Everyday life in Algiers? In response to my question, my friend set the hatchet down on the dining room table before me: an old implement from colonial times, with the name of its French manufacturer still legible on the rusting steel head. If they got into her apartment, she was determined to fight them. I weighed the heavy hatchet with both hands and thought how easily an attacker could wrest it from her slender hands. "If you hit a man's head with that, it splits like a watermelon," said her gentle, white-haired mother.
She placed a colour photograph of their cousin, Abdelkader, on the lace tablecloth beside the hatchet. He was driving home from his pharmacy on the outskirts of Algiers three weeks ago when he was stopped at a faux barrage, a fake checkpoint set up by the rebels. They shot him dead, along with a vet and a doctor riding with him. "Such a gentle boy," the mother murmured.
Four days before nationwide municipal elections, the last in a series of four polls meant to restore "democracy" to this country, terror dominates everyone's lives.
Another friend, Larbi, greeted me with the news that his wife's cousin's body had just been found in a hospital morgue, nearly a month after he was killed in the massacre at Bentalha.
Because doctors had wrapped his head in bandages before he died, the family hadn't recognised him. Larbi had already been to the funeral of the cousin's three young children.
Larbi is very tired; he and his brother take turns standing guard all night in their Algiers suburb. Kitchen knives, an axe and the siren which the neighbours pitched in to buy are their only protection. After four recent massacres took place next to a military barracks, no one expects help from the government.
The result of Thursday's poll is a foregone conclusion. President Liamine Zeroual's RND party will win, and the residents of Algiers regard it with total indifference. Opposition parties predict massive vote fraud, and the Islamic Salvation Front, the now-banned party which won the last local elections in June 1990, has called for a boycott.
The citizens of Algiers have only one concern, their physical survival. A home-made bomb in a pizzeria wounded nine people on Saturday, three of them seriously.
The government yesterday announced that open-air markets (often the target of bombings) and sports stadiums would be closed this week. Schools would shut from tomorrow. Trucks carrying sand, wood and construction materials must stay off the roads from today.