At a grocery store in the town center, whole families are in the soap aisle, selecting toothbrushes, toothpaste, socks, soap. They came with nothing except whatever cash they haven't been robbed of.

At dinner Friday night at a pub in Skopje called Pivnica, I see two Kosovar friends, journalist Eugen Saracini and his wife, a doctor, standing like ghosts in the doorway. They are alarmingly pale, and unusually for them both, they are not smiling.

I can't stop hugging them. Eugen says he spent three days on the border, trying to get his sister, a well-known journalist with Voice of America, out to safety.

Everyone is joyless.

In my hotel, young Kosovar Albanians haunt the lobby, the coffee bar, preoccupied. One young man, an ethnic Turkish Kosovar, has a father still in Pristina, a mother and brother in Turkey and an expired Yugoslav passport that keeps him trapped in the no man's land of the hotel. He too is ghostly white, and clearly desperate. He sits tensely with the Turkish journalists who have come to cover the conflict, and who talk amiably around him to mask his silent anxiety.

The family I stay with when I'm in Pristina is also on the border, with the tens of thousands of refugees. Every day I think I will find them among the crowd and take them out of there, but I don't see them.

On Friday I run into Artan, a 24-year-old Kosovar friend whom the foreign diplomats are fighting over to work for them, at the border.

"I am waiting for my mother and brother," he says, uncharacteristically grim. "I am not even sure they have even left Pristina. But the whole rest of our neighborhood is here and they tell me there is nobody left there. But I can't find them."

"What do you think, are we going to have a war here?" my taxi driver, a Muslim Macedonian named Jani asks me on Saturday.

"No," I answer. "NATO is here, there won't be a war."

"No, we are going to have a war here," he says, shaking his head. "There are just too many refugees. It's going to cause problems. It's not good."

Before the influx of ethnic Albanian refugees driven from their homes in Kosovo, Macedonia enjoyed a fragile peace between its Macedonian Slav majority and its ethnic Albanian one-third minority. But now many Macedonians fear the influx of 100,000 refugees will shift the ethnic balance and lead to the ethnic Albanian Macedonians demanding independence. The Macedonian Albanians insist they do not want independence. But the Macedonians' fear of the Albanians, that they might cause the breakup of the country, is the most dominant political characteristic of Macedonia right now.

Suddenly, it seems that everyone I talk to in Macedonia thinks there will be a war here. It changes the city, makes it feel more dangerous. Last March in Pristina, one could sense after the first 53 people were killed that it was not going to be a one-time affair. It would be a war. In Macedonia, it is still not clear to me that the ingredients that lead to tensions escalating into a conflict are there. But the increasing perception among residents that it could disturbs me.

On Saturday night I go to party in a neighborhood of Skopje that overlooks all of the city. A friend from New York calls me there, quizzing me anxiously about who I know that came over the border alive. Blerim Shala, the editor of Zeri magazine, is alive, in Gostivar, Macedonia. The sister of Veton Surroi, the publisher of Koha Ditore, was seen on TV in Macedonia; she's alive. Baton Hoxhiu, the editor of Koha Ditore rumored last week to be killed, crossed the border Sunday morning. Rexhep Qosja, a Kosovar politician who was at the Rambouillet negotiations, came out alive. Eugen Saracini, a journalist for Deutsch Welle I met at the pub: alive. Aferdita Kelmendi, journalist for Voice of America, alive. As we share information, I look over the balcony past the lights of the city, to the border where the refugees are, to the darkness beyond that is Kosovo, and wonder if any of us will ever return there.
salon.com | April 5, 1999

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