We found Nartile by chance in a winding, cobbled street of the Albanian quarter on Thursday morning. The interpreter, in her mid-20s, was so transformed by her ordeal that my husband, who worked with her a year ago, did not recognise her.
"Is that you?" he asked, startled. "I don't know if it's me," the young woman said. "I don't know anything any more. We spent three weeks on the run, living in the forest. I saw people taken away for execution. . . Did you know that Ratko Mladic [the Bosnian Serb general indicted for war crimes] is here in Pristina? Albanians saw him. . ." Months of pent-up fear and emotion spilled out. "Stop talking," Nartile whispered. "That is a Serb woman coming."
We followed her to an Albanian home, one of hundreds still inhabited in the capital of Kosovo. Nartile's friends dare not go outside, use electric lights or raise the volume on the satellite television news they watch to learn of the Serb forces' departure and NATO's arrival.
The signing of the military agreement between NATO and the Yugoslav army on Wednesday night precipitated hours of shooting all over the city; Serbs fired Kalashnikovs and anti-aircraft guns out of anger and frustration. Kosovo Liberation Army guerrillas, just a few minutes from the city centre, fired for joy, and to show their presence.
Now that the war is ending, Nartile and her friends are more frightened than ever. "Eleven days is a long, long time," one man said, referring to the time given to Serb forces to complete their withdrawal.
"The Serbs who are going will try to finish the job," he predicted. "We're afraid of a massacre." Every detail of the past 11 weeks is etched into Nartile's memory. She and her parents, two brothers and three sisters live in Vranjevac, the hilly north Pristina neighbourhood which she calls by its Albanian name of Kodra E Trimave ("The Hill of Heroes"). Ninety per cent of her neighbours were Albanians, but on March 23rd, the day before the war started, the handful of Serb men living there joined the army and evacuated their families.
"Some Albanian families began leaving for villages around Pristina. For the first six days and nights we didn't go outside. We slept in our clothes, with our shoes on."
On the morning of March 30th, interior ministry police known as MUP came to the street where Nartile lives, a cul-de-sac, and forbade the residents from leaving. A few hours later, Serb forces began shelling.
"We saw two houses burning. All of us fled to the school. The police came. We asked to go back to our homes, but they told us to go to the railway station. At 10 minutes past five that afternoon, eight policemen in an armoured vehicle and a civilian car without licence plates came. Their faces were painted black. They said: `You have 10 minutes to leave your houses. Don't lock your doors'. We spent the night in Vresta neighbourhood, but NATO was bombing Llukar air base next to it, so at 5 a.m. on March 31st we started walking."
The Serb police and the NATO bombardments sparked a mass exodus of Albanians within Kosovo. "We had to pass through a Serb village," Nartile recalled, "but it was so early in the morning that no one shot at us. There were thousands of us, mostly women and old people, because the Serbs took the young men. After two or three hours, we heard shouting and screaming. I couldn't go back to see what had happened. My father was ill, with a weak heart, and I stopped with him to rest. I never saw so many people walking. I saw a woman giving birth by the roadside. It was so strange and amazing."
After walking for 14 hours, Nartile and her family reached an Albanian village called Mramor, where more than 1,000 Albanians sheltered in 11 houses.
"There was no food, no bread, no clean water. I ate only once every day or two, because we had so many children and whatever food there was went to them. The men slept outside at night. It snowed once. Most of the time it was raining. The Serbs flew over the whole region with helicopters with red crosses on them."
Conditions in Mramor were so terrible that by mid-April, Nartile's family decided to risk walking back to Pristina. After another daylong trek they were caught in crossfire in the hills outside the city. They later learned that a group of deserters was fighting with loyal troops.
"We spent the night on the hill, in a farmyard. In the morning some Albanians came and took us to their home about 15km away, where we stayed for four days. Then the army attacked Vitje and Slos, where the KLA has a base. They fired on us with Pragas (antiaircraft artillery). About 400 people were hiding in the school at Vitije. It was hit and people started running."
After the bombardment, Serb police came and set fire to houses.
"I'm still not sure how we ran away," Nartile said. "For half-anhour we were running and seeing houses on fire". With Serb forces pushing the refugees back towards Pristina from two directions, another huge column formed and the Albanians reached a field west of Pristina late that night.
"There were thousands of people in the field. It was raining and all the babies were crying. We spent the night under the open sky, and all night there was very hard bombing of a nearby village. All night I held my 12-year-old brother. He was crying and was so afraid. We had lost all contact with our parents. Both were ill and we had put them in trucks. To calm my brother I told him jokes and stories."
How did she have the strength to continue?
"I was the eldest, and I thought about my brothers. I wanted to live, and the main thing was to look after my brothers and to come home; definitely to come home. At 4 a.m. the light came. It was freezing. The rain stopped for a time and we decided to try to get to Pristina."
The group were turned back at the first army checkpoint. For several hours, they were shunted between the police and the army checkpoint.
"The second time we reached the military checkpoint, they said, `Don't worry about it. This is Serbia now. We'll have a wedding. Look how pretty these women are. Look at these men. We will take their hearts, we'll take their blood'."
At the last MUP checkpoint outside Pristina, the police beat anyone who could not show identity papers, or anyone whose papers showed they were from the KLA stronghold of Podujevo. "The strangest thing to me was they put some women and children in front of TV cameras and gave them chocolate and biscuits and then showed the footage on [state-owned] RTS."
Police reinforcements arrived. "I recognised some of the inspectors from the green market. They had been low ranks, and now they were captains."
A NATO aircraft flew low overhead - "We were very lucky" - and the police rushed the Albanians through the checkpoint, but only after claiming more victims.
"I saw two young women, they were so beautiful, and the police ordered them to go with them. They told us to put our heads down and not look left or right, just at our shoes. I never saw the women again. We passed two garages filled with young men; I knew many of them. I heard shooting when we were past them, but later I heard three of them were released from Lipljan prison near Pristina and went to Macedonia."
Nartile and her siblings reached home in the third week of April. It was a very dangerous time, she said, when the Serb forces were looking for money and gold. "I had none. They could only take my heart, my spirit."
Every day, policemen came to the Albanian quarter. "Some said, `Why are you here? You must go". Some came and said `You must stay. Who said they will burn your house?' We didn't know what to do. My parents and brothers decided to leave, but I wanted to stay here for my fiance."
In the end, her family were turned back by the police, who said they needed permission to leave. Nartile's brothers and father stayed indoors and she ventured into town to buy groceries for them. On May 22nd the Serbian interior ministry issued her with a new green identity card, apparently part of a plan to distinguish between Albanians who stayed and those who left the country.
As a member of a student peace movement, Nartile was against NATO's way of resolving the Kosovo crisis. "We were caught in the middle and we had no choice," she said. "People were very afraid when it started. We knew something very bad would happen."
But at the same time, she says, "someone had to stop this crime in the Balkans". She quotes Slobodan Milosevic saying 10 years ago that all Albanians would go to Albania.
"So I don't think the displacement of the refugees was only because of NATO bombing. The refugees had been leaving for the past year."