Disbelief can be as rare as truth in war; during a dark Belgrade night beset by air raid sirens, reddish anti-aircraft fire and the sensation of standing in a building wobbling with the impact of bombs pounding a mile away, one is unlikely to reflect much, or ponder possibility.
Something that just whizzed overhead - a plane, a missile? - gurgled like a cappuccino maker before it hit, someone noticed. (Interesting how the instinct to duck is almost involuntary.)
After a day of witnessing the bloody aftermath of another NATO mistake in Nis, the streets strewn with bodies and limbs where an errant bomb hit a hospital and market, killing 15 people and wounding 60, a sense of reality can shift. Almost nothing is unbelievable. Almost.
A few minutes after an enormous kaboom was heard near our hotel late on Friday night, word began to spread. The Chinese embassy was hit. A diplomatic mission of the world's most populous country, where, it was commonly known, workers and Chinese journalists were living? NATO could not be that brutal or reckless. Or incompetent.
And yet there it was, chunks of building strewn across the road a few minutes later, diplomats and office workers pouring from the building. The red flag still flying, the five-storey modern structure, built four years ago with mirrored blue glass was severely hit.
A wall on one side was gone, and flames were coming from the other side. Ambulances were taking the injured away and Yugoslav fire-fighters were trying to get water to the top floor.
Pan Zhanlien, the Chinese ambassador, in shirtsleeves amid concrete shrapnel and twisted metal, was trying to comfort people who were crying and trying to find colleagues. "The People's Republic of China has been attacked," he said. "This is an outrage."
At least four people died and 20 were injured, five of them seriously. Among the dead were Yunhuan Shao, a reporter for the Guanging Daily who came to cover the crisis here, and his wife, Yin Zhu. Among the seriously injured was the military attache. They didn't find him in the rubble until 8 a.m. and he was bleeding profusely.
Other targets pounded again and again during that long evening made more sense militarily: the defence ministry, the federal military headquarters, a Serbian government complex. Word that the Hotel Yugoslavia on the south bank of the Danube had been struck seemed curious at first, but NATO said it was a bunker for Zeljko Raznatovic, the paramilitary leader better known as Arkan.
Born in 1950, son of an air force officer, Arkan made his name as a top-flight bank robber in Europe, with convictions in Belgium, Holland and Germany. The Italians still want him in connection with a murder in 1974. As leader of a brutal paramilitary group, The Tigers, Arkan was named in a 1994 UN report as one of the leaders of ethnic cleansing in Bosnia and in eastern Slavonia. He is often referred to as one of the world's most wanted war criminals.
Perhaps, but that night he stood outside the demolished Hotel Yugoslavia, dapper and well dressed as ever, sporting a flashy, huge diamond ring. Chatting merrily with reporters, he said he was part owner of the hotel casino, but denied he had any other interest in the place. NATO later said it was one of the few times he had been seen recently. Anyone who has been hanging around another Belgrade hotel, however, including myself, would disagree. He has been a frequent and open presence in the lobby.
On Saturday and Sunday, with world public opinion condemning the attack and NATO offering profuse apologies for yet another error, the Chinese community took to the streets in Belgrade, as they did in other capitals around the world. Instead of the familiar sight of 100 or so Serbs standing on the bridges in the afternoon, carrying pro-Yugoslav signs, this weekend it was 300 Chinese flying the Chinese flag over the Brankov Most bridge.
Another few hundred marched with a rapid and determined gait down the main street of Kneza Milosa, chanting, angry, carrying signs with slogans, "Is This Really a Mistake?" and "Stop NATO Savagery".
They were angry and emotional, faces contorted and voices hard.
Sun Yuxi, a spokesman for a group of Chinese officials here to assess the damage and investigate the bombing, said the Chinese government was reserving judgment on whether the attack was intentional.
Of more immediate concern to a group of Chinese doctors and nurses was the condition of the injured. They headed to the hospitals, accompanied by the families.
Meanwhile, Serbian officials essentially sat back and watched NATO squirm with various explanations. They watched as a parade of representatives from the diplomatic missions of Brazil, Australia, Mexico, Argentina and Greece expressed condolences to the Chinese and condemnation of the attack.
Let's see how NATO will justify this, said Goran Matic, a government minister. Vuk Draskovic, leader of the Serbian Renewal Movement and a deputy minister until he was sacked by President Slobodan Milosevic a few weeks ago, said: "I cannot accept all these mistakes. All these so-called mistakes are consequences of this aggression."
Over the weekend Mr Milosevic met the Russian Emergency Minister, Sergey Shoygu and Swiss relief representatives. Mr Milosevic also addressed the Federal Assembly on Saturday, but the text of his remarks was not available.
NATO, meanwhile, said it would offer no pause in the bombing. And although Belgrade was quiet on Saturday night, numerous other bridges and targets were attacked, including a bomb in Nis that broke the Greek consulate's windows, according to the state news agency.
Among the elements straining belief here is NATO's tortuous explanation of the error. It was the right building, but the wrong building. The pilot meant to hit that building, but the US Central Intelligence Agency had advised that that building was a federal weapons procurement centre, not the Chinese embassy.
Rumours of what exactly happened are rife, including that the Chinese were storing weapons for the Yugoslavs, and that President Milosevic was sleeping there. (After the NATO attack on Mr Milosevic's residence, he is rumoured to be moving about quite a bit.) What is clear is that neither a cache of weapons nor Mr Milosevic was in the building at the time of the attack, leaving serious questions about the quality of US intelligence.
That NATO decision, to continue attacking all targets in similar fashion, is at variance with past US military reaction to similar errors. In the Gulf War in 1991, the US hit the Al Firdos bunker in downtown Baghdad. What the CIA hadn't known was that the bunker was filled with civilians. Afterwards, Gen Colin Powell halted strikes in downtown Baghdad.
But Belgrade is not Baghdad, and perhaps the price of mistakes in this city and in this country is acceptable to NATO. In the book On War by Carl von Clausewitz, the text used at US military colleges, Clausewitz says: "Through the element of chance, guesswork and luck come to play a great part in war. In the whole range of human activities, war most closely resembles a game of cards."
In the theatre of the Balkans, with China and Russia allied with Yugoslavia against the rest of Europe and the US, this is a dangerous game indeed.