There is a masked man with a sledgehammer trying to break down an apartment door in the building next to ours. Let his story be a lesson for masked men everywhere: if you set out to break down someone’s door with a sledgehammer, you damn well better be in shape or have the common sense to bring help.

From our balcony you can see through the stairway window of the apartment building opposite ours and from there into the interior hallway. Had you made use of this vantage point one night last week, you would have seen the aforementioned masked man trying to break down one of the apartment doors with aforementioned sledgehammer.

Really, it was the noise that attracted attention: a loud throbbing bang ringing throughout the neighborhood. He was at it for a good ten or fifteen minutes, so long that he took breaks, quite frequently in fact, huffing and puffing, resting the sledgehammer upright on the floor and leaning against its handle for support.

So I took stock of the situation, calmly collected my thoughts, and their general gist was as follows:
“What the hell??”

Then I called one of our Palestinian friends who works with us and asked him what to do.
“Stay off the balcony and don’t be seen.”
“Is there a number we can call or something like that?”
“Well, unfortunately in this situation there’s nothing we can do. But tell me if anything happens in your building.”

I love Nablus, but sometimes I hate how things are here. The police are ineffectual and partisan, there is no law, no court system, no sign of a robust local government in people’s daily lives (with the blessed exception of waste disposal).

We guessed that at the worst the masked man was here for one of the relatively harmless kidnappings that have become rampant in Nablus between Hamas and Fatah supporters. One of the kidnappings, which two of my flatmates witnessed at a Nablusi refugee camp, consisted simply of one armed masked man jogging through the street, firing into the air with one hand, and lightly tugging an obliging man behind him. Practically everyone who gets kidnapped in Nablus is returned safely after some time (think of it as a very very spontaneous vacation). In all likelihood our masked man’s intentions were no more serious than kidnapping, or perhaps even more minor than that, otherwise he would not have come alone, or he would have simply shot the lock out (guns in Nablus are like liberals in Berkeley, conservatives in Orange County; commonplace like candy at a candy shop, only the candy is inedible and discharges bullets).

Eventually the dull banging in the next building over ceased. One of us occasionally took peeks out the kitchen window. The last she saw, the masked man and some others were standing in the hallway. The next time they were gone. Who knows if they got what they wanted, perhaps a truce was negotiated, or friends and relatives of the wanted man intervened, or he simply acquiesced to whatever demands they made of him. If it was a kidnapping perhaps we’ll hear about it in the rounds of idle gossip. The specifics of minor kidnappings almost never make the local or international news: people would rather read something interesting.

Still, I worry that if things keep getting worse someday someone will kill a hostage here or more likely in Gaza; then everything will change in an instant. And regardless of the bigger picture, I want to be able to call someone when I see a masked man, clearly out of shape, taking his sweet time knocking down a door with a sledgehammer.

P.S. Some days after I wrote this, Hamas and Fatah came to an agreement in Mecca and the infighting settled down noticeably (in Gaza of course, but also the random kidnappings in Nablus). Hopefully all goes well with the formation of a real National Unity Government.