The Gladiator Read Free Page B

more. Comrade Pontevecchio frowned when no hands went up. “You haven’t been studying as hard as you should have.” He pointed at a girl. “Sofia! Tell me about popular fronts!”

    She got to her feet. “I—I’m sorry, Comrade Teacher, but I don’t know.”
    â€œAnd what excuse do you have for not knowing?”
    â€œNo excuse, Comrade Teacher.” That was the only right answer. You were supposed to know. If you didn’t, it was your fault, nobody else’s. That was how teachers and the rest of the school system looked at things, anyhow. If the textbook was boring and the teacher hated students … well, so what? Textbooks had been boring ever since they were written on clay tablets, and teachers couldn’t wallop kids the way they had in the old days.
    Comrade Pontevecchio picked on a boy. He didn’t know what a popular front was, either.
    â€œThis will not do,” the teacher snapped. “Get out your books. Write me a fifteen-minute essay on what popular fronts were and why they were important. Anyone who does poorly will have more work assigned. These are your lessons. You will learn them.”
    Gianfranco almost hadn’t brought his textbook. The miserable thing was thick as a brick and weighed a ton. But he would have been in big trouble if Comrade Pontevecchio caught him unprepared. He opened the book and looked in the index. There they were—popular fronts. Oh, boy , he thought. He flipped to the right page and started scribbling as fast as he could. If he parroted the text, he couldn’t go wrong. And he didn’t have to think while he wrote, either. Comrade Pontevecchio didn’t care what he thought or if he thought, as long as he ground out the right answers.
    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