In this office in downtown Haifa, time stands still as the minutes click away. Countless. Endless. The hardest combat mission is waiting. When the action goes down, it’s quick. There’s gunfire, noise, the smell of gunpowder and blood, mixed with fear and the screaming of both the wounded and those doing the wounding, but it starts and ends in an instant.
Waiting is eternal.
For all his preaching and teaching on the wonders of speed, Akiva Hoshech is a past master of the wait.
So, he waits. He’s been waiting for almost an hour.
He walks to the water cooler, refills his cup, goes back to his chair.
The receptionist looks up from her fashion magazine, the kind that seems to grow on waiting-room plants or something.
“I don’t think she’ll be much longer, General,” she says, with the same bland smile, the same bland voice, the same bland eyes with which she’s said the same thing three times already. Each time unprompted.
“No worries, I’m in no rush,” he says.
The receptionist eyes the clock on the wall, a leftover from the eighties, like the furniture and the woman’s boss behind the door. The woman must be thinking about lunch. It’s almost time.
Hoshech opens his knapsack. An apple, two dates, a fistful of nuts. Noa Perelman may hide in her office all day if she wants to, but she can’t run away.
The receptionist types something on her keyboard.
Her computer beeps.
“She’ll see you now, sir.”
He walks to his frenemy’s door, leaves the apple on the receptionist’s desk. “You may need this, sweetheart.”
Noa Perelman’s office smells of vanilla odor spray. It smelled like this the last time Hoshech was here, and it smells like this still.
Not much has changed either, except for the receptionist outside.
The same frayed green carpet, the orange office couch, a coffee table, enormous bulk chairs in front of a massive desk overrun by coffee-stained stacks of paper. Hoshech bets some of those papers have been on that desk since before the last time he was here, thirty years ago.
Behind the desk sits a yenta with brown-dyed hair forced back and held by a pin as if under penalty of death, or worse. She wears a printed housedress, no makeup, no jewelry except for a pair of dangling gold earrings.
Noa Perelman has worn long skirts since she and Akiva were young. She’s not religious, far from it. She uses them, as Golda Meir did, so her balls don’t show when she walks.
She’s the boss of bosses of retired and wounded soldiers.
“Did you enjoy your stew?” she says.
“Delicious,” says Hoshech. He’s not sure if she means the time she made him wait, stewing in his juices today, or a potato-and-roast-chicken casserole she sent him as a thank-you present, those same thirty years ago, or both.
One never knows with Noa.
“So,” she says.
“So,” he says.
“Is the piper here for his pay?”
He nods.
“On behalf of this rabbi of yours?”
He nods again.
“I hear you’re making the rounds. You’ve got endorsements for this speaking tour from most of the old guard.”
“That’s what an old guard is good for, Noa,” he says. “We cover each other’s backs.”
“Hoshech, most of us are old socialists, and all my boys are wounded veterans. I can’t endorse a Haredi. I’m sorry.”
“You’re not endorsing a Haredi rabbi. He’s a Medal of Valor war hero. He was Bnei Akiva and a tier-two combat soldier. He fought in the Second Lebanon and in the Second Intifada. BenTov is a guy who casts more than a single shadow. He encourages his congregation, males and females, to join, to serve in Tzahal. Ever heard of a rabbi who did that? Huh? He’s no socialist by a long shot. But he’s one of us.”
“Yeah, yeah. I’ve seen his card. I know all that but, Hoshech, a rabbi? To think Akiva Hoshech found religion this late in the game.”
“There’s no religion.”
“No religion?”
“No religion,” he says. “He won’t preach or anything like that. He’s not trying for more converts for his flock. God knows he’s got enough of those. It’s something else. It’s tikkun olam,” he says.
“Tikkun olam?” she says. “Some spiritual bullshit?”
“Tikkun olam, Noa. Repair the world. Fix our country’s past mistakes. Build bridges between the Orthodox and the secular, find common ground with the Palestinians, open a path for peace. I’m telling you, Noa, he’s one of us.”
“The boys aren’t going to like it.”
“They don’t have to like it, they just have to go to a meeting and listen,” he says.