In the oldest part of Belgrade, in the rubble of an abandoned factory close to a bridge and a power plant, some 150 Gypsies have managed to hold on. They find the bombing frightening -- and disappointing. PNS correspondent Terence Sheridan, a former reporter for the Cleveland Plain Dealer, has been living and writing in the former Yugoslavia for the last eight years.

BELGRADE, Yugoslavia -- Her name is Mira. She is an undersized eight-year-old Gypsy with stringy hair, a dirty face, four missing front teeth and a perpetually runny nose. But she takes no prisoners and never accepts "no" as a reasonable answer.

Whenever she sees me, which means nearly every day, she asks, "Did you give me a dinar last night?" and when I say no, she says, "Then give me one now," and I promptly fork over a dinar, about eight cents.

She lives with her family and 150 or so other Gypsies in the nooks and crannies of a former cinder-block factory between the railroad tracks and the Danube in the oldest part of Belgrade, which makes her my neighbor.

The factory rubble has been stripped clean of everything salable. Some walls and part of a roof three stories high remain, but stairs lead nowhere and weeds and wildflowers grow on former office floors. Their laundry water is from the Danube, their drinking water from a faucet. Some have been there for four years.

Home is two-acres of refuse heaps, muddy tracks, lines of dingy laundry and packs of unfriendly dogs. Smoke from cook fires hangs over the entire mess. Yet there are scores of pigeons in spotless coops. They tenderly care for the birds, launching them skyward from cupped hands with cries of "fly high! fly high!"

Gypsies are the underclass of a city pauperized by wars and U.N. sanctions. Women and young children panhandle, men and boys and girls collect cardboard and retrieve stale bread from garbage containers to sell to peasants as pig food.

I often see Mira headfirst in a garbage bin outside one of the nearby yellow-brick apartment buildings, which have nuclear bomb shelters in the basements.

The people living in the apartments, who look out their windows and down at the rubble with attitudes ranging from indifference to contempt, are now living cheek-by-jowl in bomb shelters and wondering how to cope without electricity. The Gypsies know what it's like to live in confined spaces, with kerosene lamps and coal and wood fires -- and they have never stopped singing.

On the other hand, they are naked to Operation Allied Force. Their rickety shelters are only about a half-mile upriver from what U.S.-led NATO may or may not consider a "high-value target" -- a key bridge across the Danube. Even closer, within 200 yards, is a power plant with a tall candy-striped smokestack.

"I went to a shelter the first night, then decided that what will happen will happen," said Fatima Janusovic, 28, a frail-looking mother of six, the youngest six months old. "I have so many children and they are so small I never know which one to reach for first when the air-raid siren goes off."

"Of course we are afraid," she continued, "but what can you do? We are a merry people. We wait. We hope for peace. We are Gypsies. That is our nation."

"And now we are mice in our holes," added Naser, who said he was 26 but didn't want to give his last name.

In World War Two thousands of Yugoslav Gypsies were killed by Croatian fascists in the Jasenovac death camp, along with tens of thousands of Serbs and Jews -- no gas, their throats methodically cut or their heads bashed in with mallets, sledgehammers, and other farm implements: carnage that made even the Nazis gag.

"Gypsies are an ancient people who have seen much and suffered much," said Satko Azirovic, 39, who also has six children. "This bombing is a terrible thing, a frightening thing, but the big surprise is President Clinton. I admired him very much and now it turns out that he is a perfect fool."

When President Clinton appeals to the Serbian nation to support NATO's bomb and cruise missile attacks and to repudiate its dictatorial leader, Slobodan Milosevic, he is also talking to the Gypsies who live in ready-made rubble. But, so far, they aren't listening.

Getting ready for a music concert, a daily protest rally attended by thousands in the Square of the Republic, they recently used some of their precious cardboard to fashion signs reading "NATO is Fascist" and "Adolph Clinton." The leader, a small, agile man wearing a once yellow baseball cap and a filthy purple parka, shouldered his sign, punched a clenched fist in the air, and laughingly shouted, "Cigani, napred!" -- Gypsies, forward!

Mira, however, was taking care of business. Spotting me, she asked, "Did you give me a dinar last night?"