“Well, Ludovico?” Maria demanded.
“Well …” His voice broke, so that he sounded eleven years old at the end of the word. He blushed furiously. “Well …” he said again, and stayed on the same note all the way through. That seemed to encourage him. “Well, it doesn’t seem to me the place is doing any harm, Maria. Annarita’s been there to look it over, and you haven’t. I think we can leave it alone for now. We can always condemn it if it gets out of line later on.”
“Two to one,” Annarita said. “So decided. I’ll write up the report we submit to the League.”
“I’m going to turn in a minority report, and it will tell the truth about you people and your backsliding. You’ll see.” Maria didn’t even try to hide how furious she was. “This isn’t over yet, and don’t you think it is. I’ll get that den of running dogs shut down if it’s the last thing I ever do.” She stormed out of the classroom where they were meeting. The door didn’t slam. Annarita wondered why not.
Ludovico said, “She’ll make trouble for us. Maybe it would have been easier to do what she wanted. It wouldn’t have hurt anybody we know.”
“Yes, it would. I have friends who go to The Gladiator,” Annarita answered. “Besides, if you let people like that start pushing you around, they’ll never stop. Don’t you think we did the right thing?”
“I guess so.” Ludovico didn’t sound sure—not even a little bit. He was a weak reed—he would break and stick your hand if you depended on him too much. But he’d backed Annarita this time, anyhow. And he told her why: “I will have to go over there myself. If they have Roman miniatures, I want to get some.”
So principles didn’t matter to him. He’d gone along because he didn’t want to lose a chance to buy little Roman soldiers. What did that say? That he was human, Annarita supposed. Wasn’t it better to let yourself be swayed by something small and silly than to act like Maria, the ideological machine? Annarita thought so. That probably meant she made an imperfect Communist. If it did, she wouldn’t lose any sleep over it.
“I’ll write up the report for Filippo,” she said. “You’ll sign it, too?”
“I guess so,” Ludovico said again, even more reluctantly than before. “Do I have to?” He didn’t want his name on anything that could come back to haunt him later on.
But Annarita said, “Yes, you have to. You’re part of the committee. You voted this way. Either you sign my report or you sign Maria’s. And what do you think will happen to Maria one of these days?”
“Maybe she’ll end up General Secretary of the Italian Communist Party,” Ludovico said. Annarita winced, but she couldn’t tell him he was wrong, because he wasn’t. People with Maria’s kind of single-minded zeal could rise high. But he went on, “More likely, though, she’ll get purged.”
“That’s what I think, too,” Annarita said. Most Communists were people just like anybody else. Maria had a knack for getting everyone around her angry. Odds were she’d end up paying for it—and never understand why nobody liked her, even though she was (in her own mind) right all the time. “So which will it be? Mine or Maria’s?”
“Yours.” Ludovico wasn’t happy, but he saw he couldn’t get away with pretending none of this had anything to do with him.
“Bene.” Annarita smiled at him, and he lit up like a flashlight. Just acting friendly was one more thing Maria would never think to do.
Comrade Donofrio passed back the algebra homework. When he gave Gianfranco his paper, he said, “Please see me after class for a moment, Mazzilli.”
Gianfranco didn’t follow him for a second. The algebra teacher spoke a French-flavored dialect of Italian that sounded peculiar in Milanese ears. When Gianfranco did get it, he gulped. Had he botched things again? “Sì, Comrade Donofrio,” he said, no matter how much he wanted to say no.
“Grazie.” The teacher walked on.
Only then did Gianfranco look down to see how he’d done. There was his score, written in red—100%. He blinked, wondering if he was seeing straight. He hadn’t got all the problems right on a math assignment since … He couldn’t remember his last perfect score on a math paper. He wondered if he’d ever had one before.
And he wondered why Comrade Donofrio wanted to see him. What could be better than a perfect paper?
He tried to follow along as the teacher went through today’s material. It didn’t make as much sense as he wished it did. Could he get another perfect homework paper? He had his doubts, but he hadn’t expected even one.
When the other students left the room, Gianfranco went up to the teacher and said, “You wanted to see me, Comrade?”
“That’s right, Mazzilli.” Comrade Donofrio nodded. “You did very well on the last assignment. Did you have any, ah, special help with it?”
A light went on in Gianfranco’s head. He thinks I cheated, he realized. But he said, “No, Comrade,” and shook his head.
“Well, let’s see how you do on another problem, then,” Comrade Donofrio said.
“All right.” Gianfranco didn’t know what else he could say. He just hoped he didn’t make a mess of this one. If he did, the algebra teacher would be sure he’d had somebody else do the homework for him. If I got good grades all the time, he wouldn’t suspect me. But he didn’t get good grades all the time. He usually didn’t care enough about them to work hard. Thanks to the game, he’d got interested in these problems.
Comrade Donofrio pulled a book off his desk. Maybe it was the algebra book he’d used when he was in high school. It looked like an old book, and he wasn’t a young man. He flipped through it till he found the page he wanted. “Here. Let’s see you do problem seventeen.”
Gianfranco looked at it. It was a train problem, so he didn’t have to pretend. But it was more complicated than the ones he’d done the night before. Just a lot of steps, he told himself. You’ve done them in other problems. Now you need to do them all at once.
Instead of numbers and times, he tried to picture squares on the board and dice rolls. It helped. He also tried not to do anything dumb, like multiplying seven times six and getting thirty-five, which had messed him up for fifteen minutes on one of the homework problems.
If you just kept at it, this problem wasn’t that bad. He looked up and gave Comrade Donofrio the answer: “Four hours twenty minutes, 390 kilometers.”
The teacher grunted. Then he worked the problem himself on a piece of scratch paper. He was much quicker and more confident about attacking it than Gianfranco was. When he got done, his bushy eyebrows jumped. “You’re right!” He sounded surprised. No—he sounded amazed.
Gianfranco grinned like a fool. He wanted to turn cartwheels, right there in the classroom. “I really can do them!” He was telling himself at least as much as he was telling Comrade Donofrio.
“Well, so you can.” Yes, the algebra teacher looked and sounded as if he didn’t want to believe it. “I gave you a hard one. Let me see your work.”
“Here you are, Comrade.” Gianfranco gave him the paper where he’d scribbled.
Comrade Donofrio studied it. Still reluctantly, he nodded. “Your method is correct, no doubt about it. If you did so well on the rest of your papers, you would have a much higher mark in this course. Why have you mastered these problems and not the others?”
“I think it’s because of Rails across Europe,” Gianfranco said.
He waited for the teacher to ask him what the devil that was. Instead, Comrade Donofrio looked astonished all over again. “You play that game, too?”
“Sì, Comrade,” Gianfranco said after he picked his chin up off his chest. “But … I’ve never seen you at The Gladiator.”
“No, and you won’t,” Comrade Donofrio said. “But a friend and I play every Saturday afternoon. We play, and we drink some chianti, and we talk about how to make the world a better place.”
“And how do you make it a better place?” Gianfranco asked.
Comrade Donofrio actually smiled. Gianfranco hadn’t been sure he could. “Well, t
he chianti helps,” he said.
“If—” But Gianfranco stopped. He’d been about to say something like, If the world ran more the way the game does, that might help. Eduardo would call him a fool if he spoke up like that, and Eduardo would be right. Why should he trust Comrade Donofrio? Because he got one algebra problem right? Because they both enjoyed the same game? Those weren’t good enough reasons—not even close.
“You’d better go,” the teacher said. “You’ll be late to your next class if you don’t hustle.” As Gianfranco headed for the door, Comrade Donofrio murmured, “Rails across Europe? Who would have imagined that?”
Since Gianfranco was at least as surprised about his algebra teacher as Comrade Donofrio was about him, he didn’t say anything. But I got the problem right! he thought as he hurried down the hall.
Annarita had a class with Filippo Antonelli. She gave him her report on The Gladiator, saying, “This is what the committee decided.” Actually, it was what she’d decided, and she’d got Ludovico to go along. She was beginning to suspect a lot of things in the world looked that way.
“Grazie,” Filippo said, putting the report into his binder. “Maria Tenace already gave me her minority report. She’s not very happy with you or Ludovico.”
“She’s never very happy with anybody,” Annarita answered. That was certainly true. “She got outvoted, and she should have.”
“I looked at her report,” said the head of the school’s Young Socialists’ League. “She’s … very vehement.”
“She’s throwing a tantrum,” Annarita said. “If she weren’t doing it in committee work, somebody would send her to bed without supper. Just what she deserves, too, if you want to know what I think.”
“Well, yes.” But Filippo laughed nervously. “Even so, she’s dangerous to cross, because she knows other people who think the same way she does.”
What was that supposed to mean? Annarita feared she knew—he was saying Maria had connections with the Security Police, or somebody like that. “What should we have done, then? Said this place was corrupt when it isn’t?” she asked, thinking, I hope it isn’t, anyway. If it is, I’ve given Maria enough rope to hang me. She went on, “That wouldn’t be right. Think about what could happen to the people who work there—and to the people who just play there. Do you think they’re all right-wing obstructionists who get together to plot how to bring back capitalism and exploit the workers?”
“No, of course not,” Filippo said, which proved he was still in touch with reality. “I know some kids from this school go there. In fact, I know a couple of people who do. Don’t you?”
“Sì,” she said. If he asked her who, she intended to duck the question. What he knew, he might have to report one of these days. Yes, he led the Young Socialists’ League. Yes, he would probably end up with a job in the government, and one of the things the government did was make sure the Italian people didn’t get out of line. Even so, he understood how the system worked. As long as he didn’t officially know something, he wasn’t responsible for doing anything about it. And so he stayed away from the question that would have led to knowing.
When Annarita didn’t name any names, Filippo just nodded and said, “Well, there you are.”
“Do you think this report will be the end of it?” Annarita asked.
“I sure hope so,” he answered. “And I hope you’re right. If you turn out to be wrong, if people at The Gladiator really are messing with the wrong kind of politics, Maria won’t let you forget it. She won’t let you get away with it, either.”
A nasty chill of fear ran up Annarita’s spine. Filippo was bound to be right about that. She didn’t let him see that she was worried. If she had, it would have been the same as admitting she wasn’t so confident about the report. “What could they be doing there?” she said.
“I don’t know of anything. I guess you don’t know of anything, either,” Filippo answered. “Just hope you’re right, that’s all. I hope you’re right, too, because I’m accepting your report, not Maria’s. Don’t make the League look bad.”
Don’t make me look bad, he meant. Once he did accept the report, his reputation would be on the line with it, too. The person at the top was responsible for what the people in the organization did.
“I won’t, Filippo,” Annarita told him, responding to everything under the words as well as what lay on the surface.
“I didn’t think you would,” he said. “You’ve got good sense. After I graduate, are you going to head up the league yourself?”
“I’ve thought about it.” Annarita knew it would look good on her record. “Maybe I’ve got too much good sense to want all the trouble, though, you know?”
“Sì. Capisco.” He nodded. “I ought to get it. Most of this year’s been pretty easy, but when it gets ugly, it gets ugly.” He smiled a crooked smile. “I’ll bet you’d say yes if Maria were graduating with me.”
“Maybe I would.” Annarita smiled, too. Filippo was acting nicer than he usually did. “But there’s bound to be at least one person like that every year, isn’t there?”
“Well, I haven’t seen a year when we didn’t have one,” Filippo admitted. “Pierniccolo, two years ahead of me …” He rolled his eyes. “His father really is a captain in the Security Police, so he had a head start.”
“He’ll probably end up with a fancy car and a vacation home on the beach by Rimini,” Annarita said. Going to the Adriatic for the summer, or even for a bit of it, was every Milanese’s dream. Not all of them got to enjoy it. Her family and the Mazzillis went, but they stayed in a hotel, not a place of their own. A red-hot Communist from a Security Police family was bound to have the inside track for things like that.
“I can’t help but think …” Filippo Antonelli didn’t finish. That he didn’t spoke volumes all by itself. He’d started to say something unsafe and thought better of it. He shook his head. “Let it go.”
“I understand,” Annarita said. Both their smiles were rueful. People got so they automatically watched their tongues. Most of the time, you hardly even noticed you were doing it. Every once in a while, though … Annarita wondered what it would be like to say whatever she had on her mind without worrying that it would get back to the Security Police.
Somewhere in a police file drawer sat a folder with her name on it. Whatever word informers brought on her went in there. Maria might well go to the trouble of writing out a denunciation. All the same, Annarita didn’t think the folder would be very thick. She didn’t go out of her way to cause trouble. Nothing the authorities had, wherever they got it from (and the informers you didn’t know about, the ones who seemed like friends, could be more dangerous than out-and-out foes like Maria), would make large men in ill-fitting suits knock on her door in the middle of the night.
She hoped.
“I wish—” she began, and then she stopped.
“What?” Filippo asked.
“Nothing,” Annarita said, and then, “I’d better head for home.”
As she walked out of Hoxha Polytechnic, she knew she’d been right on the edge of saying something really dumb. She shook her head. That wasn’t right. She’d been on the edge of saying something risky. Saying risky things was dumb, but what she almost said wasn’t dumb at all. She sure didn’t think so, anyhow.
I wish it weren’t like this. I wish we could speak freely. I wish the Security Police would leave us alone. I wish there were no Security Police.
If she did say something like that, what would happen? She’d get labeled a counterrevolutionary. She’d get taken somewhere for what they called reeducation. If she was lucky, they’d let her out after a while. Even if they did, though, her chances for making it to the top would be gone forever.
If she wasn’t so lucky, or if they thought she was stubborn, she’d go to a camp after reeducation. She’d probably only get five years, ten at the most—she was still young, so they’d give her the benefit of the doubt. But she’d stay under suspicion, under surveillance, the r
est of her life.
Just for saying people ought to be free of the Security Police. For saying people ought to be free, period.
That’s not right, she thought. It really isn’t. She looked around in alarm, as if she’d shouted it as loud as she could. She hadn’t, of course, but she worried all the way home anyway. Maybe she really was a counterrevolutionary after all.
Four
“You’re helping me in school,” Gianfranco told Eduardo the next time he walked into The Gladiator.
“Don’t say that.” The clerk thrust out the index and little fingers of his right hand, holding the other two down with his thumb—a gesture against the evil eye. “Who’d come in here if he thought we were educational?”
“But you are. What would you call it?” Gianfranco pointed to the shelves full of books.
“That stuff?” Eduardo shook his head. “That’s only to help people play the games better. Games are just games. How can they teach you anything?”
Gianfranco might not be sharp in school. But he could hear irony, even if he didn’t always call it by its right name. “You’re trying to fool me,” he said now. “Lots of people have learned lots of things from your books.”
“Now you know our secret,” Eduardo whispered hoarsely. “And do you know what happens to people who find out?”
“Tell me,” Gianfranco said, curious in spite of himself. Eduardo used another gesture, with thumb and forefinger—he aimed an imaginary pistol at Gianfranco. “Bang!” he said.
Even though Gianfranco laughed, he wasn’t a hundred percent comfortable doing it. Eduardo was joking—Gianfranco thought Eduardo was joking—but he sounded a little too serious. If The Gladiator had a real secret, he might do everything he could to keep it.
How much was that? How much could people at a little shop like this do if somebody powerful—say, the Security Police—came down on them? Gianfranco’s first thought was, Not much. But after a moment, he started to wonder. The Young Socialists’ League at Hoxha Polytechnic couldn’t be the first set of zealots to notice them. They were still here, though. That argued they had ways of protecting themselves.
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