The Gladiator ct-4
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Gianfranco hadn't thought about it like that. "Most people don't, I bet," he said.
"That doesn't make it wrong if you do," Annarita said, which struck Gianfranco as being true and not true at the same time. If you got too far out of step with what most people did and thought, you'd probably end up in trouble.
When he said so, Annarita frowned. "You shouldn't, unless you hurt somebody or something."
"I didn't say anything about what should happen," he answered. "T just said what would."
She looked at him as if he'd grown another head. "You know what?" she said. "You sound like my father. I never expected that."
"Neither did I!" Gianfranco exclaimed. Not only did he not expect it, he didn't much like it.
That must have shown on his face, because Annarita said, "Don't worry. It probably won't happen again soon."
"I hope not!" Gianfranco said. "I mean, I like your father and everything, but I want to sound like me, not like him."
To his relief, Annarita said, "Well, that's probably good."
He didn't have to cram any more. Neither did Annarita. They celebrated by going to see a remake of The Grapes of Wrath. It might as well have used a sledgehammer to drive home how wicked and corrupt American capitalism had been. Bang, bang, bang-each point thudded home, subtle as an earthquake.
"The book was better," Annarita said when they came out.
"I wonder if there's ever been a movie that was better than the book," Gianfranco said.
Annarita thought for a moment. "I wouldn't bet on it."
"Neither would I," Gianfranco said.
They stopped and had gelato to get the taste of The Crapes of Wrath out of their mouths. Then they went back to their building and trudged up the stairs to their apartments. "I do wish somebody would fix the elevator," Annarita sighed.
"If somebody made money doing it-" But this time Gian-franco stopped before he really got going. He couldn't make himself believe anything like that would happen here, not any time soon.
"Well, it was nice even if the movie wasn't everything it might have been," Annarita said as they paused in front of her front door.
Did she expect him to kiss her? The only way to find out was to try. When he put his arms around her, she didn't try to push him away. And when he kissed her, she kissed him back. That was all good. That was all wonderful, in fact.
"Good night," he said after reluctantly ending the kiss. "We'll have to do this again soon." Did he mean go out again or kiss some more? All of the above, probably.
"Sure. Why not?" Annarita said, and went inside.
Gianfranco didn't think his feet touched the floor once as he walked the handful of steps to his own apartment.
Monday after finals. Judgment Day, people called it, even if the Italian People's Republic officially looked down its nose at religion. A year's work, there in black and white. If you did well, you were glad to see it proved. If you didn't…
Annarita knew she'd worked hard. She hoped it would pay off. Even so, she worried. She couldn't help it. Some people had a Che sera, sera attitude-whatever will be, will be. She wished she could feel that way, but didn't expect she ever would.
Into Russian she went. Because it was her first class, she got her report card there. Then she had to turn it in again so Comrade Montefusco could write her mark on it. Giving it to her with the grade already written in would have been more efficient. Teachers didn't do it that way. Why not? Because they didn't, as far as she could tell. Maybe there was some obscure rule against it. Maybe nobody in the bureaucracy cared about being efficient. She figured it was about fifty-fifty either way.
Back came the report card, this time with a grade. An A- she breathed a sigh of relief. She hadn't messed up the final, then. A few other people looked happy. A few looked disappointed or angry. Most seemed to have got about what they'd expected.
"Comrade!" A boy raised his hand.
"Si, Abbaticchio?" The teacher was always polite.
"Why did you give me a C? I need at least a B+ if I'm going to get into the university I want to go to."
"Well, Abbaticchio, maybe you should have thought more about that during the year, not when all the work is done and it's too late to change anything."
"But I need a B+!" The way Abbaticchio said it, someone-maybe God, maybe the General Secretary of the Italian Communist Party-had promised him the grade.
Comrade Montefusco shrugged. "I'm sorry. That's not what you earned."
"You mean you won't change it?" The boy sounded as if he couldn't believe his ears.
"I'm afraid so," the teacher answered.
Abbaticchio turned red. "You think you're sorry now? Wait till my father gets through with you! I'm not going to let some miserable flunky of a teacher mess with my life."
"I have had terrorist threats made against me before," Comrade Montefusco said calmly. "I am still here. I expect to be back after the summer break, too."
186 Harry Turtledove
"You don't know who my father is," Abbaticchio warned. "He took down The Gladiator, so he can sure take you out."
"What on earth is The Gladiator?" the Russian teacher said. "There haven't been any gladiators in Milan (or almost two thousand years."
The angry student rolled his eyes. Several others in the classroom whispered behind their hands. Annarita didn't, but her heart beat faster. So Abbalicchio's father was a big shot in the Security Police, was he? If he found out about Eduardo… Cousin Silvio, she told herself fiercely. He's Cousin Silvio.
No matter how Abbaticchio blustered, Comrade Monte-fusco wouldn't change his grade. When the bell rang at the end of the shortened period, Abbaticchio stormed out of the classroom. Some of the things he said would have got him suspended, or maybe expelled, any other time. Students had some license on Judgment Day. The authorities knew the kind of pressure they were under. Did they have that much license? Annarita wouldn't have thought so, but the teacher didn't call Abbaticchio on it.
Now all I need is for him to get together with Maria Tenace, Annarita thought. That would really make a mess of things, wouldn't it? She had no idea if they knew each other. She didn't keep track of who their friends were. She wouldn't have guessed either one of them had any friends.
She sighed. All she could do was try not to draw attention to herself. Usually, that was easy for her. Now, when she needed it to be easy, it wasn't. How unfair was that?
She didn't quite get straight A's. Her dialectics teacher didn't believe in giving them. People said Karl Marx himself couldn't get an A in that class. People also said the teacher had given an A once, and the girl who got it fainted and (ell over and split her forehead open. Annarita didn't believe that. As far as she could tell, the teacher had always been the way he was. She wasn't so sure about Marx.
Other than the dialectics class, she made a clean sweep. Even with a B+ there, her grades were plenty good enough for first honors again. She wondered how Gianfranco was doing. She hoped he'd held on to second honors. His folks would be on him something fierce if he didn't. She would be disappointed herself if he didn't, too. One corner of her mouth quirked up. That probably mattered more to him than all the yelling in the world from his parents would.
And what he thought about the things she did mattered to her, too. A year earlier, it wouldn't have. They'd just been a couple of people kind of stuck with each other because of their living arrangements. / didn't think I'd have a boyfriend a year younger than I am went through her mind.
She wondered how long he would stay her boyfriend. Till they stopped getting along, she supposed. Right now, everything seemed fine. Why borrow trouble?
Here he came. He was grinning, which was a good sign. Annarita thought it was safe to ask, "Did you?"
"You'd better believe it!" he answered, and waved his report card like a flag. "I should have started busting my hump sooner. I might have got firsts like you… You did, right?"
"Si." She felt better about admitting it than she would have if h
e hadn't made seconds. It was easy this way. "Maybe you will be up there too next year."
"Hope so," Gianfranco said. "I think I can do it. Now the question is whether I'll kick myself in the rear and make myself do it."
"You did it over the last couple of grading periods this time," Annarita said. "You'll start fresh next year, so if you push hard right from the start…"
"If," he agreed. "Well, I'll give it my best shot and see what happens, that's all." He waved the report card again, and almost hit somebody in the face with it. "Now I want to go home and show this off."
"I don't blame you." Annarita was proud of him, but she didn't want to come right out and say so. It would make him feel he was listening to his mother.
When they got back to the apartment building, a truck was parked in front of it, two wheels on the street, the other two on the sidewalk. That was illegal, of course, but people did it all the time. What was more surprising was the word painted in big green letters on the truck's door: REPAIRS.
Annarita and Gianfranco looked at each other. "You don't suppose-?" Gianfranco sounded like someone in whom hope had just flowered against all odds.
"Let's go look!" Annarita said. They hurried into the lobby together.
Sure enough, the elevator door was open. Annarita couldn't remember the last time she'd seen that. A man in coveralls and a cap and wearing a fat belt full of tools came out of the elevator car. Another man in the same getup stayed in there working.
"Are you really going to fix it?" Gianfranco might have been an acolyte in church witnessing a miracle.
"Better believe it, kid." The man who'd come out of the elevator paused to light a cigar and puff smoke towards Annarita and Gianfranco. She coughed-the cigar was vile. The repairman went on, "Nothing real big wrong with it. Somebody could've got it working a long time ago."
"How come nobody did, then?" Annarita asked.
He shrugged. "Beats me. Probably on account of nobody bothered to look and see how hard it'd be. Probably on account of nobody figured he'd make any money fixing it."
"But you will?" Annarita said.
"I… sure will." Plainly, the repairman almost said something more pungent. "I wouldn't be here if there wasn't some loot in it for me and Giulio. Isn't that right, Giulio?" This time, he blew a noxious cloud toward the other workman.
"Isn't what right?" Giulio asked, looking up from whatever he was doing inside the elevator car.
"We wouldn't be doing this if they weren't paying us good money."
"What? You think I'm dumb or something? Of course not," Giulio said.
"You guys sound like capitalists," Gianfranco said.
He meant it as a compliment. Annarita knew that. She wasn't sure the repairman would. The cigar twitched in the man's mouth. But all he said was, "Never yet been anybody born who was allergic to cash." He turned again. "Isn't that right, Giulio?"
"I dunno, Rocco," Giulio said. "I know I'm not."
"I wouldn't be allergic to riding the elevator instead of climbing stairs every time I need to go to the apartment," Annarita said.
"Won't be long," said the man with the cigar-Rocco.
She and Gianfranco still had to climb the stairs now. The trudge seemed twice as long as usual because soon she wouldn't have to make it any more. Halfway up, Gianfranco said, "They really did sound like capitalists. They only seemed to care about making a profit for their work."
"Even if that is all they care about, you don't expect them to come right out and admit it, do you?" Annarita was surprised they'd come so close. "It would be like admitting you eat with your fingers or pick your nose or something."
"I suppose." Gianfranco climbed a few more steps. Then he turned to her and said, "It shouldn't be like that, you know? It's not like that in the game. You want to make as much money as you can there."
"That's a game," Annarita said gently. "This is life. It's not the same thing, and you'll get in trouble-you'll get everybody in trouble-if you think it is." The game could suck you in. Even she knew that, and she played much more casually than Gianfranco did. But he had to remember what was real and what wasn't.
With an impatient gesture, he showed he did. "I know, 1 know. Those guys down there didn't exactly deny they were doing it for the money."
"No, they didn't." Annarita didn't say that showed what a crude pair they were. To her, it was obvious. It should have been obvious to Gianfranco, too. No doubt it would have been if the game didn't make it hard for him to think straight.
The game. The game from another world. The game from a world where capitalism worked-by the things Eduardo said and by the things he had, it worked better than Communism did. The game from a world where Communism lay on-what was Marx's phrase?-the ash-heap of history, that was it. The game from a world with no Security Police. No wonder it made Gianfranco think dangerous thoughts. No wonder it made him think political thoughts, economic thoughts.
Annarita laughed at herself. As if political and economic thoughts weren't dangerous by definition!
"What's funny?" Gianfranco asked, so she must have snorted out loud. She told him. He thought about it for two or three steps. Then he said, "Ideas like that shouldn't be dangerous. That's the point, right?-to make it so they aren't dangerous any more."
"Si, that's the point," Annarita said. "The other point is, it hasn't happened yet, and it won't happen any time soon."
"I know," he said again, and gave her a crooked grin. "I won't slip up, Annarita. Honest, I won't."
"I didn't think you would," Annarita answered, which was… close enough to true that she didn't feel too much like a liar saying it.
Mechanical noises came from the elevator shaft when she and Gianfranco walked past it. They looked at it. Annarita saw something close to awe on Gianfranco's face. Her own probably held the same expression. "Wow!" he said. "They really are fixing it."
"I don't remember the last time it worked," Annarita said. "Do you?"
He shook his head. "Not really. I was a lot smaller than I am now-I know that. 1 remember how hard climbing all those stairs seemed then. Now I'm used to it. But I could get used to riding the elevator real quick, I bet."
"Me, too." Annarita stopped at the door to her apartment. "See you at dinner. And congratulations again!"
"Grazie!" Gianfranco grinned at her. "I only get second-class congratulations. You get first."
"Next year," she said. She'd got first honors plenty of times before, too. They didn't seem such a big deal to her. For Gianfranco to earn second honors-especially on year-end grades-was further out of the ordinary.
Eduardo was reading the newspaper when she came in. "Ciao" he said. "How did you do?"
"Pretty well," she answered. "I didn't get the grade in dialectics, though. I don't know what kind of hoop I was supposed to jump through. Whatever it was, I didn't."
"Too bad." He shook his head in sympathy. "There's always somebody like that."
"Even in your perfect home timeline?" Annarita teased.
"It's not perfect. All kinds of things wrong there. Our troubles are different from yours, but we've still got 'em. Some of them, I guess you say, are the troubles that go with too much freedom," ICduardo answered.
"How can you have too much freedom?" Annarita asked. "Don't you just do whatever you want then?"
"Sure. I mean, that's what you do, si, but it's not always so simple. If what I'm doing makes me happy but bothers other people, where do you draw the line? How much should the state do to take care of poor people and people who don't want to work? Countries all find different answers."
"Different how?"
"Well, in Italy -in most of Europe -people pay more taxes, and the countries do more for their people who don't have so much. In America, taxes are lower, but the state does less to take care of you. If you make it in America, you can make it bigger than you can on this side of the Atlantic. If you don't, you'll have a harder time than you would here."
"Which is better?" Annarita asked.
"Don't they make everybody do things their way, like the Russians here?"
He shook his head. "They do throw their weight around, but not like that. Most of the time, anyway."
She wondered how big an exception came with that handful of words. But his world and hers had been different-evidently, very different-for a century and a half. She couldn't expect him to fill her in on all that history in one lump. She did ask, "So you have teachers who think they're little tin gods, too?"
"You'd better believe it," he answered. "Every alternate that has teachers has some like that. They've got the power, and the students don't, and they enjoy rubbing it in. Human nature doesn't change from one alternate to another. The way it comes out changes because of religion and technology and culture, but people are still pretty much people." He winked at her. "I'm a people, aren't I?"
"I thought so, till now," she answered tartly, and he laughed. She went on, "This is a world-an alternate-where Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism came out on top."
"That's right." Eduardo nodded. "And anybody who can say 'Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism' and make it sound natural the way you do has a pretty good handle on the dialectic, no matter what your dumb teacher thinks."
Annarita smiled, but she continued with her own train of thought: "And you come from an alternate where capitalism won."
He nodded again. "That's me."
"Are there… alternates where the Fascists won?"
Eduardo nodded one more time. "Yes, and they're just as bad as you'd think they would be. They're even worse than this one."
The way he said it was like a fist in the stomach. "Are we really that bad?" Annarita asked in a small voice. Of course she took the only world she knew for granted-how could she do anything else?
"Well… You're not so good, not when it comes to treating people the way you ought to," Eduardo answered. "But I'll tell you what the difference is. If somebody here gets out of line, he goes to a camp. If they decide to kill him later, it's just part of doing business, and nobody gets excited about it. In the Fascist alternates, he still goes to a camp. But if they kill him there, they enjoy it."