Strangers I Know by Claudia Durastanti

Author:Claudia Durastanti [Durastanti, Claudia]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2022-01-25T00:00:00+00:00

In First Person

I arrived in London at age twenty-seven, on September 4, 2011, an unusual day of pouring rain. One month after the Tottenham riots, six years before the Grenfell Tower fire.

I’d come with my partner, but his company immediately sent him on to Darmstadt, to the European Space Operations Centre. Famous contemporary music courses had been taught in that town; John Cage even played there. I read this on Wikipedia, trying to make sense of our being apart. While he wrote code, I scraped mold off the walls of our newly rented house and walked in the garden; I lived for the weekends, when he came home. The rest of the time I spent barricaded inside, hands crossed over my chest, an accurate imitation of a ghost. Without my noticing, I’d become a wife.

There’s a famous Unitarian church nearby with a mural dedicated to Mary Wollstonecraft; if you look up, you’ll see the inscription The birthplace of feminism, on a commemorative medallion. Mary Wollstonecraft moved here in 1784 to reinstate her school for girls; back then the area was full of libertarians who supported the American Revolution and women’s rights. Oliver Cromwell and Daniel Defoe would pass through, and for a time, Edgar Allan Poe lived somewhere in the area. Not far from here is the Mildmay Club, one of the last working men’s clubs in London, where a beer costs three pounds, but the members are dying off or moving away; on weekends, they rent the club out for weddings or as a movie soundstage.

After moving to Newington Green, Wollstonecraft wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, the reason the Unitarian Church is considered the birthplace of feminism. Though this doesn’t change the fact that I moved here for love, and I wasn’t doing anything with my life. Her daughter, Mary Shelley, also fell in love when she was young, like I did, but she wrote a brilliant book and invented science fiction.

Another woman deciding the destiny of this neighborhood where I live: in the sixteenth century, one of the area’s inhabitants, Henry Percy, became secretly engaged (without permission) to the future mistress, then wife of Henry VIII. Percy tried to announce that they’d already slept together and that it would weigh on him if he didn’t marry her, but due to the girl’s lower social status, the marriage was prevented anyway. Around ten years later, Percy was forced to testify during Anne Boleyn’s trial for adultery and he collapsed and was carried out after hearing she’d been sentenced to death.

The street I see every morning when I step out the door is named for Anne Boleyn; I’m caught between a suffragette and a queen who lost her head.

The places I fell in love with first in London: a cemetery, a movie theater, and a skate park. The Abney Park cemetery is one of the seven great private cemeteries in the city, but it’s more rundown than that Park Street cemetery in Calcutta; and here you’ll find the graves of all the radical nonconformists who passed this way.

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