Slavko Curuvija's son, Rade, carried his father's plain wooden grave marker before him like a shield. It bore only the murdered newspaper editor's name, the years 1949-1999, and in the place where most Yugoslavs put a cross or a red star to indicate their religious or communist convictions, two crossed pen quills, the symbol of a journalist's lost struggle.
The staff of the Dnevni Telegraf (Daily Telegraph) newspaper marched up the gentle slope of Belgrade's Novo Groblje cemetery weighed down with wreaths and bouquets. The Telegraf was fined, driven underground and finally destroyed by President Slobodan Milosevic's regime last autumn.
There was a tinny marching band playing a funeral dirge, a battered old black estate car carrying Mr Curuvija's coffin, the family and at most a thousand people.
No Serbian newspaper, radio or television station had dared to announce the funeral, and as of yesterday, none had reported it.
Many of the mourners had never met Slavko Curuvija, but they included the mostly unemployed remnants of Belgrade's independent press corps, representatives of a handful of impotent opposition parties and a large number of academics and intellectuals. It spoke volumes about the crowd - and the mood in Serbia - that this funeral was the only place in Belgrade where a Western journalist was not afraid to speak English in public.
The Mayor of Belgrade, Mr Dragoslav Mihailovic, a member of Mr Vuk Draskovic's Serbian Renewal Party, was the highest-ranking politician to make a brief appearance. After Mr Curuvija's assassination on April 11th, Mr Draskovic made a television appeal for Serbs not to kill Serbs.
His wife came to the funeral, but Mr Draskovic apparently deemed it safer to keep his distance. The murdered newspaper editor's former friends-turned-enemies were also unrepresented: the political parties of Mr Milosevic, his wife Mrs Mira Markovic and their extreme nationalist ally, Mr Vojislav Seselj.
An air raid siren sounded at exactly 12.30 p.m., the starting time of the funeral, but none of the mourners who were waiting to escort the hearse to the graveside reacted. They were doubtless concerned with a more immediate danger, the presence of cameramen and photographers from Mr Milosevic's personal State Security service.
The heady days of late 1997 and early 1998, when hundreds of thousands of protestors braved riot police charges to demonstrate against Mr Milosevic's rigged elections, are a distant memory. Mr Milosevic's political rise began with his Field of Blackbirds speech in Kosovo in June 1989 when he told Serbs: "Niko ne sme da vas bije" ("No one is going to beat you").
The phrase became his slogan, until the now-defunct student opposition radio station Index fashioned a clever rhyme with the additional phrase "except our police".
High-ranking federal government officials become shrinking violets if asked to speak to a policeman. Relatives of army officers fall silent if police depredations are mentioned on the telephone; they assume all lines are tapped.
"I am surprised to see so many people here," a university professor told me. "I thought there would be only the family and the staff of Dnevni Telegraf. That would have made it easier for the men [secret police] taking pictures. You are not living under a dictatorship, so you cannot know how much courage it takes to come here at all."
The first victim of the NATO bombardment, the professor said, had not been the truth, but all hope of achieving democracy in Yugoslavia. He was so frightened that he did not want us to reveal what subject he teaches at university. Nor would he telephone or call on us at our hotel. The professor thought he knew who killed Slavko Curuvija, and why. "This man was very close to the ruling family," he said. "He became a kind of dissident from their ranks. This was sheer revenge."
A woman named Snjezana recalled the last time she saw Mr Curuvija, eight days before the war started. In his last public appearance, he spoke to the youth group she heads on the topic of press freedom.
"He said the situation could not last for a long time, and he predicted that change would come about. He said what was needed was a simple spark to move people in the direction of democracy. We gave him a present - books of poetry, prose and satirical stories by young Yugoslav writers - saying he could read them in prison. He had been sentenced to five months in prison, but he wasn't in jail yet."
Six days before Slavko Curuvija's murder, an editorial in the state-run Politika Ekspres claimed he supported NATO's bombardment of Serbia. But the turgid pro-Milosevic newspaper has a small readership, so to drive the point home the official Radio Television Serbia, the sole source of information for many Yugoslavs, broadcast the text the following day. It was, his colleagues said, his death warrant.
As the dirt clods and flowers fell on Mr Curuvija's coffin, mourners said they were also burying the last hope of a free press here. Since the Law on Information was passed last October, at least half a dozen newspapers and magazines and two radio stations have been forced to shut down.
As Mr Curuvija's wife and ex-wife, his son and daughter by his first marriage, mother and brother stared incredulously at his grave, a bitter editor's impromptu speech served as the funeral oration.
"They claimed the Dnevni Telegraf was a vulgar tabloid," he said. "But if it could appear on the news-stand today, you could not find a single expression that could embrace the event that brought us here, not in all the words in a journalist's vocabulary.
"What a terrible irony that you cannot make a full report of a newspaper man's murder. It will be recorded that on [Orthodox] Easter Sunday in 1999, between two air raid sirens, Slavko Curuvija was killed. He meant a lot to us."
Under the leafy trees of Novo Groblje cemetery, the mourners uttered in unison: "Slava mu i havala" ("Honour and thanks").
The coffin was lowered on ropes into the grave, and three women supported Mr Curuvija's widow, Vesna, collapsing under the weight of her grief, as she tried to walk away. "You died at the hands of Serbs," shouted a man wearing dark glasses. "This was premeditated."
A copy of Dnevni Telegraf was thrown on the coffin before earth and all the flowers of spring were heaped upon it. Then the mourners drifted away one by one, back to their hard daily lives, void of freedom, void of information, punctuated by bombardments; back to the black hole of Yugoslavia's future.