The Children's Book - A. S. Byatt [154]
She talked away about sex, with wit, indignation and a kind of social fervour that was new to Karl. She had argued with Kropotkin about it, she said, as they rode the travelator, and had been forced to tell him he underestimated it because he was no longer young. He had the grace to laugh and to concede the point, she said. She told Joachim in an undertone that the Malthusian society was meeting in secrecy—she would tell him where and when if he was interested, but the police were snooping, and she had no wish, at present, to be imprisoned in the cause of birth control, because that was only one part of the larger mission, the whole vision.
They came to the hotel on the Boul’ Mich’ and ate Russian beet soup, and a beef hotpot, with boiled potatoes, concocted on the burner. The room was full of smoke from Russian cigarettes and French Gauloises—everyone’s outline was blurred in Charles’s eyes, and the gathering spoke many languages, apparently at random, French, Russian, Italian, German, American, Dutch. Joachim in this company looked smiling and wild, his hair ruffled, his shirt-neck open. He sounded meek and thoughtful in English. In German he sounded excitable and harsh. They were talking about someone called Panizza, who had been imprisoned in Munich for blasphemy and was now released and in Paris. Emma Goldman said that Panizza had called on her—she had been moved and excited—and had invited her to dine with Oscar Wilde. “Dear Hippolyte,” she said, turning to her lover, had recalled her to ethics—it was the night of the comrades’ session—but she would so very much have liked to meet Wilde.
Karl looked curiously at Hippolyte, who was small, agitated, elegantly dressed and had bandaged hands. He was a penniless Czech, who had ruined his skin cleaning boots for a living. As an example of “free love,” he was uninspiring. He fussed. He said something in either Russian or Czech about Wilde, in which the tone was disparaging. Someone else, a grey-haired Dr. somebody, said he was surprised at Emma Goldman, a good woman, defending a man like Wilde, a pervert, and a perverter.
This led to an animated discussion of the right attitude to inversion, perversion and “sex variation.” Most of it was in German. Karl had learned German, as his German mother wished. He thought Susskind knew that he knew German, but for some reason, he had kept quiet about it. He found he had an instinct to be secretive. He took pleasure in having a secret life, and within his secret life, he took pleasure in keeping secrets. He listened to the fierce discussion of Panizza’s ideas about masturbation, rape and perversion with the blank face old Etonians knew how to put on, courteously imperceptive. He was both excited and alarmed by the world he had entered. If you were a German freethinker, you could be imprisoned for blasphemy, like Panizza, or for lèse-majesté, like Johann Most, or shut in an asylum and declared insane. He stared, watchful, through the swirling smoke at the intent faces, and listened to the voices, earnest, bitterly ironic, gleeful. He was there and not there. He could always walk home, and close his respectable door behind him. But he was not playing, he told himself, he was in earnest. Something had to be done about the horrors of society.
The conversation had moved to Emma Goldman’s forthcoming lecture on Trafficking in Women. This discussion was in English. What other ways of earning their bread did most women have, other than selling their bodies, Goldman asked. How could you blame a woman who was a servant kept to herself in a cellar, or a labourer at a factory bench, for wanting human warmth and better nourishment, yes, and pretty clothes. Wages were so low that married women sold themselves too. With their husband’s connivance, often enough. The men who used these women went home and infected their wives—whom they had also bought—with syphilis. It was not the men who were punished by the state and its police and doctors, of course, oh no. It was the women. Women must take control of their lives