“By myself? Nothing,” Gianfranco said. “But if all the people united …”
“The Security Police would throw everybody into camps.” Annarita finished the sentence when Gianfranco’s voice trailed away.
He shook his head. “They couldn’t do it to everybody, not all at once. There aren’t enough camps for that. Not enough Security Policemen, either.”
“Well, in that case the Russians would say we’re trying to overthrow Socialism, and they’d invade,” Annarita said. “Either they’d build more camps or they’d kill enough people so the ones who are left would fit into the camps they’ve got.”
“But what if the Russian people united, too?” Gianfranco said.
Annarita stared at him. “You weren’t drinking wine at breakfast. I saw what you had: cappuccino, just like me.” Like most Italian kids their age, they did drink wine with dinner. Nobody here fussed about it, though people from northern Europe and America sometimes squawked.
“I was thinking about … freedom,” Gianfranco said. “That gets you drunk like too much vino, but you don’t come down again afterwards.”
“I guess not, to look at you,” Annarita said. “Be careful you don’t get in trouble once you’re in school.”
“I’ll try,” Gianfranco said.
A car went two wheels up on the sidewalk in front of them to let somebody off. It still blocked traffic. All the drivers behind the offender leaned on their horns. Some of them yelled at him, too. He ignored them. Annarita wasn’t much impressed. She saw things like that almost every day. Keeping Gianfranco out of trouble was more important—and more interesting. Now she could say what she needed to say: “All this talk about freedom. You must have been listening to Cousin Silvio.” In public, she wouldn’t call him Eduardo.
“Well, what if I was?” Gianfranco said. “He likes to talk, you know.”
He does not! But the hot retort never came out. If Annarita said something like that, Gianfranco would be sure she was sweet on Eduardo. And she wasn’t, not really. So all she did say was, “What else were you talking about?”
“Oh, stuff,” Gianfranco answered vaguely. Annarita wanted to clout him. She kept quiet and waited instead. It wasn’t easy, but she did it. When Gianfranco spoke again, a few steps later, he sounded almost like a gruff old man: “He said he wasn’t going to run off to Sicily with you.”
“I should hope not!” Annarita exclaimed. “It’s too hot down there in the summertime, and I wouldn’t want to have to try to understand that funny dialect.” She paused, too. “I suppose they think we talk funny, too.”
“Wouldn’t be surprised.” Gianfranco took a deep breath. He seemed to look every which way but right at her. “Maybe we could go to a movie or something one of these days before too long.”
“Maybe we could,” Annarita said. Nothing wrong with a movie. “It might be fun.”
Gianfranco lit up like a neon sign. He hopped in the air. He seemed so happy, Annarita wondered if he would come down. He did, of course. “Wonderful!” he said. “How about Friday night?”
“All right,” Annarita answered, and he lit up all over again. He didn’t seem so worried about freedom and overthrowing the Italian People’s Republic any more. He didn’t seem so worried about Eduardo, either, which was also good.
Would he have blamed Eduardo if Annarita told him she didn’t want to go out with him? She hoped she hadn’t said yes to keep him from blaming Eduardo. That was no reason to go to a movie with somebody.
What would I have done if Eduardo asked me? she wondered. After a moment, she shrugged. She didn’t know, and she didn’t seem likely to find out, either. Eduardo made a point—even stretched a point—of being a gentleman. And he was playing the role of her cousin.
Was that just as well, or was it a shame?
Before she could come close to finding an answer, they got to Hoxha Polytechnic. Then she had to worry about Russian prepositions instead. At least with Russian prepositions, you knew when you were right and when you were wrong. This other stuff? It wasn’t nearly so obvious.
Gianfranco wanted to use the bathroom mirror to comb his hair. He’d already used it twice, but that didn’t matter to him. He wanted to look perfect, or as close to perfect as he could. He was unhappily aware of the distance between the one and the other.
He couldn’t use the bathroom right now because Annarita was in it. His mother saw his glance toward the door and smiled at him. “She’ll be out soon,” she said. “She wants to look nice for you. That’s good.”
“Is it? I guess so.” To Gianfranco, Annarita already looked nice. Why did she need to do anything more?
But when she came out, she looked nicer. Gianfranco couldn’t have said how, but she did. He ducked in there, ran the comb through his hair again, and wished he wouldn’t have picked this exact moment to get a zit on his chin. He couldn’t do much about that, though.
He stuck the comb in his pocket and went out again. “Shall we go?” he said, trying to sound like someone who did this all the time.
“Sure.” Annarita seemed to take it for granted. Maybe that would help him do the same. He could hope so, anyway.
“Have fun, you two.” Eduardo sounded as if he meant it. Gianfranco hoped he did.
“Grazie, Cousin Silvio,” Annarita said.
She and Gianfranco walked down the stairs together. He wondered if his feet were touching the ground. When they got to the bottom, Annarita said, “It would be nice if the elevator worked. Coming down is easy, but going back up, especially when you’re tired … .” She shook her head.
“If somebody could make a nice profit fixing elevators, it would have been fixed a long time ago,” Gianfranco said.
She looked at him as if he’d just told a dirty joke. His ears got hot. Profit was evil—everybody learned that in school. But then she sighed. She looked around to make sure no one could overhear, then said, “Cousin Silvio tells me the same thing. It still feels wrong, though—know what I mean?”
“Sì,” he answered. “But what we’ve got doesn’t work the way it’s supposed to. If it did, the elevator would run. So shouldn’t we think differently?”
“I don’t know if we should think that different,” Annarita said.
“Why not?” he asked.
She gave a perfectly practical answer: “Because we’ll get in trouble with the Security Police if we make too much noise about profit. Look what happened to The Gladiator.”
“Somebody ought to do something about the Security Police,” Gianfranco said. “They just hold us back.”
Annarita stopped, right there outside the apartment building. “If you keep talking like that, I’m going back upstairs. It’s not safe to be around you. It’s not safe to be anywhere near you. Cut it out, all right?”
He wished he could tell her she was worrying too much. He wished he could, but he knew he couldn’t. “All right,” he said meekly. “Let’s go watch the movie.”
“That’s more like it,” Annarita said. “This other stuff … Do you want to end up a zek in a camp?”
There shouldn’t be zeks. There shouldn’t be camps. If Gianfranco said that, he’d just get in more trouble with Annarita, no matter how true it was. But people who couldn’t learn to keep their mouths shut were the kind who did end up in camps. So all he said was, “No,” which was also true. Annarita nodded. Not only was it true, it was the right answer—not always the same thing.
The theater was about three blocks from their apartment building. It was showing a remake of the great early Soviet film, Battleship Potemkin. Gianfranco had seen the black-and-white original—with Italian subtitles—in his history class. So had almost everybody. He knew Annarita had. Even though it was more than 150 years old, with acting ridiculously over the top, it still had the power of a punch in the face.
He bought tickets, then sodas and roasted chestnuts when he went inside. When he and Annarita sat down, other people nearby were already crunching away. “Do you think it will be a
s good as the first one?” he asked her—that was a safe question.
“Remakes hardly ever are,” she said. “People who do something the first time really mean it. The ones who do remakes are just copycats.”
Gianfranco thought about that for a little while, then nodded. “You say interesting things, you know?” he said.
She shrugged. The house lights dimmed. The newsreel came on. Halfway through a story about a dam going up in South America (and how many of the laborers building it were zeks?), something went wrong with the projector. The house lights came up again. “One moment, please!” someone called from the projectionist’s booth.
That moment stretched and stretched. People got restless. “Fix it, you bums!” a man with a deep voice yelled.
“Don’t you know how to fix it?” somebody else said. No one from up in the booth answered. Gianfranco feared that meant nobody up there did know.
After a few minutes where nothing happened, a wit sang out: “You must be the jerks who worked on my car!” He won a laugh.
The house lights went down again. Sarcastic cheers rose. The newsreel started once more—upside down. Billions of liters of water seemed ready to spill out from behind the dam. The audience booed and jeered. The newsreel stopped. The lights brightened. “Sorry about that!” a man called from the booth. People went on booing.
At last, after half an hour or so, they got it right and finished the newsreel. It probably got more applause at that theater than anywhere else in Italy. The remake of Battleship Potemkin started. It was a Russian film dubbed into Italian. All the effects were bigger and fancier than the ones in the original. It was in color. The actors didn’t ham it up. It should have been better than Eisenstein’s version, but Gianfranco found himself yawning, not getting excited.
“You’re right,” he whispered to Annarita. “It’s no big deal.”
“Well, so what?” she whispered back. “We got to watch an upside-down newsreel instead. That’s more interesting than the movie would have been even if it were good.”
She was right again. Gianfranco wouldn’t have thought of it like that, but he knew the truth when he heard it. He stopped being so disappointed in Battleship Potemkin and settled down to watch it—and to listen to it. All the boring speeches about the glorious Soviet Revolution, all the propaganda about the wicked Russian landowners and capitalists … Everything seemed different to him now that he knew Eduardo.
He wasn’t the only one yawning. People had a lot of practice tuning out propaganda. But being bored didn’t seem enough. What would happen if he yelled, We’d be better off if the Revolution failed!?
That was a dumb question. He knew what would happen. They’d grab him and haul him off to a camp. His father would get in trouble, too, for raising a subversive son. However much he wanted to come out and tell the truth, the price would be too high to pay.
Can we ever change things, then? he wondered. If they were ever going to, somebody would have to stand up and tell the government it was wrong. Somebody, yes, but who? Who would be that brave? Gianfranco wished he knew.
Eight
“Did you have a good time at the movie?” Eduardo asked after Annarita came back to her apartment.
“Well, the remake wasn’t anything much, but we had fun anyway.” She told him about the foul-up with the newsreel.
“That’s pretty good,” he said, smiling. “Or pretty bad, depending on how you look at things. They make movies over again in the home timeline, too, and most of the time you wish they didn’t.”
“Why do they, then?” Annarita said. “If you’re so free, why don’t you make new things all the time?”
“Because doing old, familiar ones over again makes the studios money,” Eduardo answered.
Annarita’s mouth twisted. “Profit doesn’t sound so wonderful, then.”
“It’s not perfect. Nothing’s perfect, far as I can see,” Eduardo said. “But it works better than this—most of the time, anyhow.”
“Have they remade Battleship Potemkin in the, uh, home timeline?” Annarita asked. Then another question occurred to her: “Do you even have Battleship Potemkin there?”
“We’ve got the original, sì,” Eduardo replied. “It dates from before the breakpoint. Up till then, everything’s the same in both alternates. But here, the Soviet Union won the Cold War. There, the United States did. The United States is still the strongest country in the home timeline. It throws its weight around sometimes, but it doesn’t sit on everybody else all the time the way the USSR does here.”
Annarita tried to imagine a world that had branched off from hers somewhere in the middle of the twentieth century. Why did the two alternates separate? Somebody decided something one way here, a different way over there. And this alternate turned out ordinary, and in that one … . In that one, they had computers that fit in your pocket. They had a way to travel between alternates.
They had freedom, too. Annarita had hardly known she missed it till Eduardo’s arrival made her think about it. She didn’t want to run up barricades and start an uprising the way Gianfranco seemed to, but she could tell what wasn’t there and should have been.
“And yes, they did make Potemkin again in the home timeline,” Eduardo said. “This was before I was born, you understand. The remake sank like a rock. When people watch now, they watch the original.”
“In theaters, you mean,” Annarita said.
“Well, there, too,” Eduardo said. “But we can get recorded disks with movies on them and watch on our TVs. Or we can pay a little and download the films from the Net and watch them on our computers.”
“You showed me that before,” Annarita said. “I still don’t see how you can put a whole movie, let alone lots of movies, on a little thing like the one in your pocket.”
He grinned at her. “Easy as pie. You could do it here, too—not as well, but you could. You know enough. Your governments won’t let you, though. Anything that spreads information around so easily is dangerous to them.”
Annarita found herself nodding. In a country that registered typewriters like guns and kept computers under lock and key for the trusted elite, the idea that everybody could own a computer and use it all kinds of ways had to seem like anarchy loosed upon the world. But that wasn’t the main thing on her mind. “You’ve just let me see little bits of the movies from your home timeline, to show that they weren’t from here,” she said. “Could I watch a whole one?”
“I’m supposed to tell you no,” he answered. “You’re not supposed to know what things are like there. But sometimes you’ve got to bend the rules. And so …” He pulled the little box from his pocket and told it to display its screen. Annarita had to lean forward to see well. It wasn’t like watching a movie in the theater, or even on TV.
The movie was called The Incredibles. It wasn’t like anything Annarita had ever seen before, or even imagined. It wasn’t live action, but it wasn’t exactly a cartoon, either. “How do they do that?” she asked partway through.
“More computers,” Eduardo said. “This one’s ninety years old. It’s a classic, sure, but they can do a lot more now.”
She wasn’t fussy. The Incredibles might seem old-fashioned to him, but it was thousands of kilometers ahead of anything people here were doing. And it was a good movie, no matter how they did it. It was funny, and the plot made sense. The writers didn’t lose track of details, the way they did too often here.
When Annarita remarked on that, Eduardo nodded. “It happens in the home timeline, too. Some people are stupid. Some people are lazy. Some are greedy, and out for quick money. But I bet it happens more here, because there’s less competition. Bad movies here don’t bomb. They just bore people over and over again.”
“Well, you’re right.” Annarita remembered how many times she’d seen some movies. The authorities put them out there, and they didn’t put anything else out there opposite them. If you wanted to go to a movie, you went to one of them. “They call them classics.”
<
br /> “That would be fine if they really were,” Eduardo said. “The original Battleship Potemkin is—no arguments. But a lot of them are just turkeys from the Propaganda Ministry.”
“Turkeys?” Annarita needed a second to figure that out. Maybe it was slang in his home timeline, but it wasn’t here. When she got it, she laughed. “You know what else was amazing in The Incredibles?”
“No, but you’re going to tell me, so that’s all right.” Eduardo could tease without making it sting. From everything Annarita had seen, that was a rare talent.
“I am going to tell you,” she agreed. “All those houses. Rows and rows of houses, with lots of middle-class people—well, middle-class cartoon people—living in them. Even though the movie is animated, it’s based on something real, isn’t it?”
“Sì,” Eduardo said. “But it’s based on the United States, where they have more room than they do here. And the United States had more room at the start of the twenty-first century than it does now. But Italy was mostly apartments even then—only rich people had houses.”
“Rich people.” Annarita said the words as if they were almost obscene. And, in the Italian People’s Republic, they were. “We don’t have rich people here.” She spoke with more than a little pride.
Eduardo wasn’t impressed. “You ought to have rich people. Rich people aren’t what’s wrong. Poor people are. Compared to the way people live in the home timeline, everybody here is poor.”
“You can say that,” Annarita sniffed. Yes, she took pride in her country the way it was. Who wouldn’t? It was hers. Inside, though, she feared Eduardo was right. If everybody in his world had a pocket computer, who could guess what else people there had? He’d talked about fasartas, and she didn’t even know just what they did.
Instead of reminding her of that, he took a different tack: “You know what you have instead of rich people?”
“What?” she asked suspiciously.
“Apparatchiks,” he said.
The Gladiator Page 14
