The Garden of Restraint

In the grey half-light of a Donbas spring, where the war hummed like distant thunder beneath the soil, a strange retreat stood at the edge of a shattered village. Its name was written in fading blue Cyrillic across a rusting gate: Сад Стриманості—The Garden of Restraint.

Nobody came here by accident. Participants applied in silence through a Telegram channel passed from hand to hand, recommended by former attendees with glints in their eyes and half-smiles they refused to explain. The cost was paid not in hryvnia but in time: twelve days of absolute presence, under a regime as rigid as it was strange.

The rules were clear. All participants—eight men and eight women—wore clothes chosen for them by the retreat's curators: tight linen shirts, military skirts cut above the knee, sleeveless fatigues, black stockings, mesh shirts, and leather boots. Their movements were choreographed through daily rituals: breakfast in silence at shared wooden tables, calisthenics in pairs at sunrise, meditation in front of others’ undressed silhouettes, nightly “eye contact sessions” in which they had to sit, breathe, and stare at one another for sixty minutes without speaking.

It was not about shame. It was about power.

The founder, an ascetic ex-psychologist named Tamara, said the Garden’s goal was to “detoxify the body politic of touch.” There were no explicit lessons, no religious doctrine. Only the rule: no masturbation, no sexual contact. Transgression would lead to two extra days of “reflection,” locked alone in an armoured root cellar with only dry bread, brackish water, and the sound of shelling echoing off the walls.

The retreat stood in a half-renovated sanatorium—an old Soviet spa for coal miners, turned overgrown and eerie. Cameras watched every room but the lavatory, their presence announced and visible. Guards did not smile. The entire place smelt of lye and lilacs.

The challenge, of course, was that everything else conspired toward intimacy. You were meant to want. The touch of a shoulder in the shared shower. The drop of water lingering on a thigh. The laughter in the candle-lit communal library. All of it designed not to inflame lust, exactly, but to invite longing—and then deny it, ritualistically, every hour.

On the fifth day, a red-haired woman named Inna broke. She had leaned too long in the corridor outside the men’s dormitory, murmuring. She disappeared. Returned two days later with blistered lips and eyes glassy from lack of sleep. She said nothing, and people stared at her more carefully than before.

On the ninth day, a man from Odesa, who had joked too much and wore his chest hair proudly, confessed in group circle that he dreamed of touching someone’s elbow and waking with a shame he hadn't known since childhood.

Tamara only nodded. “That is the first step,” she said. “Touch is no sin. Acting is.”

And always, behind it all, the war breathed its sulphur breath. You could hear the dull pops of artillery on the horizon as you sat cross-legged in the garden of silence, smelling the roses planted defiantly in the crater of an old bomb. The retreat was only six kilometres from the line. Once, a drone passed overhead and the guards froze mid-step, hands on hips.

By the final day, something had shifted. People stopped smiling so broadly. The tension had become communal, tender even. A man wept while chopping onions. A woman giggled uncontrollably while tying her boots. Two of them—who had never spoken—reached out and held hands at the gate when it was time to leave.

The guards didn’t stop them. Tamara stood by the lilac bush, watching with unreadable eyes.

Later, the man would write in his journal: “It was not about sex. It was about the terror of needing others. The war is loud. But longing—longing is louder when you're not allowed to listen.”