Arrived Belgrade last night to mild, balmy weather after three weeks of Kosovo, where it has been muddy, icy, freezing, and nasty in many other ways besides the war. Belgrade is an extremely depressing place, but it is incredibly comforting to come back to this still cosmopolitan city, to stroll down the street, drink a beer in a sidewalk cafe, and check into my old haunt of the Hotel Moskva, where Trotsky and Djilas used to hang out, among others. I slept with the window open for the first time since last fall.

The anti-climactic end of the Rambouillet conference means that both sides are free to bang off a bit more, so every day has been a grueling routine of leaving Pristina at the crack of dawn to wander the countryside, getting stuck in mud most of the time. And for what? The KLA win this war just by existing, not by fighting. As Mao wrote in his instructions for the Red Army during their guerrilla days, “…when they come, we leave. When they leave, we come.” The Serbs have the firepower, the cities, and the road control to take one or two or three areas any time they want. But without the support of the civilian population or the resources to be everywhere at once, inevitably their control is limited to the range of their guns, and not an inch further. Everywhere in Kosovo, the front lines, such as they are, are five or six hundred yards apart, where the reach of a rifle ends.

And, of course, there are the dead: I’ve been given the not entirely reassuring title of “funeral specialist,” always the sad families and crowds of mourners, whether Serb or Albanian, the still bloody bodies, the what-would-otherwise-be-charming Eastern European stuff of wailing women and candles, except that all of these people have died needless and violent deaths…

Thanks to the surreal gears of Yugoslav bureaucracy, I managed this morning to get my official accreditation in two hours, a procedure that normally takes at least two weeks if not months or forever, and I am finally entitled to a multiple-entry visa. However, since my current visa expires today and it cannot be renewed, I must leave the country by midnight, and come back Monday. So I get to go to Budapest for the weekend. I did not complain too loudly.