"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 1 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 nearlv 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?"
"Si," 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 as 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 he 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.