As they left their home, the Serbs told them: ``Go to Albania, or you will be killed.'' Rrahim Zylfai sat in the tractor for three days, waiting to cross the border to safety. On the third day, however, the Serbs, with guns and sticks, drove back the people queuing to leave Kosovo, and told them to go home. In the confusion, Rrahim was separated from his family and his shoes. So he walked for two days in his socks until he crossed the border, solitary, broken and alone.

As he crossed the border, the Serbs who had driven back his family, and tens of thousands of others, told him: ``You are an old man. You will die soon, so go. But when you cross the border, there will be many journalists waiting to talk to you. Be careful do not say anything bad aboutus.''

Rrahim Zylfai did as he was ordered. But at the hospital, as they bound up his shredded feet, he told a representative of the United Nations Commissioner for Refugees, who told me. We were at the same border that Zylfai had crossed at a painful hobble, watched by the publicity-conscious Serbs. Halfway across the 100 metres of no-man's land that separates Yugoslavia from Albania, Rrahim Zylfai became a refugee.

It is a strange passage, those few yards of tarmac at the border-crossing at Morini, in northern Albania. There is a pressure there that weighs as heavy as the deeps which squeeze a panicking diver to the surface. That pressure is fear. It is a terror that they have almost left behind, but which, even at the border, could still close in on them.

On the days the Serbs open the border, the pressure spits out the refugees from Kosovo like corks, their faces tense and frightened, their eyes fixed -- unwavering -- on the nightmare's end: a tatty red barrier on the Albanian side. Then comes thesudden decompression.

The relief provided by crossing the border brings with it a bitter and painful narcosis. The stark and dehydrated faces -- which have been held together by will -- visibly melt. The tears you see on almost every face are mostly silent ones. The men try to hide them, but the small acts of kindness from the doctors and aid workers who keep a vigil at the border are enough to tip them over as they are handed packets of food and water, and soft-drink bottles full of baby compound.

Occasionally, there is a hysterical release of fear. Once I met a woman who had walked across the border, a single figure in a vast, surging crowd. She sought us out. Only when she had made it to safety did she allow herself to lapse into tearful confusion for the children she had lost along the way, as she roamed among the aid workers and the press, asking for help in trying to find them. In decompression, they kiss, they hug, they cry and then -- and only then -- do they wonder about the future.

It is thenthat the English- and German-speaking children are pushed forward to ask the unrefusable. ``Will you call an uncle in Hamburg? A sister in Stockholm? A cousin in Green Lanes?'' I collect a wad of such numbers. And so I call Besa Krasniqi's uncle Binak, in Germany, and Muje Hasani's niece Hajria, in Sweden. To say what? ``Your people are safe, but I cannot answer any of your other requests for information.''

Beyond the decompression chamber of the border, all that exists for the refugees of Kosovo are new, unanswered questions. Where will I live? What will I eat? How will I live? Will I ever see my home again? It is the lament of the refugee. The lucky ones are those with cars, mobile shells of comfort that give a choice of where to travel in a decaying country that offers little hope of salvation. Those on foot are ferried away in the buses and taxis that the Albanian government has ordered each commune to provide. The least fortunate are the ``tractor people'', the rural refugees piled a dozen or more toeach trailer, moving at a crawling pace. Many trailers are tented with awnings made from plastic sheeting provided by the UNHCR, when it was still able to operate in Kosovo. It is a sign that they have been displaced for months.

Down the twisting road to the border town of Kukes, the ``tractor people'' come to gather outside the Italian camp -- a canvas city in miniature set up by Italy's civil defence volunteers. But the tents are reserved for the worst cases. Those who are excluded camp outside the gate. Then they move closer. And a little closer, until finally they are dispersed. I met Riza Demiri in the queue for medical attention outside the Italian camp. A new arrival, he was waiting with one of his cousins from the village of Muchtisht, near Suva Reka. She had been hit in the arm by bullet fragments when the Serbs shot at their lorry as they fled.

Gunshot wounds are a ticket into the Italian camp. Riza left Kosovo in a truck with 54 of his friends and relatives crushed in the back. He showed it tous. ``They told us to turn around and to go back,'' he said, showing us the holes the bullets had made in the pale blue metalwork of his lorry. ``I told them, `I won't go back, because we are not free'.''

But, after a while, a slow reckoning dawns -- of the not-freedom on the other side of the border. First there is registration, then allocation to other people's homes (if they are lucky), or to camps and stadia such as the stinking Palace of Sports in Tirana. And then what? Enough food to survive; the barest of educations for the children; no work; no future. There is a universal smell about every refugee disaster. It is a smell of dust and fear, of mud and shit, of smoke and tears. It is what hopelessness smells like.