This would be my last night inside Kosovo, a few days before President Slobodan Milosevic finally agrees to all of NATO's demands. NATO was telling the truth about a few things: the bombing did intensify in Kosovo in the days before the agreement was reached.
Tonight the windows in the hotel dining room were blown out. This sad hotel seems to be on its last legs anyway. The lifts rarely work, the water, when it is running, is almost never warm, and the electricity is intermittent. Guests staying on the sixth and seventh floors greet each other, panting for breath, in pitch black stairways.
The hotel staff does its best, but they have little to work with.
The American media are fond of saying there are no western reporters in Kosovo, and while there are only a few, the fact is that a small contingent of journalists has ensconced itself here since the bombing began. A few others have made the trek from Belgrade and managed to stay on for a few weeks.
First, there are the Greek television crews. They are about eight men, mostly bearded, a ragged-looking group. Despite Greece's status as a NATO country, the anti-NATO, pro-Serb feeling there is so overwhelming that the Greeks are considered allies by the Serbs. No car flies through the Yugoslav Army checkpoints in Kosovo faster than the dusty, broken down little vehicles with the GRK TV signs taped to the windscreen.
Then there is the Sultana, a Turkish television reporter named Sharif Turgut (33), a veteran of the war in Bosnia. A fixture here since the beginning, Sharif remembers the terrifying first night of the bombing, when no one was sure what was going on.
There were a total of seven guests staying at the Grand Hotel, a meagre contingent of Serbs and one Turk who thought their number and status hardly ensured safety from NATO bombs. Glass was breaking and the walls were vibrating. The hotel staff, including Sharif, were huddled behind the reception desk, making a poor attempt at sleep. The telephone rang. Someone calling from somewhere inquired about room availability.
"Oh no, we are full," said the shaking reception desk attendant. "We have everyone here. We are full with Americans, French, Germans. Very full."
The Turks are hated by the Serbs. Their defeat by the Turkish army in the Battle of Kosovo Polje in 1389 is seemingly as fresh a memory as last night's detonations. That Sharif Turgut has been able to gain their respect and even their protectiveness is more than unusual, especially as her reporting is objective and not especially pro-Serb.
Her determination to stay here until the war is over stems also from an obligation to her community.
Near Prizren, there is a village of some 5,000 Turkish people. Several thousand more live in Pristina. In the ethnically charged atmosphere that prevails here, the Turkish community finds comfort in the presence of a reporter from the homeland, someone who will tell the world if anything happens to them. Sharif, in turn, feels protected by the community. She has no official permission to be here, but the Serb authorities have left her alone.
Other reporters have not been so blessed. Jacky Rowland of the BBC had a run of several weeks in Kosovo, filing reports from various sites. One day reporters were taken to Istok, location of Dubrava prison, a place that has been bombed numerous times by NATO, for reasons that are unclear. On her second visit to the prison, Jacky was shown a pile of corpses that Serb officials said had been killed by NATO bombs. She noticed, however, that several of the corpses had their trousers around their knees and did not appear to have suffered bomb injuries.
She reported her observations on the air. Several days later, she was called back to Belgrade by authorities for what she thought was administrative paperwork. Instead, she was expelled from Yugoslavia.
As I prepare to leave the Kosovo I have explored for the last 10 days, I think also of Belgrade, where I spent several weeks beforehand. It was there that I met the most extreme Serb nationalists. I heard things there that I prefer to forget, musings that came from the mouths of educated and otherwise amusing people, assertions and theories of Serb racial superiority that were chilling.
In a lovely apartment filled with fresh flowers and old oil paintings, with French windows overlooking the Church of St Sava, I spent several evenings with a group of smart and handsome people who explained their view of Serbia's tortured history, starting in the 9th century.
The murderous villains of Serbia's fulfilment of its unique destiny were Turks, Albanians, Churchill, Communists, and Josip Tito who sold them out. Even President Milosevic is a lightweight suspicious figure to these nationalists. To them, the burning of Albanian homes in Kosovo was not a question; the problem was that Serb forces did not go far enough. The Albanians' birth rate - unarguably the highest in Europe - is a political strategy to take over their beloved Kosovo.
"So we must do what we must do," said one 33-year old woman, dressed in Yugoslav army fatigues. "I would rather kill 100 children today than 1,000 Albanian children tomorrow. This is the reality."
Another man was introduced to me as Dragoslav Bokan, the commander of the White Eagles, a Serb paramilitary group that was especially active during the war in Bosnia. The White Eagles were accused of some of the most brutal acts in Bosnia. Bokan was indicted as a war criminal. He is a charming and literate fellow, known in Serb circles as a poet, a fan of Yeats, and a student of Irish history.
"I am glad this war started," he said brightly. "We have been telling our people for years that they would bomb us. Now it has all come true. It has brought Serbs together."
These diatribes, laced with racial hatred, make it all too easy to dismiss the Serbs. Their insistence that the Albanians are latecomers to Kosovo is absurd, as Catholic Church documents going back to the 17th century show that Albanians were firmly settled here then. The Serbian tunnel-vision lends credence to those in the West who are now suggesting that Serbia must be occupied and racially "re-educated."
In fact, however, a review of Albanian political literature shows the Serbs are not paranoid about the Albanians' wish for a Greater Albania, a land they believe includes Kosovo and Macedonia. The Albanian political leader's demand for independence, not simply autonomy, for Kosovo, is rooted in this theory.
Every Serb I spoke with in a month in Yugoslavia was willing to fight for this land. The Kosovo myth, its place in Serbian iconography, is very much alive. And the Serbs, who have demonstrated an extraordinary capacity to inflict brutality, also have an equal ability to absorb its infliction on themselves. They will watch Kosovo destroyed by NATO, an alliance that has shown little regard for land or civilian lives, or by themselves if necessary, before they will hand it over to the Albanians.
It all feels rather sad, especially in a land that is every bit as beautiful as the Serbs claim. In Kosovo Polje, the "field of blackbirds" for which the region is named, the blackbirds are indeed profuse, and they seem unaware of the bombs. The red poppy fields and the yellow buttercups carpet the rolling green hillsides.
I am driven to the Kosovo-Macedonia border by a Serb. The road, carved between two forested mountain ranges, is deserted. Days before the area had been filled with Albanian refugees. Today the flow has halted.
I walk alone, dragging a couple of bags filled not with clothes, but with a computer and the satellite telephone that has been my sole means of communication in Kosovo through no man's land, the eighth of a mile stretch between Yugoslavia and Macedonia. It is a strange feeling, too quiet, and I see a crowd of 30 or so people staring from the Macedonia side. They are Skopje-based journalists and UN aid workers.
"You speak English," a reporter exclaims.
"Are you okay? Who are you?" says a UN worker.
"Uh, I'm a journalist with The Irish Times," I say.
The reporters' smiles vanish.
"How did you get into Kosovo?" one man with a notebook growls.
The competitive frenzy to get into Kosovo will likely abate, now that peace appears to be at hand. But the story of Kosovo has not ended, and a presumption that any deal will ensure peace is simply naive. The Kosovo refugees will return to a place shorn of its hospitality and any hint of innocence. They will return to Serb neighbours who condoned the ethnic cleansing.
For its part, the KLA will return to a place governed by an agreement that is in discord with their primary goal, which is independence for the province.
If there is peace in Kosovo, it most likely will be as temporary as spring. In the Balkans, another time of tension and violence is always just a season away.