Harry Turtledove: The Gladiator

Popular fronts, he rediscovered, combined Communists with non-Communist Socialists and other fellow travelers. The first one came along in France before World War II, to try to rally the country against Fascism. It didn't work. But later popular fronts swung France and Italy and Scandinavia away from the weakening USA and toward the USSR.

Without these fronts, he wrote, the victory of Socialism in Europe, while it still would inevitably have come, would have been slower. It might even have required warfare to eliminate reactionary forces from the continent. That was what the textbook said, and the textbook had to be right. If it was wrong, the authorities wouldn't use it-and what would they do to an author who was wrong on purpose? Send him to a camp? Kill him? Purge his whole family? Gianfranco wouldn't have been surprised.

Was everybody in the class writing the same ideas in the same words? Everybody with any sense was. Why stick your neck out when the answers were right there in black and white? How many times would Comrade Pontevecchio read the same sentences? How sick of them would he get?

Serve him right, Gianfranco thought. The teacher called for the essays. The students passed them forward. Comrade Pontevecchio grudged a nod. "Now, at least, you know what popular fronts are."

He was right. Gianfranco didn't think he would forget. He still didn't care, though. But Comrade Pontevecchio didn't care whether he cared.

After what seemed like forever, the bell rang. Gianfranco jumped up much more eagerly than he had to recite. Escape! But it wasn't escape from school, only from history. Literature didn't interest him, either. Nothing in school interested him a whole lot. He felt as if he were in jail.

And his father and mother got mad because he wasn't a better student! How could you do well if you didn't care? All he wanted to do was get out. Because afterwards…

But he couldn't think about afterwards yet. If he did, he would start thinking about how long it was till he got out. And that would hurt, and then he would pay even less attention than he usually did.

He sighed. Off to literature.

This year, literature covered twentieth-century Socialist writers who weren't actually Communists. Fellow travelers, Comrade Pellagrini called them. A light went on in Gianfraneo's head. History and literature were talking about some of the same things, but coming at them from different angles. That was interesting. He wished it happened more often.

All the same, the class itself wasn't that exciting. Right now, they were going through Jack London's The Iron Heel. Gianfranco had read The Call of the Wild and "To Build a Fire" in translation the year before. Those were gripping stories. Tendon plainly knew about the frozen North, and he was able to put across what he knew.

The Iron Heel was different. It was a novel about the class struggle, and about the ways the big capitalists found to divide the proletariat and keep it from winning the workers' revolution.

"Marx talks about how, in the last days of capitalism, the bourgeoisie are declassed and fall into the ranks of the workers," Comrade Pellagrini said. "You all know that. You started studying The Communist Manifesto when you were still in primary school."

Gianfranco found himself nodding agreement. He would have nodded agreement to almost anything Comrade Pellagrini said. She didn't look much older than the girls she was teaching, but she made them look like… girls. She was a woman herself, more finished than the girls, and prettier than almost all of them, too. She carried herself like a model or a dancer.

She was.so pretty, Gianfranco almost thought it would be worthwhile to study hard and impress her with how much he knew. Almost. She treated students the way a busy doctor treated patients. She was good at teaching, but she didn't let anybody get personal. And Gianfranco knew that if he tried to impress her and failed, he'd be crushed. Better not to try in that case, wasn't it? He thought so-and it gave him one more excuse not to work too hard.

"How does London take Marx's dynamic and turn it upside down, at least for a while?" the literature teacher asked.

Gianfranco looked down at his desk. He couldn't answer the question. If their eyes met, she was more likely to call on him. He thought so, anyway. Most of the time, he looked at her when he thought she wouldn't be looking at him.

She called on someone else-a girl. The student made a hash of trying to explain. Comrade Pellagrini called on a boy. He botched it, too.

The teacher let out an exasperated snort. "How many of you did the assigned reading last night?" All the students raised their hands. Gianfranco had… looked at the book last night, anyway. Comrade Pellagrini scowled. "If you read it, why can't you answer a simple question?"

No one said a word. People looked at one another, or at the clock on the wall, or at the ceiling, or out the window- anywhere but at Comrade Pellagrini. Maybe she thought it was a simple question. Gianfranco didn't. You couldn't just copy from the book to answer it, the way he had in history. You had to recall what you'd read and make that fit the question. It all seemed like too much bother.

"All right. All right." The teacher still seemed angry. "You need to know, so I'll tell you-this once. Doesn't London show the bosses raising some workers to the bourgeoisie with what amounts to bribes to turn them against their natural class allies?"

"Si, Comrade Pellagrini," everyone chorused. Once the teacher gave the answer, seeing it was right was the easiest thing in the world.

"I want you to finish The Iron Heel tonight," Comrade Pellagrini said. "We'll have the test on Friday, and then next week we'll start 1984. You'll see how Orwell shows the tyranny of capitalism and Fascism."

A girl raised her hand. "I had to read that book in another class," she said when the teacher called on her. "He calls the ideology in it English Socialism." She sounded troubled, feeling there was something dangerous in the book that she couldn't quite see.

But Comrade Pellagrini brushed the question aside, saying, "Well, so what? The Nazis' full name was the National Socialist German Workers' Party. They weren't real Socialists, and they weren't for the workers. They used mystification to confuse the German people, and it worked."

That seemed to satisfy the girl. It didn't matter to Gian-franco one way or the other. He hadn't read 1984 yet, and hoped it would be more interesting than The Iron Heel. But how interesting could a book be when even its title lay more than a hundred years in the past? And how interesting could it be when you had to read it for school?

The dismissal bell. Well, it was the dismissal bell for most people, anyhow. Annarita knew Gianfranco would be leaving now. But she had the Young Socialists' League meeting. She didn't really want to go-nothing would happen there. Nothing ever did. And she'd get back to the apartment an hour and a half later than usual, and still have a whole day's worth of homework to do.

People in the same boring uniform she was wearing filed into the auditorium. Most ol them looked as unenthusiastic as she did. For them, this was something you did because you were in the League. Being in the League put you on the fast track to joining the Party. And getting your Party card was a long step towards a prosperous, comfortable life.

But there were a few eager faces, too. Some kids really believed in the stuff the grown-ups who ran the League shoved down their throats. Annarita fell sorry for them-they were the kind who couldn't see their nose in front of their face. And there were kids who liked to run things, loo. She didn't feel sorry for them. They scared her.

Filippo Antonelli was one of those. He banged the gavel. "The meeting will come to order!" he said loudly. He would graduate at the end of the year, and she wouldn't be sorry to see him leave. He intended to study law and go into politics. She thought he would go far i(he didn't get caught in a purge. As long as he went far from her, that suited her fine. He turned to the girl silting next lo him. "The general secretary will read the minutes of the last meeting."