But Gianfranco had more urgent things on his mind. “Is Alfredo here yet?” he asked.
Eduardo grinned. “Eager, aren’t we?”
“I don’t know about you, but I sure am,” Gianfranco answered, grinning back. “I know he’s tough, but if I beat him, I make the finals, and I’ve never come close before. That would be a big deal, right?”
“If you think it would, then it would.” In a sly voice, Eduardo went on, “Would you get that excited about finishing in the top two in your class?”
“I don’t think so!” Gianfranco said. “Are you going to go all Stakhanovite on me? I thought I could get away from all that stuff as soon as I left school.”
“You’re probably working harder here than you are there,” the clerk said.
“Yes,” Gianfranco said, and then, in the same breath, “No.”
“Which is it?” Eduardo asked. “You can’t have that one both ways, you know.”
“Maybe I try harder here than I do in school,” Gianfranco said. “I wouldn’t be surprised. But this isn’t work, you know what I mean? I want to come here. I have fun here. Going to school …” He shook his head. “It’s like going to a camp. You do it because you have to, not ’cause you want to. They make you do things, and they don’t care if you don’t care about them. You’ve got to do ’em anyway.” He eyed Eduardo. “Does that make any sense to you?”
“Some, maybe, but not as much as you think it does,” Eduardo answered. “You’ve never been inside a camp—I know that. But do you know anybody who has?”
“The janitor at our building—he’s a zek, I’m pretty sure,” Gianfranco said. The word for a camp inmate sounded about as un-Italian as anything could. Just about every European language had borrowed it from Russian, though. There wasn’t a country without camps these days, and there wasn’t a country without people who’d done their terms.
“Well, ask him whether he’d rather do algebra and lit or chop wood and make buildings and starve,” Eduardo said. “See what he tells you.”
“I hear what you’re saying. But school still makes you do stuff you don’t care about and you don’t want to do,” Gianfranco said. “That’s what I don’t like.”
“Some of that stuff, you end up needing it,” Eduardo said. “You maybe don’t think so now, but you do.”
“Oh, yeah? How much algebra have you done since you got behind that counter?” Gianfranco asked.
Eduardo looked wounded, which made Gianfranco think he’d scored a hit. But the clerk said, “All right, so I don’t have to know X equals twenty-seven. Even so, algebra and your languages make you think straight. You need that, especially with some of the other stuff they put you through.”
Which other stuff did he mean? Literature? History the way schools taught it? Dialectical materialism and Marxist philosophy? That was how it sounded to Gianfranco. But he couldn’t ask Eduardo to say more, not without seeming to want to entrap him. And Eduardo couldn’t say more on his own, not without asking to get denounced.
Before Gianfranco could figure out a way around his dilemma, the bell over the front door rang. In walked Alfredo, with his graying mustache. He looked rumpled and smelled of tobacco smoke. “Ciao, Eduardo,” he said, and then, grudging Gianfranco a nod, “Ciao.”
“Ciao,” Gianfranco answered.
“Shall we do it?” Alfredo didn’t sound excited or anything. He just sounded as if he wanted to get Gianfranco out of the way so he could go on to something serious. It was intimidating.
After a moment, Gianfranco wondered if it wasn’t intimidating on purpose. If it was an act … If it was an act, it was a good one. He made his own nod as casual as he could, as if he knew he was a tough guy, too. “Sì,” he said, sounding almost bored. “Let’s.”
Eduardo had heard him being all bubbly before. The clerk had to know he was faking his cool now. But Eduardo didn’t let on. He played fair—and why not? The Gladiator got the same fee no matter who won.
Gianfranco and Alfredo went into the back room. Other games were already going there. The Gladiator had games going from the minute it opened till the time when the clerks kicked everybody out so they could close up. “Good luck,” Gianfranco said as the two of them sat down.
Alfredo looked surprised. He seemed to have to make himself nod in return. “Thanks,” he said. “You, too.” He couldn’t keep himself from adding, “It’s a game of skill, though.”
“Well, sure,” Gianfranco said. “That’s what makes it fun.” Alfredo sent him a measuring stare. Gianfranco felt under the microscope. Part of the skill in the game was figuring out how the guy on the other side of the board thought.
They rolled for first build. That was luck, like seeing who went first in a chess game. Gianfranco outrolled Alfredo, so he got to start. Against some players, it wouldn’t have mattered one way or the other. Against Alfredo, he figured he needed every edge he could get.
He would have expanded faster against some players. If some people saw you get a big railroad net in a hurry, they lost heart. Gianfranco played a more careful game against Alfredo. Somebody who knew what he was doing would wait till you got overextended, then attack your weak routes, drive you out of cities where you didn’t have a strong grip, and take them over for himself.
Alfredo played as if Gianfranco weren’t there. That was intimidating, too. It said he thought he could do whatever he pleased, and that Gianfranco didn’t have a chance to stop him.
Their first clash came over Turin. The northern Italian city—Milan’s rival in everything from style to soccer—made engines you could ship to Moscow for a nice profit. Alfredo got there first. But Gianfranco had a route from Copenhagen to Turin, and Danish butter did well there. He used the profit from the first load to buy a stronger, faster engine to bring in more. And he built toward Moscow himself.
Alfredo did everything he could to throw Gianfranco out of Turin. Nothing worked. Gianfranco hung on. After a few turns, he started to prosper. Once, when he was deep in thought about whether he could move more tourists through Turin and build up a hotel business there, he happened to catch Alfredo studying him again. The older gamer looked more thoughtful than he had when they started.
I can play with this guy, Gianfranco thought. I really can, and he knows it, too. He had no idea whether he would win or lose. It was still much too early to tell. But, in a way, whether he won or lost hardly mattered. Alfredo was one of the best around. Everybody knew that. And Gianfranco was holding his own against him.
If I can play against Alfredo, I can play against anybody. Gianfranco grinned. He’d come as far as he could—he’d come as far as anyone could—with Rails across Europe. That made him proud. Then it made him sad. Once you’d taken the game as far as it would go, what else could you do?
“We are lucky today, class,” Comrade Montefusco said in Russian. “Two Russians from the delegation in Milan to promote fraternal Socialist cooperation and trade are going to stop by the class. You will get to practice your Russian with native speakers.”
Annarita nodded. Talking with someone who’d grown up speaking a language was the best way to learn it. She grinned. It sure was a chance she hadn’t had when she was studying Latin!
The Russian teacher looked at his watch, then at the clock on the wall, then at his watch again. “They’re supposed to be here now, in fact.” He sighed. “But one thing I found when I studied in Moscow—Russians are often late. I know the Germans say the same thing about us … .”
Everybody laughed. Germans had made fun of Italian inefficiency even when the two countries were allies against Russia in the Great Patriotic War. The next time an Italian cared about a German opinion would be the first.
“But Russians are often really late,” Comrade Montefusco went on. “What do you suppose this has to do with the way the Russian verb works?”
Along with the rest of the class, Annarita blinked. That wasn’t the kind of question they usually got. Almost everything was right or wrong, true or false
, yes or no, memorizing. With those questions, deciding what a student knew was easy. This? This made her think in a way she wasn’t used to doing in school. Some of the kids looked horrified. They didn’t like anything different from what they were used to. A little to her own surprise, she found she did.
Hesitantly, she raised her hand. It was the first one up even though she hesitated. The teacher pointed at her. “Comrade, isn’t it because the Russian verb isn’t so good at describing when something happened in relation to now or in relation to some other time? There’s just finished action or unfinished action. The Russian verb to be doesn’t even have a present tense. You can’t say I am in Russian, only I was or I will be.” She’d been amazed and dismayed when she discovered that.
Comrade Montefusco didn’t wear a smile very often, but he beamed now. “Sì,” he said. “Very good! That’s just right. Ever since the glorious October Revolution, the Russians have tried to run more by the clock, the way Western Europe and America do. I have to say it hasn’t worked too well. Their own language fights against them.”
“Comrade, why is it the glorious October Revolution when it happened in November?” a boy asked. “Did their verbs make the Revolution late, too?”
The students laughed. Comrade Montefusco didn’t. “No,” he answered. “The Tsars were so reactionary, they were still using the old-fashioned Julian calendar, and it was out of phase with the sun and with the rest of the world. The Soviet Union brought in the Gregorian calendar and even improved it, though no one will see a difference between theirs and ours till the year 2700.” He paused. “Since our distinguished guests aren’t here, let’s get on with our regular lessons.”
They’d just got well into the homework on prepositions when the two Russians breezed into the classroom. They didn’t apologize for being late. They didn’t seem to notice they were. They both looked old to Annarita’s eyes. The man had to be past forty, and the woman wasn’t far from it. But they had on Italian clothes not much different from those Annarita and her classmates wore when they weren’t in uniform. It made him look stupid and her look cheap. She wore too much perfume, too.
And the way they talked! Comrade Montefusco taught the class proper grammar and the best Moscow pronunciation. If they were going to learn Russian, he said, they should learn it right. The two real, live Russians couldn’t have set things back further if they were trying to do it on purpose. The man’s accent made him sound like a mooing cow. He stretched out all his O’s and swallowed most of the other vowels. The woman sounded more like a Muscovite, but her mouth was so full of peppery-sounding slang that Annarita could hardly follow her. And some of what Annarita couldn’t understand made the teacher’s ears turn red.
“Comrades, do you have any suggestions for students learning your language?” Comrade Montefusco asked. He was careful to keep his own pronunciation and grammar as fine as usual.
Both Russians understood him well enough. “Stoody hard. Woork hard,” the man said. “And yoo’ll gooo fur.”
The woman winked at the Russian teacher. “Dmitri’s right,” she said. “And having a pal on the left never hurt anything, either.”
Annarita did understand that bit of slang, and wished she didn’t. In Russian, doing things on the right was the legal way, the proper way. The left was the bribe, the black market, the underworld … all the things the glorious Revolution was supposed to have wiped out but hadn’t.
These were the representatives of the greatest Communist republic in the world? Annarita knew Russians weren’t supermen and -women, but seeing them with such obvious feet of clay still hurt. And they didn’t really want to have anything to do with the class. Why are they here, then? Annarita wondered. But she didn’t need to be Sherlock Holmes to find the answer to that. Because their boss told them to show up, that’s why.
They’d come late, and they left early. When the door closed behind them, everyone in the class seemed to sigh at the same time. If any of the students had any illusions about Russians left, that pair would have shattered most of them.
Comrade Montefusco sighed, too. “Comrade Mechnikov”—the man—“comes from southern Russia, near the Volga,” he said. “That accent is common there. We have different dialects here, too—think how much trouble you can have talking with someone from Naples or Sicily.”
He wasn’t wrong. Those southern dialects of Italian were so different, they were almost separate languages. Even so … Someone else said it before Annarita could: “The way he talked made him sound stupid. I don’t know if he is, but he seemed like it.”
“I know.” The Russian teacher spread his hands, as if to say, What can you do? “For whatever it’s worth, people in Moscow feel the same way about that accent.”
“And what about Comrade Terekhova?” Annarita asked. “Am I wrong, Comrade Montefusco, or did she sound like a zek who’d just finished her term?”
“I’m afraid she did.” Comrade Montefusco looked even more unhappy than he had before. “There’s a whole other side to Russian—mat’, they call it. It’s more than slang. It’s almost a dialect of its own, and it’s based on … well, on obscenity.” He spread his hands again. “The more you deal with Russians, the more you hear it. And yes, it thrives in camps.”
“Can you teach us?” a boy asked eagerly. He wasn’t a very good student, but he sure seemed to want to learn how to be gross in Russian.
But the teacher shook his head. “Foreigners shouldn’t use mat’, or not very much. You almost have to be born to it to do it right.”
“What else shouldn’t foreigners do?” a girl asked. It was a legitimate question—and it was a lot more interesting than which prepositions meant what with nouns in which cases.
“Don’t try to drink with Russians,” Comrade Montefusco said. “I know most of you drink wine at home. I know you’ve been doing it since you were bambini. That’s fine. Don’t try to drink with Russians anyway, not unless you keep a spare liver in your pocket. They have more practice than you do. They have more practice than anybody.”
“Why do they need to drink so much?” someone else asked. “They rule the roost.”
The Russian teacher looked at the boy as if he didn’t have all his oars in the water. “One of the things you’ll find out when you get a little older is that everybody has something to worry about. That’s how life works.”
Annarita had some notion of what he wasn’t saying. The Russian security apparatus was even bigger and snoopier than the Italian one. Somebody could be watching you every minute of every day. You never knew which minute it would be, either, so you had to watch yourself all the time. If you were on edge so much, wouldn’t you want to dive into the vodka bottle to escape for a while?
“What other things do we need to watch out for, Comrade?” Annarita asked.
“Don’t tell a Russian he’s uncultured, even if he is—especially if he is,” Comrade Montefusco replied. “It’s a much worse insult with them than it is with us. We Italians, we know we’re cultured.” He preened a little. “But Russians have doubts. They always measure themselves against Western Europeans, and they worry they come up short. Some ways, they’re like peasants in the big city. Don’t remind them of it.”
“What else?” somebody else inquired.
Now the Russian teacher frowned. He’d run out of obvious answers—and he’d seen something else that was pretty obvious. “I think you people are trying to waste time till the bell,” he said, but he couldn’t quite keep from sounding amused. And then something else did occur to him: “When you’re talking with Russians, never remind them Marx said theirs would be the last country where a revolution happened. Never, you hear me?”
“Why not?” asked a student who was earnest but naive.
Comrade Montefusco rolled his eyes. “Why not? Because they’re sensitive as the devil about it, that’s why not. The least that’ll happen is, you’ll make them angry. If you get a punch in the nose, you shouldn’t be surprised. And if you do it in the Soviet
Union and there’s a knock on your hotel door at midnight, you shouldn’t be real surprised about that, either.” Two or three people raised their hands then. The teacher frowned. “One more question—and I mean one. Luisa?”
“Grazie, Comrade,” the student said. “How are Russian camps worse than the ones we’ve got here?”
“How? I’ll tell you how,” Comrade Montefusco answered. “Russia has all of Siberia to put zeks in. Everything you’ve ever heard about Siberia is true, except the real thing is worse—and colder—than you can imagine. And the Russians really, really mean it. Sometimes you’ll see security people here going through the motions. Not there. In the USSR, you climb to the top through the KGB. The smart, eager people are the ones who join.”
“Do you have fewer rights in the USSR if you’re a foreigner?” Luisa asked.
That was another question, but the Russian teacher answered it—in a way. “Don’t be silly,” he said, and then, firmly, “Now—prepositions.”
Annarita followed the lesson only halfheartedly. Don’t be silly how? she kept wondering. Only one answer occurred to her. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a foreigner in the USSR or not. Nobody has any rights there.
And how was that so different from Italy?
Alfredo rolled the dice—a nine. He moved his train into Athens and unloaded the soft coal he’d carried from Dresden. “That puts me over the top,” he said.
“Sì, so it does,” Gianfranco said. He’d just picked up a cargo that would have given him enough cash to win once he delivered it, but his train was still hundreds of kilometers from where it needed to be. He stuck out his hand across the board. “You got me, all right. Congratulations.”
“Thanks.” Alfredo shook it. “You played a devil of a game. When I saw you were so young, I thought I’d have an easy time of it. But it didn’t work like that. You weren’t especially lucky, either. You know what you’re doing, all right.”
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