If everybody had a computer like that, what would stop people from hooking all their computers together? They’d be able to figure out in an instant if somebody in the government was lying. And people in the government lied all the time. All those Five-Year Plans got overfulfilled again and again, yet somehow life never looked any better. The state didn’t wither away—it got stronger. And anyone who said out loud that the Emperor had no clothes discovered that, while the Emperor might be naked, he did have the Security Police.
If you kick up a fuss, they’ll get you, too, Gianfranco thought. But if he didn’t kick up a fuss, he’d never be free. He was damned if he didn’t, doomed if he did. He saw no way out.
Final exams were coming. Everybody at Hoxha Polytechnic started going crazy. Seniors got especially jumpy. How they did would tell the story of who got into the good universities and who didn’t. Anyhow, it would if they didn’t have the right connections. You could tell the people who did. They were the ones who could afford to smile and take it easy. Everybody else hated them.
Annarita was only a junior, so she wasn’t quite so frantic. She still wanted to do well. She had her own stubborn pride, and she knew her parents expected good marks from her. And, in spite of all the talking she’d done with Eduardo, she still took “from each according to his abilities” seriously. If she was able—and she was—she was supposed to do as well as she could.
She knew Gianfranco was also studying hard. He’d even turned down a couple of chances to play Rails across Europe. She hadn’t thought a new outbreak of the Black Death could make him do that.
Neither had Eduardo. When he wasn’t playing the railroad game with Gianfranco and her, he played chess with her father. He lost more often than he won, but he won often enough to keep him interested and playing. He fit in well with the Crosettis—he might almost have been a real cousin. If the Security Police weren’t after him, everything would have been fine.
When Annarita said as much one evening, her father looked up from his book. “That’s a big if, sweetheart.”
“Well, yes, but—” Annarita stopped, not sure how to go on.
“But they haven’t knocked on the door yet. That’s what you mean, isn’t it?” her father said.
“I guess it is,” she admitted sheepishly.
“That’s not a reason to relax,” he said. “If it’s anything, it’s a reason to be more careful. You and Gianfranco have done very well—and the proof is, nobody’s arrested us yet. You have to keep doing it, though, both of you.”
“We know,” Annarita said.
“I hope so,” her father said. “Do you really understand everything that’s at stake? We don’t have everything you wish we did. We aren’t as free as you wish we were. But we do have enough—more than enough, really. And nobody would come down on us as long as we didn’t stick our necks out. Now we’ve done it. If the Security Police do get us, we lose everything we’ve got. And you lose your future. That’s worst of all.”
It didn’t seem real to Annarita. Nothing after exams seemed real to her. That must have shown on her face, because her father laughed the saddest laugh she’d ever heard. “What is it?” she asked.
“I remember what it’s like not to think past day after tomorrow—next week at the latest,” he answered. “You think I don’t? I was like that once upon a time. Everybody is. You get older, though, you change. You’d better. If you don’t, you make a foolish grown-up—that’s for sure. You have to start looking further down the road.”
“How do you do that?” Annarita didn’t really believe she could do it if he told her how. She didn’t believe it, but she hoped.
“Experience,” her father said.
That made her angry. “Experience is what grown-ups say when they mean, ‘Go away, kid. Get lost.’”
Her father laughed again, this time with something closer to real amusement. “Well, sweetheart, you’ve got something there. Ten years ago, you were a little girl. Ten years ago, I was pretty much the same as I am now. I have a wider platform than you do. Only time can give you one like it.”
“Your hair had less gray in it,” Annarita said. “Pictures show that, anyway—you look about the same to me.”
“I had a little more hair, too.” Her father touched his temples, where it had receded. “You hadn’t given me so much gray then. These past few weeks, I’m surprised my hair hasn’t turned white.”
“Is it as bad as that?”
He shook his head. “It’s worse. If we get caught, all this is kaput. Kaput, you hear? Gone. Lost. Forever. You always get the dirty end of the stick after they let you out of camp. You’re just a zek after that, not a person any more. If they let you out. For something like this, they might not.”
“They don’t keep people forever.” Like anyone else, Annarita had a good notion of what happened after you vanished into the netherworld of the camps.
“No, they don’t.” Her father nodded, but he looked grim. “But they don’t always let them out, either. Sometimes people die in there. Heart failure, the death certificates say, or, Brain hemorrhage. A 9mm bullet can cause either one.”
Annarita bit her lip. Again like anyone else, she knew those things could happen. But she didn’t like to think about them. She especially didn’t like to think about them happening to her.
When she said so, her father’s mouth tightened. He didn’t get angry at her very often, but he did now. She’d disappointed him. “Anything that can happen can happen to you. If you don’t know that here and here”—he tapped his forehead, then his belly—“you don’t know anything.”
He was right, which didn’t make Annarita any happier. “What are we going to do?” she wondered out loud.
“You should have asked that when you brought your stray puppy home and asked if we could keep it,” her father said.
“Edu—Silvio’s no puppy!”
“No. He’s more dangerous than a puppy ever could be.”
“Why didn’t you send him away, then?”
“I probably should have.” Her father sighed. “But he made me too curious. He persuaded me he really isn’t from here, from this world, at all. I never imagined anyone could do that. It’s one reason I let him stay. And the other one is even simpler—it was already too late to kick him out.”
“Why?” Annarita said. “He carries a computer in his pocket, not a gun like a gangster. What could he do?”
“He could get caught by the Security Police, that’s what,” her father answered. “And after that, he could tell them he was here.”
“He wouldn’t do that!” she exclaimed.
“He wouldn’t want to, I’m sure. When they start squeezing, what you want has nothing to do with anything.” Her father looked and sounded very unhappy. “So they would find out he was here, and we didn’t turn him in. And not turning him in is as bad to them as sheltering him. So if I’m going to be hung, I might as well be hung for a sheep as for a lamb.”
Annarita eyed him. “All his talk about freedom has you going just like Gianfranco, doesn’t it?”
“I don’t want to admit that. I’m supposed to be too old and cynical to care about such things,” her father said. “But yes, I’m afraid it does. And I am afraid, because I can’t see how this is likely to end up well for anybody.”
“If he gets away, if he goes back to the home timeline, then it’s as if he were never really here,” Annarita said.
“If pigs had wings, we’d all carry umbrellas,” her father said.
That made her blink. He wasn’t usually so blunt. “Everything will be fine,” she said.
He got up from his chair, walked over, and kissed her on top of the head. “I wish I were seventeen again. Then I could close my eyes and all my problems would disappear just like that.” He snapped his fingers.
“I’m not an ostrich. I don’t stick my head in the sand,” Annarita said. “And if you think I do, you ought to listen to Gianfranco.”
“Boys are born radicals at that ag
e. They want Causes.” The way her father said it, she could hear the capital letter. He went on, “It makes them good soldiers, too. The captain says, ‘Take that hill for the country,’ and they go, ‘Yes, sir!’ instead of, ‘What? Are you nuts? I’ll get shot!’”
“Freedom is a good cause, sì?” Annarita said.
“One of the best,” her father answered. “But it’s also one of the ones most likely to get somebody shot.”
Nine
“Time!” the teacher said loudly. “Put your pencils down now. Do not mark any more answers on your tests. Pass your papers forward immediately.”
Gianfranco let out a long, loud, weary sigh. Most of the time, such an uncouth noise would have landed him in trouble. Now it was just one of a chorus. He waggled his wrist back and forth, trying to work out writer’s cramp. Something inside the wrist cracked as if it were a knuckle. He stared at it in dismay. It wasn’t supposed to do that … was it?
The last final. Everything was over for the year. Well, almost over. Everybody had to come back Monday to get report cards marked. Teachers would spend the weekend figuring out what everybody’s grades were. That was a lot of work, but Gianfranco didn’t worry about it. The only thing he worried about was what marks he’d end up with.
A year earlier, he wouldn’t have cared much about that. But when you started doing well, you wanted to do better. He wouldn’t have believed that before, but it turned out to be true.
After counting the exams, the teacher nodded. “I have all your papers,” he said formally. “You are dismissed.”
Again, there was more noise than usual as the students got up. Something in Gianfranco’s back popped, too. I’m wearing out, he thought. I need oiling or something.
As he walked toward the entrance to wait for Annarita, another thought crossed his mind. I’ll be a junior next year. Where did the time go? Hadn’t he been in primary school just a little while ago? No matter what he felt like, the answer was no.
Annarita got there less than a minute after he did. “How’d it go?” she asked.
He shrugged. “I’ll know for sure on Monday. It didn’t seem too bad, though.” He made as if to knock on wood. “How about you?” he said.
“I’m glad it’s over,” Annarita said. “I hope it turned out all right.” She always talked that way. Anybody who didn’t know her would think she was worried. Gianfranco knew better. She always came through.
“Want to go to a movie to celebrate finishing?” Gianfranco asked.
“We can do that,” Annarita answered. Gianfranco hoped that meant she wasn’t saying yes to be nice. Better than saying no, he thought. She went on, “What I want to do right now is go home and catch up on my sleep. That would be wonderful.”
“Sure, but do you have five years to do it in?” he said. She laughed, for all the world as if he were kidding. He knew how hard she worked.
They left Hoxha Polytechnic behind for another school year. She would be a senior when they came back in six weeks. She would have to worry about the university and the rest of her life. Gianfranco wasn’t ready for that yet. He wondered whether Annarita was.
Maria Tenace came up to Annarita and wagged a finger in her face. “You’ll never be president of the Young Socialists’ League!” she said. “Never!”
“I wasn’t really worried about it,” Annarita said.
“You were wrong about The Gladiator,” Maria continued, as if she hadn’t spoken. “Wrong! Wrong! Wrong!” She lovingly sang the word. “And you’re going to pay for it. Pay! Pay! Pay!” Then she waltzed off without giving Annarita a chance to answer.
“You sure know some nice people,” Gianfranco remarked.
“Sì. And I know Maria, too,” Annarita said.
That was funny and sad and true, all at the same time. “I hope she can’t do anything worse than keep you from being president,” Gianfranco said.
“I’m not even sure she can do that,” Annarita answered. “She probably means she’ll run against me, and everybody will be afraid to vote for me because I was wrong. Maybe yes, maybe no.” She waggled her hand. “She doesn’t realize she scares people to death herself. Fanatics never think they’re fanatics, but they are anyway.”
“If we could all see ourselves the way other people do …” Gianfranco said.
“There’s a poem about that in English.” Annarita frowned. “I read it for European lit. They translated it into a funny mountain dialect—the notes said the English was in dialect, too.”
He stared. “How do you remember stuff like that?”
“I don’t know. I just do.” Annarita stared, too, imitating his expression. He laughed. He must have looked pretty silly. “How come you don’t?” she asked.
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. “I 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 Grapes 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 Gianfranco 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 Chè serà, serà 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.
“Sì, 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.”
“You don’t know who my father is,” Abbaticchio warned. “He took down The Gladiator, so he can sure take you out.”
The Gladiator Page 16
