The daily wartime concerts on Trg Republika continue, with children in traditional costumes dancing to Serb folk music.
Like NATO's air raids, it seems, the concerts cannot be halted until peace is official. A taxi driver praised God yesterday that NATO had not bombed his favourite breweries, and boat restaurants floating amid the sewage on the Sava River were packed with people.
But the dominant feeling was still one of exhaustion, of limbo closer to purgatory than heaven.
Over the weekend, just about every political party in Serbia except for President Milosevic's SPS and his wife Mira Markovic's JUL demanded that the government call early elections as soon as the state of war is officially ended. This could mean parliamentary and presidential polls in late October or early November.
"The person responsible for this huge tragedy of the Serbian and Montenegrin people is Slobodan Milosevic," Mr Vuk Obradovic, the president of the Social Democratic Party and a former army general said.
With his principles, Mr Obradovic is an odd fish in Serbia's political stew. A photograph of Olof Palme, the murdered Swedish prime minister whom he admires, hangs in Mr Obradovic's downtown office. Educated city-dwellers and army officers would like to see him succeed Mr Milosevic.
The government daily Politika called Mr Milosevic's surrender to NATO "a brave and wise move", but few are fooled by such propaganda. Army officers recall the sacking last autumn of the former chief of staff, Gen Momcilo Perisic, with particular bitterness.
Gen Perisic told Mr Milosevic that the Yugoslav armed forces could not fight NATO's 19 nations - advice the President did not want to hear then. "We've lost Kosovo," an army officer told me. "How can you be sovereign in a place where you don't even control the administration? It was an error to try to fight someone ten times stronger than we were, but the second error was to stop half-way. Those who lost their lives died for nothing."
NATO claims 5,000 Yugoslav troops were killed by the bombardment. About 1,500 Serb civilians also perished.
In the scramble to attribute blame for this catastrophe, Mr Obradovic echoes a common theme. The acceptance of the peace accord "is not the defeat of the army, nor the defeat of our people" he says. "Both the soldiers and the people heroically went through all this suffering . . . This is the defeat of the policies of Slobodan Milosevic; nothing else."
Serbs want to know what will happen in Kosovo in the coming days. The province was the prize coveted by Serbs, Albanians and NATO alike, and its transition from Serb to NATO control is fraught with danger. NATO has warned the Kosovo Liberation Army not to attack retreating Serb troops.
But will men who have been beaten and tortured - in some cases whose wives and daughters have been raped - resist the desire for revenge? And what will happen to the province's 200,000 Serb civilians?
"At the very same moment Serb troops withdraw, NATO troops must enter," says Mr Dragan Veselinov, an opposition member of parliament and the president of the Vojvodina Coalition. "A vacuum would be a disaster. The Serbs are armed and the Albanians are armed. Everybody in this whole country is armed; I myself have six guns."
It is still unclear whether NATO troops will be allowed to move freely throughout Yugoslavia, as foreseen in last March's Rambouillet accords, or whether they will confine their activities to Kosovo province.
"Once international troops enter this country, Milosevic's future is uncertain," Mr Veselinov says. "NATO could play the role of international policeman for The Hague."
The opposition MP does not believe the Serbs would turn their president and other indicted war criminals over to the War Crimes Tribunal, so if NATO wants him, they will have to come to Belgrade and get him.
Or Mr Milosevic might seek asylum among fellow slavs in Russia or Belarus. In any case, Mr Obradovic says, he must be "consigned to the historical archives of Serbia". Saint Sava, the 13th century founder of the Serbian Orthodox church and the father of Serbian identity, once wrote to a Greek priest: "We are predestined to be the East in the West and the West in the East."
The war has shown how little Serbia can rely on its eastern cousins. "With allies like that, you haven't got a chance," the army officer told me.
But as NATO bombers left Belgrade in peace for the past three days, the first murmurs of the battle for Serbia's future could be heard. Some speak darkly of the possibility of civil war.
"If no one gives us economic aid," Mr Veselinov predicts, "if in six months we are without bread, without salaries, without industry, revanchism and fascism will rise and [the extremist Radical Party leader Mr Vojislav] Seselj will come to power."
Mr Obradovic paints a much more cheery vision of a Serbia reconciled with NATO joining the EU, of a Serbia "washed over by the wave of European Social Democracy".
His "new Serbia" would be "a truly democratic country where human rights are respected", where authorities are accountable, corruption is punished and the law reigns supreme.
With perhaps naive optimism, the former army general believes the countries that have just destroyed Serbia will now help turn it into Sweden. Just one easy step, from purgatory to heaven.