Like those animals that grow agitated hours before an earthquake, the residents of Belgrade seemed to sense imminent disaster. On Thursday afternoon, hours before the onset of the worst night of bombing in the capital since the war started five weeks ago, rumours spread across the city.
The Americans were dropping thousands of leaflets in Pancevo, to the northeast of the city, a businessman told me. They were going to bomb all the bridges, so the tale went, and warned people to stay clear of them.
In the late afternoon, as people poured on to the sidewalk cafes to enjoy the first sunshine in more than a week, the Yugoslav army started burning tyres and bales of hay along the river banks to confuse the laser guidance systems of the awaited bombs.
Boats chugged up the Sava to the Danube, and safety outside the city. First came a fire department rivercraft heading towards Zemun, the left-bank municipality of the extremist Serb nationalist and deputy prime minister, Vojislav Seselj.
Meanwhile, Mr Seselj's grotesque denial of the testimony of Albanian women was broadcast on satellite television. The refugee women said they had been raped by Mr Seselj's militia followers. "If you see these creatures coming out of their shacks . . .," he responded, "you'd have to be blind to rape them."
Then a gunboat, painted the same dark green colour as the river water and loaded down with Bofors anti-aircraft guns, followed in the same direction. There were air raid sirens over dinner, like every evening, but it was the early hour of the first bombardment - at about 10:45 p.m. - that surprised the city. Until recently, NATO had waited until three or four in the morning to launch its attacks, presumably in the hope of sparing civilian lives. The witching hour has moved forward.
First, NATO bombed the usual suspects, starting with the television transmission tower at Avala, in the hills south of Belgrade, where President Slobodan Milosevic is rumoured to sleep in his bunker. Then they moved on to the Palace of Federation, the 24-storey high-rise where Mr Milosevic had his party headquarters, and bombed it for the third time. NATO finished the warm-up with a strike on the already burned-out Interior Ministry, splitting the charred ruin in two.
Streams of red tracer bullets popped into the sky, followed by the futile golden flash of anti-aircraft proximity shells. From our balcony we watched the head and tail lights of cars that had found themselves caught on the wrong side of the river when the bombing started, darting across the bridges in desperate, accelerator-to-the-floor flight.
The rumble did not stop. All night, each time Belgrade began to settle into something resembling repose, fresh explosions wracked its stolid buildings and more red halos cloaked the skyline. Residents gave up all pretence of observing a black-out, or of trying to sleep. Standing at their lighted windows, they watched and listened to a macabre concert.
The bombing had subsided for perhaps half an hour when, just at dawn, the city began to tremble. Walls, floors and furniture vibrated, but in silence. What could it be, we wondered? A distant, noiseless bombardment? Later, as they came out into the dirty morning, Belgraders were more fascinated by this extraordinary coincidence - by the earthquake - than by their night of torment. Bombing had been expected, but an earthquake was an act of God.
Studio B television began broadcasting pictures of the damage, and of the man who had stopped his car at the traffic lights at the intersection of Kneza Milosa and Nemanjina streets; he was cut in half by an explosion. The policeman guarding the Foreign Ministry was also killed.
This intersection made me nervous since the day I arrived in Belgrade, because I felt certain that the Defence Ministry on one corner, and probably the Foreign Ministry across the street, would be targeted. Both were bombed during the night from Thursday to Friday.
On Thursday afternoon I had called on an official in the Foreign Ministry, a huge fortress of hewn stone with a fountain and marble columns in the entry. A Russian architect designed it in 1924, the secretary who accompanied me to my appointment said.
The halls of the city-block-sized building contained 31km of red carpet, she added.
Her boss was eager to share his vision of international relations; that Europe needs Yugoslavia more than Yugoslavia needs Europe; that Serbs had never raped or massacred or "ethnically cleansed", not in Croatia, not in Bosnia, not in Kosovo; that these stories were propagated by dishonest journalists. As for all those old factories that NATO keeps bombing, most of them were outdated and hadn't functioned for years, he said. Yesterday I wondered what was left of his office.
Among air strikes in Belgrade too numerous to list on Thursday night, the bombing of Vracar, one of the more fashionable residential areas of the city, instilled the greatest fear. At least two houses were destroyed in Maksima Gorkog Street, where two civilians were reported killed. Worse accidents have occurred in the towns of Aleksinac, Pristina, Cuprija and Surdulica, but this was the first time NATO had destroyed private homes in the capital.
We'd had dinner in an apartment in John Galsworthy Street in Vracar, a few hundred metres from the bomb site, only hours before the explosion. "The damage to civilian infrastructure is very dramatic," one Serb guest had said. "But the military don't really care. It doesn't affect them."
The pro-Serb French novelist Patrick Bresson had described this war to me as a succession of catastrophes and miracles. If the night of April 29th was catastrophic for the Yugoslav capital, at 7:30 a.m. I witnessed something approaching a miracle.
Smoke from the night's bombardment choked the city, yet cafe-owners stood in open doorways while waiters wiped the tables.
Thousands of Belgraders emerged from their apartment blocks with dark-circled eyes. They had bathed and combed their hair, drunk their coffee, put on suits and neatly pressed dresses to do the only thing they knew how to do after Belgrade's worst night of bombing. They took their places in long bus queues - created by the bombing of fuel depots and refineries - and even longer cigarette queues caused by NATO's destruction of tobacco plants.
Not one of them smiled, and they were convinced, more than ever, that they alone in the world suffer, that NATO's war on Yugoslavia is an unprovoked aggression, that there will be more hell to pay before this is over.
