Picos Gemeos

Yesterday, for the first time in all my 18+ years in London, someone called me a faggot on the street.

Money from my two shifts at the gay sauna had just landed in my bank account. So, as a treat, I decided to get a lamb doner wrap for dinner at a restaurant by Hackney Central that I used to love back in the day. Took me half an hour to walk there; I tried to appreciate the rows of houses I walked past, reminding myself I was in London for only a short time.

The restaurant was empty, a few Turkish men standing around behind the counter. It looked decadent, past its glory days of line ups to buy its food. Everything in London, actually, feels a bit like that right now. The post-Brexit and post-pandemic gleam. As the men served me with smiles they made little comments to each other in Turkish. I tried to make nothing of it.

On the walk back, I was thinking to myself how London is hard, how it spat me out and now was having trouble swallowing me back down. Suddenly a young white man cycled past me and shouted: "you batty boy, you fucking faggot." My first thoughts: was I walking in some way that gave me away? (Certainly wasn't my clothes, all dark and non-descript.) Would he be waiting up ahead for me? And had I just materialised London's response to my unkind thoughts about it?

The rest of the walk was uneventful but everything was suddenly coloured differently. I walked past women gritting their teeth and wondered if these are feelings women have all the time after some random harassment; or even queer people who are generally more fabulous than me. I felt nothing for the young man, just apprehension of encountering him and having to avoid a more physical interaction.

I got home and received a phone call from my friend and host, V., who should have been at his therapist: "Ollie, are you home?"

"Yes, I am," I replied, sitting in the living room with the lamb wrap on my lap.

"I'm stuck in the bathroom. Can you come help me?"

And so we tried various things to open the bathroom door but the lock was broken. Screwdrivers, oil, tugging and pulling. Finally, we called a locksmith. When I got back to my lamb doner, the bread and meat tasted hard. I forced myself to eat it.

Tolstoy: A Russian Life by Rosamund Bartlett

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I became curious about Tolstoy’s life after reading a biography on Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, the father of anarchy, and discovering that he’d met Tolstoy, who was also an anarchist and a vegetarian. Like most people, I used to think of Tolstoy as a sort of a bearded Jane Austen – a writer of grand love stories. But he was more than that and it’s partly the USSR’s fault (according to this biography) that we don’t know this: Tolstoy was in fact highly subversive in his lifetime because of his views on religion and war, protected from government persecution because of his noble background and popularity, but also a danger to communism (it’s generally agreed he’d have faced a firing line if he’d still been alive after the October Revolution of 1917.)

There were three phases to Tolstoy’s life. The first phase, his youth, was marked by growing up in his family’s estate Yasnaya Polyana (a place so important to him that his family went to great lengths to preserve it after his death), sowing his wild oats as a young man (his first attempt at writing came while recuperating in a clinic for venereal diseases), then experiencing the Crimean war and becoming the first modern war correspondent by publishing impactful accounts of it.

The second phase began with his marriage to Sophia Behrs, their family life in Yasnaya Polyana and Moscow, and the fame that came with the publishing of masterpieces like “War and Peace” and “Anna Karenina”. The third phase started with his turn away from literary fame to dedicate himself to creating educational material for Russia’s serfs (he thought this was what he’d be remembered for), renouncing Russian Orthodoxy for a form of grassroots Christianity based on his studies of the scriptures (which went on to become a social movement known as Tolstoyanism), and finally his renunciation of all material wealth, in keeping with his anarchist and religious views.

There is so much that could be said about Tolstoy’s life – it was jam-packed with genius, egoism, soul searching and controversy. This biography made me want to read more about his life and read everything he has published, especially the more subversive works from his later years. His wife Sophia should be rightfully credited for all the editing work she did throughout their marriage, but there’s no doubt that Tolstoy was a towering figure and perhaps the greatest writer the world has ever seen. This biography makes the claim that the Russian Revolution couldn’t have happened without his taking down of the Romanov Dinasty and Orthodox Church (he was the first person in Russia to have a civil burial after being excommunicated by the Church) but his philosophy also deeply affected the 25-year-old Gandhi, with its doctrine that revolution could happen through non-violence. For better or for worse, Tolstoy changed millions of lives.

My favourite moment in the biography, however, is from Tolstoy’s childhood. One of his favourite things was to get into bed with his grandmother at night, in a room only lit with a few candles, and listen to stories told by a blind serf. I’d like to think it was in these nights, just before falling asleep, that Tolstoy fell in love with storytelling.

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Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

You don't have to know anything about the author Olga Tokarczuk to enjoy this novel, but it helps. Olga won the Nobel Prize for Literature for 2018 as well as the Man Book International for her novel “Flights”. She’s an outspoken feminist, vegetarian and animal rights advocate. As you can imagine, she’s hated by the right in her native Poland and has even received death threats. This novel feels a little bit like two fingers raised up at them.

It’s a humorous, quirky crime drama, set in a small village on the border of Poland and the Czech Republic. An aging woman, Janina Duszejko, who lives alone in an isolated corner of the village and is viewed as crazy by many, narrates the tale. Whereas most homes are empty during the harsh winter, Duszejko stays behind all year round, taking care of the empty homes as well as teaching English in a local school (she’s a retired engineer), using her spare hours to study astrology (her big passion), translate Blake’s poems with an old pupil and disarm traps in the forest (used by most local men as a hunting ground).

Some of the community’s hunters begin to drop dead and Duszejko develops a theory that nature has decided to exact revenge after so much unnecessary animal cruelty. Nobody believes her, of course, but Duszejko is somehow always close to the action, and always willing to write a long letter to the police with her theories (which just add to her reputation as crazy). Duszejko has by her side a small group of friends – other misfits in the area that don’t fit it – who seem to adore her, despite her eccentricities.

The white men who get killed – gun owners who enjoy killing for sport, who marry trophy wives, who claim to be religious, who boss and bully those around them, who have a lot of money – remind me so much of the ones hoarding the news today in the U.S., U.K., Brazil… - men who wield power for destructive effects. In our world of trivial cruelty, Duszejko is one of the sole voices from the periphery that can cross the borders of the real (daily village life) and the unreal (astrology; vengeful nature) to show us how life can be more poetical and unsettling than we realise.

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