After she helped her mother with the dishes, though, she hunted up her father, who was reading a medical journal. “Can I ask you something?” she said.
“Why not?” He put down the journal. “This new procedure sounds wonderful, but it’s so complicated and expensive that no one will use it more than once every five years. What’s on your mind?”
She told him about visiting The Gladiator. “I don’t know what I should say to the Young Socialists’ League,” she finished.
“Are they hurting anybody?” her father asked. He looked as if he ought to smoke a pipe, but he didn’t. He said he’d seen too many cases of mouth cancer to want one of his own.
“Hurting anybody? No.” Annarita shook her head. “But they’re ideologically unsound.”
“And so? I’m ideologically unsound, too. Most people are, one way or another,” her father said. “Most of the time, it doesn’t matter. You learn to keep quiet about it when you’re not with people you can trust—and you learn not to trust too many people. Or it’s about something so silly that you can talk about it and it doesn’t count, even if you are sailing against the wind. So what’s The Gladiator doing that’s so awful?”
“They’re selling games that make capitalism look good,” Annarita answered.
“Are they?” Whatever her father had expected, that plainly wasn’t it. “How do they think they can get away with that?” he asked. Annarita told him how Eduardo had explained it to her. Her father clicked his tongue between his teeth. “This fellow should have been either a Jesuit or a lawyer. Does he think the Security Police will let him get away with a story like that?”
“The government tolerates the Church. Why wouldn’t it put up with something like this?” Annarita asked.
“It tolerates the Church because the Church has been around for almost 2,100 years. The Church is big and powerful, even if it doesn’t have any divisions. The Russians let religion breathe, and they don’t usually put up with anything.” Her father looked unhappy. “A shop that’s been open two years at the most just doesn’t have that kind of clout. If this Eduardo can’t see that, he needs to get his eyes examined.”
“Do you suppose somebody’s going to start a company or sell stock or exploit his workers because of The Gladiator?” Annarita asked. Those were things capitalists did. She knew that much, if not much more.
“With the laws the way they are now, I’m not sure you could start a company. I’m pretty sure you can’t sell stock,” her father answered. “You’d have to be crazy to try, wouldn’t you? Who’d want to stick his neck out that way?”
“What am I supposed to tell the League?” That was Annarita’s real worry.
“Well, it depends,” her father said. “Do you want to get these people in trouble? If you do, I bet you can.”
“But I don’t, not really. Most of them are like Gianfranco—a bunch of guys who don’t get out much sitting around rolling dice and talking,” Annarita said. That made her father laugh. She went on, “What could be more harmless, really?”
She thought he would say nothing could. Instead, he looked thoughtful. “Well, I don’t know,” he said. “When the Bolsheviks started out, they were just a bunch of guys who didn’t get out much sitting around drinking coffee and talking. And look what happened on account of that.”
“You think a revolution—I mean, a counterrevolution—could start at The Gladiator?” If Annarita sounded astonished, she had a good reason—she was.
“Stranger things have happened,” Dr. Crosetti said.
“Is that so? Name two,” she told him.
He laughed again, and wagged a finger at her. He always said that when somebody claimed something stranger had happened. Annarita enjoyed shooting him with one of his own arrows. “What am I going to do with you?” he asked, not without admiration.
“When I was little, you’d say you would sell me to the gypsies,” she said. “Is that out?”
“I’m afraid so,” her father answered. “If I tried it now, they’d really buy you, and that wouldn’t be good.”
Gypsies still did odd jobs in the countryside, and sometimes in the city. When they saw a chance, they ran con games or just stole. Not even more than a hundred years of Party rule had turned them into good collectivized citizens. Annarita didn’t know how they dodged the Security Police so well, but they did.
“Who’s on the committee with you?” her father asked. “Will anybody else go to see The Gladiator in person?”
“Ludovico Pagliarone and Maria Tenace,” Annarita answered. “No, I don’t think they’ll go, not unless one of them knows somebody who plays there.”
“Will they listen to you because you were on the spot?”
“Maybe Ludovico will. Maria …” Annarita sighed. “Maria will just say to call the place reactionary without even thinking. She always does things like that. If there’s any chance it might be bad, she wants to get rid of it.”
“More Communist than Stalin,” her father murmured.
“What?” For a second, Annarita didn’t get it.
Dr. Crosetti explained: “Back in the old days, they would say, ‘More Catholic than the Pope,’ or sometimes, ‘More royal than the king.’ They used to say that in France a lot. Only one king there, not a lot of them the way there were in Italy before unification. But we still need a phrase like that for somebody who goes along with authority because it is authority.”
“Where did you find these things?” Annarita said. “I bet you were looking in places where you shouldn’t have.”
“And so? Who doesn’t?” Her father held up a hand before she could answer. “I’ll tell you who—people like your Maria, that’s who. They go through life with blinkers on, the way carriage horses used to.”
“You have to be careful when you come out with things like that,” Annarita said slowly.
“Well, of course!” her father said. “That’s part of growing up, learning how to be careful. I don’t think you’re going to inform on me.”
“I should hope not!” Annarita said. In school, they taught about children who informed on their parents or older siblings. The lessons made those kids out to be heroes. Annarita didn’t know anybody who thought they really were. No matter what the state did for you after you blabbed, it couldn’t give you back your family. And chances were none of the people to whom you informed would ever trust you after that, either. They had to know you would betray anybody at all, even them.
“Good,” her father said now, as if he hadn’t expected anything else—and no doubt he hadn’t. “You can talk to Ludovico, then. Maybe between the two of you, you’ll outyell this other girl, and nothing will happen. Sometimes what doesn’t happen is as important as what does, you know?”
Annarita hadn’t thought about that. It kept cropping up in odd moments when she should have been thinking about her homework for the rest of the night.
Gianfranco opened his algebra book with all the enthusiasm of someone answering the midnight knock on the door that had to be the Security Police. As far as he was concerned, their jails and cellars held no terrors worse than the problems at the end of each chapter.
He groaned when he got a look at these. They’d driven him crazy in middle school. Here they were again, harder and more complicated than ever. Train A leaves so much time and so many kilometers behind Train B. It travels so many kilometers an hour faster than Train B, though. At what time will it catch up? Or sometimes, how far will each train go before A catches B?
They weren’t always trains. Sometimes they were planes or cars or ships. But they were trains in the first question.
And, because they were trains, Gianfranco’s panic dissolved like morning mist under the sun. This was a problem right out of Rails across Europe. There, it involved squares on the board and dice rolls instead of kilometers and hours, but so what? He figured those things out while he was playing. Why couldn’t he do it for schoolwork?
Because it’s no fun when it’s schoolwork, he though
t. How could it not be fun, though, if it had to do with trains? He tried the problem and got an answer that seemed reasonable. On to the next.
The next problem had to do with cars. When Gianfranco first looked at it, it made no more sense than Annarita’s Russian—less, because everybody picked up a little Russian, like it or not. Then he pretended the cars were trains. All of a sudden, it didn’t seem so hard. He got to work. Again, the answer he came up with seemed reasonable.
There was a difference, though, between being reasonable and being right. He took the problems to his father, who was smoking a cigarette and reading the newspaper. “Can you check these for me?” he asked.
“I don’t know. What are you doing?” his father asked. Gianfranco explained. His father sucked in smoke. The coal on the cigarette glowed red. People said you were healthier if you quit smoking, but nobody ever told you how. His father shook his head and spread his hands. “Sorry, ragazzo. I remember going down the drain on these myself. Maybe you’re right, maybe you’re wrong, maybe you’re crazy. I can’t tell you one way or the other. I wish I could.”
“I’ll find out in class tomorrow.” Gianfranco didn’t look forward to that. But he still thought he had a chance of being right, and that didn’t happen every day in algebra. “Let me go back and do some more.”
“Sure, go ahead. Pick up as much of that stuff as you can—it won’t hurt you,” his father said indulgently. “But you can do all right without it, too. Look at me.” He stubbed out the cigarette, then thumped his chest with his right fist.
“Thanks anyway, Papa.” Gianfranco retreated in a hurry. He didn’t want to spend the rest of his life going to an office and doing nothing the way his old man did. Yes, his father had a medium-fancy title. He’d got it not because he was especially smart but because he never made enemies. But it still amounted to not very much. He’d said himself that they could train a monkey to do his job.
So what do you want to do, then? Gianfranco asked himself. He knew the answer—he wanted to run a railroad. How did you go about learning to do that? Figuring out when trains would come in probably was part of it.
Gianfranco muttered to himself, pretending airplanes were trains—very fast trains. His trouble was, he didn’t just want to run a railroad that had already been operating for 250 years. He wanted to start one and build it up from scratch, the way he did in the board game. How could you do that when it wasn’t the nineteenth century any more?
He sighed. You couldn’t. He was no big brain like Annarita, but he could see as much. What did that leave him? Two things occurred to him—working at the railroad the way it was now or starting some other kind of business and running it as if it were a nineteenth-century railroad.
He could almost hear Eduardo yelling at him. He could hear the midnight knock on the door, too, and the Security Police screaming that he was a capitalist jackal as they hauled him off to jail. Or maybe they wouldn’t bother waiting till midnight. Maybe they would just grab him at his business and take him away. For a crime as bad as capitalism, why would they waste time being sneaky?
But the way things were now, people just went through the motions. Gianfranco’s father wasn’t the only one. He was normal, pretty much. Everybody knew how things went. People made jokes about it. You heard things like, We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us. That was why you had to wait years for a TV set or a car. That was why crews had to come out to repair repairs half the time. That was why the elevator here hadn’t worked for so long, and might never again.
The people owned the means of production. They did here, they did in the Soviet Union, they did in Canada and Brazil, they did everywhere. What could be fairer than that? It kept things equal, didn’t it? Gianfranco nodded to himself. He’d learned his lessons well, even if he didn’t realize it just then.
Maria Tenace had a face like a clenched fist. “I say we condemn the reactionaries.” Her voice said she wasn’t going to take no for an answer. “They’re trying to corrupt people. The authorities need to make an example of them.”
“How do you know? Have you been to The Gladiator?” Annarita asked.
“What difference does that make?” Maria sounded honestly confused.
“Well, if you haven’t been there, how do you know?” Ludovico Pagliarone said.
“Because that’s what was reported at the Young Socialists’ League meeting,” Maria said. “It must be true.”
“If someone said the earth was flat at one of those meetings, would you believe it?” Annarita inquired.
“Don’t be silly. Nobody would say such a counterrevolutionary thing,” Maria declared.
Annarita didn’t understand how saying the earth was flat could be counterrevolutionary. She would have bet Maria didn’t, either. Maria just meant saying that was bad. It sounded more impressive when you used an eight-syllable word instead.
“I went over there yesterday afternoon,” Annarita said. “Their business license is in order. I looked. They have a bunch of people playing games in a back room, and they sell games and miniatures and books. They seemed pretty harmless to me.”
“Miniatures? The kind you can paint?” Ludovico asked.
“Sì, that’s right,” Annarita said.
“Maybe I ought to go over there,” he said. “Do they have any from the Roman legions?”
“I think I saw some.” Annarita wouldn’t have thought Ludovico knew Rome had ever had legions. People could surprise you all kinds of ways. She didn’t know how many times she’d heard her father say that. Ludovico didn’t seem real smart and didn’t have a lot of friends. Maybe he read history books for fun, though. How could you know till he showed you? He sure seemed interested now.
And Maria was getting angrier by the second. “I think the two of you want to cover up antistate activities,” she said.
“Like what?” Annarita asked. “Playing games isn’t antistate. Neither is painting lead centurions the size of my thumb.” She eyed Ludovico. Yes, he knew what a centurion was. You had to be interested in Roman legions to know that.
“Being right-wing deviationist is.” Maria sounded positive. She always sounded positive. She probably always was. She was one of those people who thought being sure and being right were the same thing.
The trouble was, Annarita wasn’t a hundred percent sure Maria was wrong. Some of the games at The Gladiator did seem to have rules only a capitalist could love. Some of the books they sold there sounded as if their authors felt the same way. And that Eduardo hadn’t exactly denied things. He’d just tried to say it was all pretend, not for real. But how true was that? How true could it be? Wasn’t he trying to dance around the truth?
Annarita remembered a Russian phrase: dancing between the raindrops without getting wet. One of Stalin’s commissars—was it Molotov or Mikoyan?—was supposed to have been able to do that. He’d dodged all the trouble that came his way … and if you worked for Stalin, lots of trouble came your way.
Because of Annarita’s own doubts about The Gladiator, she might have gone along with Maria in condemning the place. She might have, that is, if Maria weren’t so obnoxious. As things were, Annarita figured anything Maria didn’t like had to have something going for it.
Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism might be fine for analyzing historical forces. When it came to looking at how two people got along, or didn’t get along, that was a different story.
“I think the shop is harmless,” Annarita said. “And denouncing people isn’t a game. You don’t do it for fun.”
Maria did. Annarita could see it in her pinched, angry features. Getting even with anybody who dared act unorthodox in any way had to be her main joy in life. Annarita wondered whether she would denounce her husband if he stepped out of line in any way. She didn’t wonder long—she was sure Maria would.
Then she wondered who would marry Maria in the first place. But most women did find husbands, as most men found wives. Somebody else every bit as rigid as Maria might like her fine. When you got r
ight down to it, that was a really scary thought.
And, by disagreeing with her about The Gladiator, Annarita was making her an enemy. That was another scary thought. Still, if you let people like Maria ride roughshod over you, how could you keep your self-respect? You couldn’t, and what good were you without it? Not much, not as far as Annarita could see.
“I say The Gladiator is anti-Socialist and needs to be suppressed, and that’s what we should report to Filippo—to Comrade Antonelli, I mean.” Filippo wasn’t a Party member yet, but Maria didn’t care. She stuck her chin out—she wasn’t going to back down. She had the courage of her convictions. She would have been much easier to deal with if she didn’t.
As gently as Annarita could, she said, “You’re not the only one on the committee, Maria. We go by majority vote. That’s what the rules are.” Sometimes reminding her of the rules helped keep her in line. Sometimes nothing did.
This was going to be one of those times. Maria gave her a look that could have melted iron. Then she gave Ludovico Pagliarone another one. “You’re not going to let this—this Menshevik get away with being soft on deviationists, are you?”
“You can’t call me that! My doctrine’s as good as yours!” Annarita had to sound angry. If she accepted the name of the Bolsheviks’ opponents, she gave Maria a stick to hit her with. She wished she’d never, never volunteered for this committee.
And she anxiously watched Ludovico, trying to pretend all the while that she wasn’t doing any such thing. He was nice enough, but he had the backbone of a scallop. If Maria could frighten him, he’d go along with her no matter what he thought. Some people just wanted to get along, to stay out of trouble.
She didn’t like the way he gnawed at the inside of his lower lip. He was having to make up his mind, and he didn’t want to. He would leave somebody unhappy. Maria was meaner than Annarita, but Annarita was smoother. He had to be thinking how dangerous she could be if she set her mind to it.
The Gladiator Page 5
