"What are you reading?" I asked the young man operating the gate of the courthouse garage that, in the evening, becomes the garage for Cinema Paradiso.
"A Writer at War," he said, "a Soviet Journalist With the Red Army."
"Are you reading it for school?" I asked him.
"No."
"Who's the author?"
"Vasily Grossman. He wrote a novel - Life and Fate."
The gate rose, I drove into the garage and the young man's head returned to the pages.
