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Again his hands fastened on my biceps. “And now the big question,” he roared. “Are you with us?”
“Of course,” I said, puzzled.
“With IMRO?”
“Of course.”
He stepped forward and caught me in a bear hug, lifting me up off my feet and leaving me quite breathless. He set me down, spun around, and shouted at the crowd.
“America is with us!” he roared. “You have heard him speak, have you not? America will aid us! America supports Macedonia for the Macedonians! America will help us crush the tyra
Behind me the streets had suddenly filled up with Macedonians. I saw men holding guns and women with bricks and pitchforks. Everyone was shouting.
“The time has come!” Todor shrieked. “Raise the barricades! March on the homes of the tyrants! Root out and destroy the oppressors! Give no quarter! Rise and die for Macedonia!”
A child rushed by me holding a bottle in his hand. There was a rag stuffed into the neck of it. The rag smelled of gasoline.
I turned to the girl who had opened the door for me. “What’s happening? What’s going on?”
“But of course you know. You are a part of it.”
“A part of what?”
She hugged me with joy. “A part of our triumph,” she said. “A part of our finest hour. A part of-”
“What?”
“Our revolution,” she said.
Chapter 13
The street had gone mad. There were so many guns going off that they no longer sounded like gunfire. It was too much to be real, more like a fireworks display on the Fourth of July. To the north a row of houses was already in flames. A police car roared past us, and men dropped to their knees to fire at it. One shot burst a tire. The car swung out of control, plowed off the street into a shop front. The police jumped out, guns ready, and the men in the street shot them down.
The girl was at my side. “They’re crazy,” I said. “They’ll all be killed.”
“Those who die will die in glory.”
“They can’t stand off an army-”
“But America will help us.”
I stared at her.
“You said America would help. You told Todor-”
“I told him I was behind his cause. That is all.”
“But you are with the CIA, are you not?”
“I’m ru
“Then, who will help my people?”
“I don’t know.”
Two blocks down the street a canvas-topped truck careened around the corner and pulled to a stop. Uniformed troops spilled from it. Some of them had machine guns. They crouched at the side of the truck and began firing into the crowd of Macedonians. I saw a woman cut in two by machine-gun fire. She fell, and a baby tumbled from her arms, and another blast of gunfire tore the child’s head off.
Shrieking, a young girl heaved a homemade ca
Sirens blared to the north. The whole town was alive with the fury of the uprising. The girl was still at my side, but I wasn’t paying attention to the words she said.
Revolution-
I had told Starcevic there would be no revolution. Not in his beloved Croatia, not anywhere. I was, after all, no revolutionary, no agent provocateur. I was simply a treasure hunter headed for a cache of gold. But it was I who had sparked this, and it was, after all, a revolution. Mills bombs, Molotov cocktails, barricades thrown up in the streets, bursts of gunfire, the screams of the wounded-these were not sound effects, not bits of the backdrop of a movie, but the sounds of a popular rising, a revolution.
When one has long been conditioned to respond in a certain fashion to a certain set of stimuli, one does not think things out. One reacts and glories in it.
I reacted.
A police van had piled up at the barricade closing the south end of the block. A trio of uniformed troopers had taken up positions behind the barricade and were firing at us. Two had rifles, one a Sten gun. I grabbed up a brick from the ground and heaved it at them. It fell far short.
Their fire came our way. I ran forward, toward the source of the firing. A youth ran beside me, pistol in hand. More shots rang out. The youth dropped, moaning, wounded in the thigh.
I grabbed up his pistol.
I kept ru
A cheer went up behind me. The rebels had fired a public building in the center of town. I grabbed up the Sten gun of the first cop I had killed and pushed forward with the crowd. For four blocks almost every house we passed was in flames. In the middle of the city, we pressed in around the police station. A small force of police and soldiers had barricaded themselves inside the stationhouse. They were firing into the crowd from the windows and lobbing grenades down amongst us. I saw the girl who had been at Todor’s house putting a torch to the front door. The flames leaped. A band of men were heaving Molotov cocktails into a second-story window. The blaze spread in several places, and the crowd dropped back out of range to let the fire have its head.
We shot them down as they came out. There must have been two dozen of them, not counting the ones who never got out the door.
In the public square, Todor proclaimed the Independent and Sovereign Republic of Macedonia. “Historic birthright” and “sever the shackles of Serbian oppression” were phrases that kept recurring. It was, all in all, a good proclamation. He paused once, and part of the crowd, thinking he had finished, began to cheer, but he picked up again, and the cheering died down. Then he did finish the speech, and a ground swell of exhilarated applause burst from the mass of people, and for a thin fraction of a moment I actually thought the revolution would succeed.
The Independent and Sovereign Republic of Macedonia, while unrecognized by the other independent and sovereign nations of the earth, did endure in fact for four hours, twenty-three minutes, and an indeterminate number of seconds. Thinking back, I ca
Those four hours were as active as any I had ever spent. After the police station fell to us, we still had to conduct mop-up operations throughout the town. It was necessary, for example, to dispatch a delegation to rouse the mayor from his bed, take him out of his house, and hang him from the tree in front of his front porch. It was also necessary to rush the town’s small Serbian quarter and massacre the inhabitants thereof. I was fortunate enough to miss out on both the hanging and the pogrom, however. During this stage of the revolution I was cloistered with Todor and A