place he was stationed before the breakup of the USSR. He then went into private business.

“We were wealthy. One of the first to be really wealthy,” the mother tells me as we walk through New York. “But he was killed.”

Ruslana was only five at the time. She had a younger brother, Ruslan. Ruslan and Ruslana.

“You gave them the same names?”

“Yes—it’s beautiful. Don’t you find?”

Valentina looked around for work. She found door-to-door sales; American cosmetics companies were just expanding in Kazakhstan. Their business was dipping in the west but rising in the east. Valentina enrolled. She attended training to make her into a model salesperson: you can sell anything to anyone, they preached, as long as you believe. They taught her the “secrets” of sales success: make the customer say “yes” three times when you first chat with her, she can just be agreeing about the weather, that way she will be tuned into saying “yes” when you offer lipstick or anti-ageing cream. In the post-Soviet space such companies were hugely successful: the promise of money, secret knowledge, and Western beauty all in one package. (The catch was that the sales reps were actually being conned; they had to buy the cosmetics in bulk and see if they could sell them. They felt like salespeople, but actually they were the customers.)

“I was one of the best,” Valentina tells me, and I can almost hear the corporate training pride. “I made it to the level of middle manager.”

Valentina sent Ruslana to the local German-language school, considered the best in Almaty. It was prestigious to attend one. Ruslana had braces, got good marks, and was preparing for university in Germany. She had hair that reached down to her knees.

“Such beautiful hair,” remembers Valentina. “I would help her wash it. Until the age of fifteen she never washed her hair alone.”

When the call came from the modeling scout, Valentina laughed it off. Modeling wasn’t their sort of thing; it smelled of prostitution. Ruslana was going to university after all. But the scout kept on calling. She explained that modeling was the best way to pay for a university education, even in England or America. Ruslana would go straight to the West; she wouldn’t be held up in Moscow. They would try her at London fashion week.

“London, I’ll finally see London!” Ruslana told her mother as she begged to go.

•  •  •

The scout’s name is Tatyana Cherednikova. I find her in Moscow. She is on her way to the airport, and we talk in the back of the car. I expected someone in a designer dress and heels. Tatyana is quite the opposite. She wears a fleece with a reindeer pattern on it and snow boots. We listen to a CD of Christmas carols on the player. It’s approaching the Western date for Christmas (the Russian date is in January). Tatyana converted to Protestantism during her travels in Europe and America.

“It’s all about hard work and honesty,” she tells me about her new faith.

I ask about Ruslana.

“Of course I feel guilty. There she was, happy with her mum, preparing for university—and up I pop and say
Hey, come to modeling land, it’s wonderful out here.
 . . . And then it all ends up the way it did. . . . But I really thought it would be a good way for her to make money for university. It is for lots of girls. It’s a chance.”

She says this simply—there’s nothing duplicitous about her. I ask her how she found Ruslana.

Tatyana spends 50 percent of her life on the road. Her life is an endless progression of cheekbones, legs, buttocks, lips. She sees thousands of girls a year. Maybe three will make it to the top. The former Soviet Union is her territory. In the Cold War it was spies who knew this country, studied it, poured over every detail: every block of high-rises, every muddy road, every factory. Now it is modeling scouts. Voronezh, Karaganda, Alma Ata, Rostov, Minsk—these are the great wells of beauty, raw girl crude to be pumped and refined. Many have never heard of these places. Tatyana knows them inside out. The Soviet Union occupied 20 percent of the world’s land mass; its former states produce 15 percent of the world’s oil. But over 50 percent of the models on the catwalks of Paris and Milan are from the former USSR.

In 2004 Tatyana had gone to Kazakhstan. She was on the jury of Miss Alma Ata. Local businessmen invited her down; they wanted her to choose one of the girls, many their mistresses, and whisk her off to Paris. But the girls were all breasts and bums: oligarch lolls. Nothing that would suit the needs of Paris and Milan. She had gone around all the agencies while she was there, too; no one had stood out. A disappointing trip.

Tatyana was on the flight back. She had finished the paperback she was reading quicker than she thought. She flicked through the in-flight magazine.

And then she stopped. In between the whisky ad and the piece on Kazakh flora was a photo of a girl. Amazing. The photo was in dubious taste: a semiclad waif in tribal garb, posing like some cross between Lolita and Mowgli in a jungle of plastic trees. But the girl herself—she was amazing. Her blue gaze went on forever, so powerful and deep that everything—Tatyana, the plane, the clouds—seemed to be caught inside it: small toys suspended inside this young girl’s gaze.

As soon as Tatyana landed, she phoned her colleagues at a Moscow casting agency. “Find that girl,” she said. “Find that girl.”

But Ruslana wasn’t a model. No agency had heard of her. In the end they found the photographer. Ruslana had been friends with the daughter of the editor of the magazine. They had taken the photographs for fun, for a piece about Amazons. Tatyana spotting the photos was magical chance. Fairy-tale stuff.

“She was hired by a London agency straightaway. She was doing the shows in London, Paris, Milan. Just in the holidays, in between school. Later, when she went full time, she would ring to say thank-you. It’s rare to hear ‘thank-you’ from a model. Ruslana was different.”

“Why do you think she killed herself?”

“She was the most emotionally stable model I knew. The most balanced. The best educated. It just doesn’t make any sense.”

The traffic is becoming congested, and we barely make Tatyana’s flight. She rushes to the departure area.

Before she goes she turns and says: “If you see Ruslana’s mother give her my love. Tell her I think of Ruslana every day. And if you need to find me I’m at church most Sundays.”

•  •  •

I find video of Ruslana’s first trip to London, her first trip outside the former Soviet Union. A teenager—no, child—in a hoodie on a blustery London day, snapping photos of Tower Bridge, grinning goofily, laughing widely, and trying to hide her braces as she does so. Then she takes the hoodie off, and down it tumbles: that heavy, golden, knee-length hair. They nicknamed her “the Russian Rapunzel” in modeling land.

Masha was her best friend during those first European days. We meet up during Moscow Fashion Week. Passing backstage during the shows, I’m struck by how young the girls look. Not even nymphet-like, just skinny like prepubescent boys.

Masha is twentysomething, but she still looks fifteen. She has Bambi brown eyes. She met Ruslana in London on her seventeenth birthday. It was Ruslana’s first season modeling.

“Who would wash her hair?” I ask to break the ice.

“We all took turns in the apartment. When we first met I had the sense Ruslana was my child, she was so innocent,” says Masha.

They shared digs in six-to-a-room flats in London, Paris, and Milan. Those were the days of casting upon casting. Life squeezed into measurements (32–23–33), tense girls eyeing each other’s legs-hips-breasts, desperate to be the one who is picked: every rejection a slap saying your body’s wrong, you’re wrong. We think of models as ideal; they think only of how they don’t quite fit.

“Ruslana would cry; she took rejection personally. But then she’d pull herself together. Wrote poems to console herself.”

Some poems still survive online:

Instead of moaning at the thorns,

I’m happy that a rose among them grows

Often they went hungry: agencies only provide a small allowance for food. That gets spent quickly.