Pericles

The only ones left in the house are me and my grandmother. So we go to the upstairs window to watch.

Little by little they gather up all the men and young women and keep them standing there in the square.

That day it was really hot. Blistering. More like July than May. At the far side of the square, there are some fruit crates piled up in front of a low wall—I can still see them now. They push everyone into a big mass over by those crates.

Even the little boys.

Then they make everyone undress. They line them all up and make them turn around. Then they set up three machine guns on top of those crates. And then, at that very moment, believe it or not, the king of Bulgaria happens to ride right through the square.

King Boris, the one the Germans poisoned a year or so later. King Boris is touring through Macedonia and Thrace. He’s sick and has come to pray at our church, to the icon of Saint Marina, worker of miracles. He wants to make an offering.

As he’s passing through the square in his jeep, with his convoy trailing behind, he sees the people standing there, naked, all in a row. He sees the soldiers. The guns.

So he stops. He gets out of the jeep to see what is going on. The Bulgarian officers won’t tell him. So he asks again and again, until they tell him the whole story. Then he says, You’re going to kill all these people because one of our men died? A whole village for one goatherd?

And he says to them, sternly, Put those guns away. Enough is enough. Let these people get back to work.

Now I’m sitting here wondering what would’ve happened if the king had taken the lower road, the one that went by my brother’s house. What if he hadn’t seen what was happening in the square? Or what if he had come to leave his offering at the church a half hour later that afternoon?