With two salaries from the local Zastava windscreen wiper plant, plus a small grocery shop, Vojislav "Voja" Milic and his son Aleksandar built their family villa in Zmaj Jove Jovanovica Street. And after NATO began its bombardment of Yugoslavia on March 24th, the whole neighbourhood sent their children to the Milics' sturdy basement every time the air raid sirens sounded.
There were 12 children and nine adults in the shelter at lunchtime on Tuesday, when the NATO missile exploded. All but one of them died.
A dozen houses in this street were destroyed and many more damaged, but the site of the impact - the Milic villa - was a pit of horror. "Bits of them were all over the road," one neighbour said. "We found a child's head in the garden and limbs in the mud."
By the time we arrived in Surdulica yesterday, the pieces of flesh and broken bodies had been taken away. There was a puddle of congealed blood and stains on the chunks of concrete and timber. The place had the sickening smell of meat that has gone off, like a butcher's shop.
On the edge of the crowd of officials from Belgrade, policemen and angry town-folk, an old man with a worn face, wearing a tweed cap and a leather jacket, was crumpled over with grief, leaning against a wall. Voja Milic's face was bathed in tears and his blue irises stared out crazily from blood-red eyes. Sobbing quietly while the officials made speeches in front of his ruined house, Mr Milic fumbled with a cigarette while two female relatives tried to comfort him. "I cannot stand to see you this way," a blonde woman said, stroking his back.
Pelagija Zdravkovic, a 60 year-old woman with a gentle face who lives two streets away, watched Mr Milic and shook her head. "This was the most tragic story in our neighbourhood," she said. "His wife was at home and his son and daughter-in-law were very unlucky. They had just come from work when they heard the air raid siren. Everyone went to the cellar, but it did no good."
Voja Milic was walking home himself when the NATO missile exploded, killing his wife, Aleksandar (37), his daughter-in-law Vesna (35), and Mr Milic's grandchildren, Vladimir (11), and Miliana (15). Three cousins aged between 18 and 21 were also killed in the basement.
"He said he would hang himself," Mrs Zdravkovic said, recounting the terrible aftermath and nodding towards her grieving neighbour. "The first thing he said when they pulled him away from the rubble was: `Shoot me. Kill me."'
Amid such grief and anger, there was another emotion that one encounters often in Serbia; a wilful denial of reality, a blind wish not to connect cause and effect. What could NATO have been aiming at when it bombed two different housing estates in Surdulica, I kept asking. Through the trees, behind a clump of bee-hives, I even glimpsed the twisted white metal ribs of what might have been a warehouse, about half a kilometre from both bomb sites.
Each time I asked a local resident what the ruined building was, an interior ministry policeman in a purple and blue camouflage uniform shooed me away. A Serb woman who stood smoking a cigarette at her front gate looked absently in the direction of the wreckage, which I pointed to, and said: "There is nothing over there - only the mountains." An official from the foreign ministry insisted, "There are no military facilities in the area."
Only one religious old woman admitted what all of us knew: "My dear, I cannot lie to you," she said. "When they aimed at this place, they meant to hit the barracks." Like many of the targets NATO is bombing, the Surdulica barracks had been hit before, on April 6th.
It was not enough for the Serbs to show us that NATO had blundered again, badly, for at least the sixth time. In some way, President Milosevic's government - like NATO - seemed to believe that the presence of a disused, bombed-out barracks half a kilometre away somehow justified the destruction of so many lives and so much property. Why else would the Serbs have tried to hide it? The deaths of at least 20 people here add to the growing catalogue of NATO accidents that keep claiming civilian victims.
After bombing civilian areas of Pristina, Aleksinac and Cuprija, after killing 27 people on a passenger train and 74 Albanian refugees in a convoy, NATO claimed that one bomb was "misled" by smoke in Sudurlica and "regretted" the deaths. The Serbs claimed four missiles hit Sudurlica. Contrary to initial reports, the hospital was not bombed. We saw two craters; I assume the other two missiles hit the barracks, whose existence the locals were so reluctant to acknowledge.
At the other bomb site, three houses were totally destroyed. A grey-haired woman wearing the traditional Serb black headscarf, full skirt and woolly tights stood at the edge of the 10-metre deep, 20-metre wide crater.
"It would have been better if they had hit me," Radica Ristic wailed. "I did nothing to God. Why did he punish me?" She and her family had run to the neighbour's cellar across the street when the air raid siren sounded. "The second we reached the cellar, the bomb hit and turned three storeys into smoke. Where you see the crater was my house. It took me 10 years to build it. We will go naked; we have nothing. . . 10 years to build it."
How many years, how many decades, will it take to restore Mr Milic's sanity, Mrs Ristic's vaporised house? The Serbs of Surdulica may not want to know what their government has wrought just a few kilometres away in Kosovo, but their suffering is nonetheless real.
Despite the car-part, furniture and textile factories on its outskirts, Surdulica was a pretty place. Lilac bushes, fruit and magnolia trees and tulips bloom here in profusion. Snow blankets peaks beyond which lies Bulgaria, melting into two streams that gurgle through the town centre. "You should have come here before," Mrs Zdravkovic said outside the ruins of Voja Milic's house. "In our street, there is something that looks like a bomb, and nobody touches it. In our street, there used to be windows, there used to be doors, but not anymore. All our souls are in pain now."