Belgrade's demons strike in the early hours before dawn. The city's inhabitants are woken (those who can sleep, that is) by a long series of whooshing sounds, as if high speed trains were racing past the walls outside in rapid succession. There is a loud crash; the buildings shake. From our windows we see a hot orange glow rise above the rooftops and funnels of smoke faintly delineated against the night sky.
The anti-theft alarms of parked cars are set off by the explosions. A few minutes pass before we hear the fire engines' sirens. Everyone turns on Radio Televiziga Srbije to learn what has been hit.
On Saturday night, it was the two interior ministries, Federal Yugoslav and Serb, on the river front in the downtown Starigrad district. They were destroyed by eight Cruise missiles, seven of them US and an eighth fired by the British submarine HMS Splendid. For many hours the large ministry buildings were infernos, the surrounding districts cordoned off by police. When we were able to drive past them yesterday , the gutted offices that spilled onto Kneza Milosa Street still smouldered.
Early yesterday, NATO used aircraft to bomb the electrical power plant in Novi Beograd, the soulless new city of grey high-rises on the west bank of the Danube. The government said a worker who was inside the plant at the time of the 4.30 a.m. bombing was killed. Perhaps to salvage the capital's plummeting morale, it claimed the damage was not serious and could be repaired, but muddy smoke continued to twist round the plant's two red and white striped chimneys like a bad omen.
A police academy in the Belgrade suburb of Banjica was also bombed, reportedly without casualties. NATO has attacked police and army buildings since the war started 13 days ago in the mistaken belief that destroying empty buildings would deter Serb forces from expelling ethnic Albanians from their homes in Kosovo. We were asked to leave our hotel on one hour's notice this weekend. As we carried our bags out, maids frantically cleaned the cramped overheated rooms. Luggage trolleys loaded down with men's clothing, well-polished shoes and bottles of whiskey and brandy were wheeled down the halls, and one of the staff greeted a grey-haired new guest with the words "Good day inspector". The Yugoslav army has also moved itself out of harm's way. "Everything that is stationary they just emptied," Mr Radomir Diklic, the general manager of Beta News Agency explained.
"The Americans are bombing barracks and no one is in them. They cannot imagine that soldiers do not return to their barracks to shower and sleep every evening. Out soldiers can sleep for months in the woods - we are not very hygienic."
The fact that there is little visible military activity in or around the capital reinforces the Serbs' conviction that they are innocent victims in this war. As the morning mist burned off TRG Republika yesterday, a young soldier in camouflage with a wooden rifle and olive duffle bag slung over his shoulder walked across the square white bandages wrapped around his forehead.
We saw several blue-coated interior ministry police enter a door in a back alley a few blocks from their destroyed headquarters. Beyond these chance sightings and the uniformed guards at defence ministry buildings, there are only air raid sirens, nightly explosions and constant broadcasts of patriotic songs to indicate the country is at war.
During an 8-hour journey through central Serbia last week, we were shown three bombed-out military garages and the destroyed Sloboda factory - which was attacked again at 3.15 a.m. yesterday. In one provincial town, a dozen soldiers sat at outdoor cafe tables next to a clapped-out water tanker. In another we glimpsed a flock of artillery pieces lined up in close-up perfect formation between two high buildings for safety. The Yugoslav military is elsewhere in Kosovo and restless Montenegro, one presumes.
The attacks of this weekend make it clear that ordinary Serbs, not just the military, are now meant to suffer. Petrol has been rationed since the war started and the fuel shortage is sure to worsen after NATO bombed the oil refinery at Pancvo, the first town south of Belgrade. Two people were reported killed there. An industrial fuel storage facility near Kraljevo, 120 kilometres south of Belgrade, was also bombed early yestrday. Fifty kilometres northwest of the capital, NATO blew up two bridges over the Danube on Thursday and Saturday nights, blocking one of Europe's main waterways and depriving a third of the city of Novi Sad of running water. Three civilians were wounded in the second bridge bombing. Because all of Yugoslavia's telecommunication links to western Europe run beneath the bridge, it was impossible to telephone western Europe yesterday and the country was more isolated than ever.
The obstetrician and gynaecology section of one of Belgrade's main hospitals is only a few metres from the ministries that were destroyed early on Saturday. Doctors had pleaded with foreign journalists - including The Irish Times - to publicise the fact that pregnant women and mothers with their new born babies would be in for danger if NATO attacked the interior ministries. NATO targeted these buildings because the interior ministry's special police, known as MUT, are blamed for most of the atrocities in Kosovo. Although no one was wounded in the attacks on the ministries, Serb television broadcast footage of frightened women and new born infants wrapped in white blankets.
Few in Belgrade feel any affection for a police force that is inclined to intimidate and shake down even fellow Serbs, but antiWestern feeling rose dramatically because NATO was willing to take the risk of harming women and children.
"It is spring, but as I live in Serbia . . . ", says an old antiMilosevic slogan from the early 1990s. After more than a week of poor weather - much lamented by NATO planners who said it interfered with their bombing - the sun has come out again over Belgrade, with its stained and rusting modern architecture and the massive soot-blackened public buildings of Austro-Hunagrian vintage. Belgrade is not a pretty city at the best of times.
Now panic and destruction exist alongside normal life, but the quoient of normality is waning. Hotel staff are already slugging back sljivovica plum brandy at 9 a.m. Who can blame them? And unsmiling passengers still travel on few fume-belching buses. Flashlights and candles are impossible to find.
There are bright new leaves on the trees of Kneza Milosa Street against a backcloth of charred buildings. Flower vendors hawk yellow daffodils and purple hyacinths in front of the green market and national theatre, but the mood is angry and black.
The Orthodox Church will celebrate Easter on April 11th, and old-timers recall that twice before their capital was bombed at Easter. The first time was by the Nazis in 1941, the second time by the US in 1944. On Saturday the Orthodox Church commemorated Lazarus rising from the grave. Children wore new clothes and golden bells on red, white and blue ribbons - the Yugoslav tricolor - to Mass. Adults waved willow branches in churches (the Serb substitute for the palm fronds of Jerusalem).
The government has announced a 7 p.m. curfew, after which restaurants close and no one ventures into the street. As bomb and missile attacks moved closer to Belgrade, Xs formed by brown packing tape appeared on most windows. Nights are chilly, but windows are left open so the explosions will not splinter glass.
As they lie awake in those long hours after midnight, few Serbs are yet able to distinguish between the sound of cruise missiles and bombers, but if this weekend was anything to judge by, they will soon be experts.
Serbs give every possible explanation for the bombardment - every explanation but one. The war is a result of US expansionism, of NATO's need to prove its strength for its 50th birthday, of the need to test new weapons . . . But no one admits, ever, that Serb forces are driving ethnic Albanians from their homes and committing terrible deeds. Satellite television reports of hundreds of thousands of refugees are either dismissed as a publicity ploy by the Albanians or attributed to NATO's bombing of Kosovo. If NATO thought they could teach the people of Serbia a lesson this Easter, it was mistaken.