A single candle wedged in an empty wine bottle throws a dancing light on the kitchen table.

Marko stands in the half-darkness beyond, his back to the crackling wood stove. He has not paid an electricity bill for six years, and does not intend to start now. ?No one from the power company ever brought me a bill,? he says. ?I don?t even know what the contract looks like.?

Marko is four hours into the five-hour rotating power cut that blankets the Kosovo Serb monastery town of Gracanica in darkness every evening ? part of a regime of electricity cuts plaguing the province since Serb forces pulled out under NATO bombing in 1999 and the United Nations took control.

Not paying for electricity is something of a tradition among Serbs and Albanians in Kosovo, jobless and poor alike. Even in this there is a political undercurrent, a tug-of-war set to surface in direct negotiations beginning on Monday to decide Kosovo?s fate. The 100,000 remaining Serbs reject the power company now run by Albanians and its demands for back-payment.

Egged on by Belgrade, they say they want power from the Serbian provider which, like every other Serbian state body, lost the right to operate in Kosovo in 1999. At least, officially.

In practice, with the exception of electricity, Serbia runs an elaborate system of parallel structures covering schools, health care, public administration and telephones.

Gracanica?s health clinic answers to the Serbian Health Ministry, the school is run by the Education Ministry and the phone system by Telekom Srbija, the state telecoms monopoly.

This is a 100-million-euro per year ($119 million) operation, Serbian government sources say, with 30,000 Kosovo Serbs paid to answer only to Belgrade, whether they work or not. U.N. sources say some Kosovo Serb police officers are also on the books.

<B>?Nothing to look for? </B>

Just as the 90-percent Albanian majority created its own network of backyard schools and basement clinics in response to Serb discrimination in the 1990s, so Serbs have shunned their new masters and cocooned themselves in a Serb-run world.

?That society five kilometres from here has preserved almost nothing of any meaning to me,? says Marko, jabbing his finger in the direction of the nearby capital, Pristina.

?My family isn?t there any more. The church I was christened in was torched and the name of the school I went to changed. I have nothing to look for in that society.?

<B>Matthew Robinson</B>