The whoosh of a warplane, detonations crashing through the darkness. A moment of silence, then hundreds of screaming car alarms set off by the booms. Belgrade at day. NATO has shut down much of the capital with weeklong attacks on the power grids, but there is another layer to the silence. I feel as if my life were suspended somehow.
Main roads remain busy during the day.
And there are new sounds. The sirens, day and night, warning of airstrikes. But these are rare sources of noise. On late spring days in other years, the air was thick with music wafting from open apartment windows or storefronts. Street dealers hawking bootleg compact discs blasted Serbian turbo-folk or Western hard rock through boom boxes yards away from each other.