The Gladiator (6 page)

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Authors: Harry Turtledove

BOOK: The Gladiator
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“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 right 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.
“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.

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