A band played down the street and residents of the Serbian capital savoured cold beer and a few more hours of ignorant, peaceful bliss in the hot summer night. The official 9:00 p.m. TV Politika news simply was not broadcast - its editors apparently unsure how to present the faltering peace deal - so few Belgraders were aware that their representatives had been given a few more hours to think over the detailed six-page document on the withdrawal of 40,000 Serbian troops from Kosovo.
Stefan and Marija-Masa played among the chairs and tables on the cafe terrace while their parents dined at the next table. The mosquitos were biting ferociously - the Yugoslavs could not spray this year because of the war - but life seemed to be inching back towards normality.
During the bombing, we saw the two children sleeping on the upholstered benches of our hotel restaurant, where their father is an employee. He brought his wife and children to live in the relative safety of this central Belgrade neighbourhood. "Is the war really over?" the parents asked us last night. "Is the bombing finished? We want our children to live in democracy. We want them to have a good education."
Hundreds of miles to the south, in a huge camouflage aircraft maintenance tent at Kumanovo, near Macedonia's border with Kosovo, the British General Sir Michael Jackson had faced more than a dozen of his Yugoslav counterparts for the second day. NATO's patience was running out.
"The Yugoslav parliament accepted an agreement last Thursday," a young British officer said testily. "At this stage, the Yugoslav delegation is not signing up to those principles."
NATO did not want the talks to go into a third day. In Brussels, Gen Walter Jertz said Serb forces were looting again around Pristina. Bruised Albanian men - newly released from Serb prisons within Kosovo - were making their way across the Albanian border. When the private station Studio B finally reported the delay in the talks late last night, there were five more civilian deaths from NATO bombardments to add to the tally. A civilian bus had been attacked on the road from Pristina to Belgrade.
Were the Yugoslav generals - furious that President Slobodan Milosevic challenged the West to attack him in the first place; furious that he then called off the war they nonetheless agreed to fight - suddenly rebelling? Or was that old master of prevarication, Mr Milosevic himself, still pulling the strings from Belgrade?
The people of Serbia are longsuffering, yes. The people of Serbia are patriotic, if self-deluding. But how lovely it was to have electricity and running water again, to sit on a cafe terrace without fear of explosions.
