“He’s alive!” Member Ma`ayan entered the room at a run. “He’s healthy, I heard him cry. It’s a Harvest Festival miracle. Didn’t you see the texts?” The faces of the five members of the Committee who were assembled in the conference room glowed, but a moment later they donned an enigmatic expression. They looked at one another in silence. “There’s a live baby,” M. Ma`ayan said again, her straw hair bouncing up and down. “Member Ruth gave birth to a healthy baby boy. Why aren’t you happy?”

              The conference room filled up. The 40 numbered wooden chairs were arranged in a semi-circle facing the northern window, from which the blossoming green walls, the pipes, the large refrigerators, the solar panels, the server room, the storerooms, and the hothouses could be seen. The large sheets of nylon sparkled in the sun, despite the dust covering them. A sickly light flooded the room, like through dirty plastic. The western window and the southern window, located behind the chairs, faced the high wall. In stained work-clothes, the Members who entered the room, whether from the first generation or the second wave, took their seats in silence as was customary, regardless of the great excitement. Some dared to smile, despite their past experiences. Others looked worried, even troubled. They were undoubtedly thinking of all the previous instances; perhaps they actually enumerated them. Everyone’s faces were yellow, but no more than usual. Excited and with a sense of trepidation, all the members waited for the arrival of those who remained. The Committee members sat with expressionless faces. 

              First to enter was M. Einat, the midwife, who wore a smile and took her seat. All the heads turned when M. Ruth and M. Erez entered the room with a stroller, but no one stood up. The members minded the protocol and waited for the speaker’s words to leave his lips. Each Harvest Festival, the speakership rotated. This time it was M. Ehud’s turn to fill the position. He looked at the seated members, emptied a glass of water into his large mouth, and then rose and walked to the middle of the room with a confident stride, despite the limp. “Come in peace two. Come in peace three.” His voice was deep and clear. When M. Ruth reached the center of the room, she bent down to the stroller and removed a living body. A newborn. The members sitting around her stared with arrested expectation. The newborn’s face grimaced slightly and a small sigh left his lips. A tense silence prevailed in the room. After a few moments, he screwed up his face and began to cry. The members rose to their feet, applauding, whistling, and singing. M. Ma`ayan rejoiced and jumped up and down in place. Others hugged each other and made noise. Erez and Ruth looked at one another and smiled with excitement. A few members looked at their fellow members in silence. The Committee members remained seated, and their faces betrayed no emotion.   

              “Members, members!” cried Ehud, and the room was seated. Ruth consoled the newborn, and she and Erez took their seats. “We welcome two. May they become three. Truth be told, it has been a long time since a couple entered this room with a live newborn. But we have learned from experience. We are not yet celebrating. We are not holding the ceremony. We will continue working, and we will give members Ruth and Erez the time and the privacy they need. The newborn will remain in the clinic until the thirtieth day – may we be blessed by giving him a name. Until then, we will continue our lives as usual. I know that our situation poses some difficulty for some members,” he said, and those seated looked to their left and right but evaded the eyes of their fellow members. “And in any event, we must show restraint. Just like a tree does not weep when its trunk is being sawn. The same is true of us.”                  

              Ruth nuzzled her head into Erez’s armpit, and he stroked her stiff hair. M. Ehud stopped speaking, looked at the members of the Committee seated behind him, and then turned back to face the room. “Now, before we open the floor, I’ll ask Member Amichai to update us about something.” 

              The faces turned to the ruddy M. Amichai, who still had a bit of hair on his head. He stood up in place and cleared his throat. “Fellow members – This morning, like every morning, I performed a sweep next to the wall. When I passed the guard tower and the machine gun, I peeked through the crack that looks out on the old plot, and I saw a very troubling sight.” M. Amichai fell silent for a moment, covered his mouth with his hand, then continued. “The graves are…at Little Graveyard, the graves of the stillbirths… The dug-up ground… someone desecrated, removed the graves. Nothing’s left there. Nothing.”

              Eyes widened and choked voices were audible in the room. M. Ma`ayan shouted, “My baby!” She ran toward the door, but M. Ehud stopped her and asked her to return to her seat. “Members, members. Please maintain order.” “How can we maintain order?!” shouted M. Irit, the chain-smoker. “Who did it?! Who did it?! Our babies…”    

              Committee member Raphael broke in. He stood up and raised his long, thin arm with its disfigured hand. His face was yellower than average. “Members – That’s precisely why we are here. To figure out who did it. I am speaking on behalf of the Committee when I say that we will not rest until we understand what happened. Our Group has been desecrated. For years, we have been toiling over revival, over renewing settlement, renewing the population. For years, we have been walking the path of the Land and the Sun, because we know that this is the way to finally achieve renewal. And here,” he said, pointing at the stroller, “perhaps… Well then, what was done at Little Graveyard is very difficult. I promise we will deal with it.”

              M. Raphael sat down, and M. Ehud stood up. He asked M. Amichai if there was any evidence, and the latter shook his head indicating that there was not. “Well then, did any of the members see or hear anything?” “How could we hear?” asked M. Ronen, one of the older members. “It’s outside the wall.”  Then M. Irit the chain-smoker spoke: “All the promises, all your promises – our promises! They have desecrated our history, our families, our dignity. And for what? For the Group! But what is the Group worth if it cannot protect its members? We are growing fewer in number in any event, because there are no babies. The only ones are under the ground, and they’re taking them from us as well.” “It’s not only us,” someone broke in. “There are no babies anywhere in the Land,” he continued, adding to himself, “at least that’s what we’re being told.” “But we promised it would be different,” Irit the chain-smoker added. “We worked the Land and the Sun, we signed the Members’ Covenant, we promised…” She burst into tears, and M. Ruth and the newborn wept with her.  

              M. Ehud, for whom it was the first time moderating a meeting, attempted calmly to take control of matters. “Members, members,” he said. “Would anyone like to say something worthwhile regarding the possible perpetrator of this crime?”  

              “It’s the Thai workers,” M. Boaz muttered. “We should not have approved them. Only Hebrew labor. What have we come to?” M. Ayelet said: ” It’s most certainly the foreign children from the village settlements. The Satanic cult is running rampant there. That’s what happens when you bring newborns from abroad.” M. Neta whispered: “It’s the Arabs from the dining room. I always knew we couldn’t trust them. And on the whole, maybe we did need to bring the newborns from abroad.” Suspicious looks filled the room and the whispering continued to grow until Amalia, the oldest female member, stood up, her gaunt body trembling. She looked to her right and to her left until everyone was quiet. “It’s the jackal,” she said.

              “Jackal? There are no jackals in this Land Amalia,” said M. Neta. “They went extinct years ago,” M. Ronen added “after the Drying-Up and the Great Poisoning. It’s all written down. And those who remained migrated northward to the Galilee, to Lebanon, and to Turkey. Jackals!” 

              Amalia remained adamant. “There is one jackal left. Nergal.”

              “Nonsense. Those are legends, Amalia. Nergal does not exist. Hardly any mice even remain in this Land.”

              “It’s not legend – it’s the truth. We already lost a newborn to the jackal years ago.”

              “Again, with those rumors? You’re only hurting the parents and the entire Group with talk like that. The subject was researched and closed.”

              “Researched and closed, eh?” asked Amalia. “We stopped looking around us, but he’s here, roaming around. He would eat out of the trash cans, but we locked them shut. He would eat from the yards, but we closed them off with a wall. There’s nothing left for him, for Nergal to eat. So he dug in the ground.”

              The meeting turned bitter. M. Ayelet asked M. Ehud to stop with the farce, and M. Ma`ayan requested permission to speak, saying that she saw a canine figure in the fields outside the wall a few weeks earlier. “What exactly were you looking for outside the wall?” asked M. Ronen against a background of whispers. “That’s not your business,” she answered. “I received authorization and an escort.” M. Ehud asked for quiet.            

              M. Amalia opened her cloth bag and took out a small bundle. The members strained their necks. She slit the old flannel fabric and presented its contents to the meeting. “Fur,” she said. “A tooth,” she said. “Nergal still visits here. The land is still not satisfied with us.”

              M. Erez asked to be recognized. “We reconciled with the land in the tenth year. Now it depends only on us. The land does not send us animals.”

              “Yes, it does,” M. Ma`ayan broke in. “There was also a jay two years ago.” M. Ehud reminded the attendees that “here, we ask permission to speak,” but the Committee members signaled that it was alright. M. Amalia passed the Nergal bundle around to the seated attendees. The tooth and the fur travelled twenty seats before it reached M. Erez, who refused the bundle. “Don’t let that get near my son.” M. Ehud reminded him that he was not yet his son. The Sun and the Land had not yet decided. The newborn emitted a laughing sound. “Look how the newborn is reacting,” said M. Ronen. “Look how he is reacting to Nergal. A one-day-old baby, laughing.” M. Ruth smiled, but M. Erez flared his nostrils.    

              “Did it look like the work of a jackal?” M. Irit asked M. Amichai. “Perhaps,” he answered. A rustle passed through the room.

              “We need to eliminate him,” someone called out. At first, chuckles could be heard. But when the members understood that no other proposals were being brought, the chuckles were replaced by mumblings of agreement. “Eliminate. Eliminate.” they responded. “We will not allow ourselves to be debased like this. They are our babies, our babies.” A wave passed over those seated. “It’s us, the Group.”

M. Amalia spread her arms and shook her head from side to side. “No, you don’t understand. He wants something. He’s telling us something.” She looked at M. Ma`ayan in search of an ally, but the latter repeated the mantra along with the rest of the meeting attendees. “Eliminate. Eliminate.” Eyes were wide, mouths opened, and teeth chattered.

              M. Ehud calmed the seated attendees and asked them to vote. The sentence passed with a large majority. “But how will we find him?” M. Ronen asked. “He won’t come to us just like that.”

              “We’ll set a trap with cheese,” M. Neta said. M. Boaz proposed using a doll that looked like a female jackal. “We can lure him with the sound of goats.” There was no meat to offer him. The members discussed the matter for a long time until someone elbowed his neighbor. “The newborn.” Furious eyes turned toward the member. “What was just said here?” M. Raphael asked. “They said the newborn,” said M. Ma`ayan. Sounds of shock passed through those seated like a wave. M. Ruth cradled the newborn close to her chest. M. Erez turned to M. Ma`ayan. “What did you say?! How dare you?!” M. Ronen broke in: “The newborn seems to have a connection with the jackal, with Nergal. He loves him.” M. Erez stood up and moved toward him with a puffed-out chest but stopped when M. Ehud lifted both his hands. “I am the voice, and I am the power, from harvest to harvest. I don’t suggest you question my authority.” M. Erez returned to his seat, frustrated.     

              “No one is going to harm the newborn,” said M. Ehud. “The newborn is the source of our sanctity. He is the seed from which we will grow. That is what is written in the Members’ Covenant. What do we have here, if not for the newborn?” 

              “There is no reason for him to be harmed,” said M. Irit. “All he will do is call the jackal. When Nergal gets close, we’ll give it to him real good, and that’s it. The newborn will earn another tooth to play with.” A few of the members concealed their laugh.

              M. Erez interrupted. “No one is going to use my son, the newborn,” he corrected himself. “He is more important than Little Graveyard.” Member Ruth wept in silence.

              “Who do you think you are?” shouted M. Ma`ayan. “Is this newborn more important than my baby? My baby is already four years old, and he has been desecrated…” she wept. M. Ronen joined in: “It’s very interesting that on the day the newborn arrived, all the babies disappeared. Who knows, maybe you’re involved.”   

              “Members, members,” said M. Ehud. The meeting calmed down a bit, but the tension was palpable. The members of the Committee met while the rest of the seated attendees whispered to one another. “It is agreed then,” said M. Raphael. “Not a hair on the head of the newborn will be harmed. The members guarantee it. However, to grow, and to get through the thirtieth day in peace, the newborn must survive the threat. He has a moral obligation to help capture Nergal. There’s precedent for it. Eleven years ago, the newborn of M. Adel and M. Nimrod helped appease the fungus that was eating the crops.” “But he’s dead!” screamed M. Ruth. “True,” said M. Raphael, “but not because of that. He died like all the newborns. It will be done at night, then, on the eve of the Harvest Festival. Who is in favor?” M. Ehud asked. Thirty-eight hands were raised.  

              The evening was cooler than usual, but there was no wind at all. The holiday began with the annual circling of the fields, the venturing out beyond the walls. In a long procession that proceeded in exemplary silence, the members exited through the narrow opening in the wall in white holiday clothes. First came the members of the Committee, led by M. Raphael. M. Erez and M. Ruth, the newborn in her arms, followed closely behind. M. Ehud staggered after them. The lights of the nearby village settlements gleamed in the distance. A few lone trees stood by the side of the road – last survivors, last remnants. M. Ronen listened closely, but nothing could be heard except the throb of motors in the distance. A trail of cigarette smoke dissipated behind M. Irit. Some of the female members carried straw baskets. At the end of the procession, in work boots, walked a member carrying a rifle.             

The weeds were heavy with dew, resulting in a wet sound that accompanied the procession. Aside from that, nothing else could be heard until the members reached Little Graveyard. They gasped at the sight of the dug-up earth and the orphaned headstones. A moment later, lowing, weeping, and a few shouts could be heard. Due to the sacredness of the holiday, the members did not console one another with touch. M. Ma`ayan fell to the ground and held her head in her hands. Sobbing silently, she tore weeds from the ground and began crawling toward the headstones. M. Ehud stood in her way. “Go back to your place, Member Ma`ayan. Be strong. Respect the holiday and the occasion. You will soon have your revenge.”     

At the instruction of the Committee members, on top of the weeds, the female members spread light-blue and lilac blankets that they removed from their baskets. Then they took out bundles of assorted leaves and flowers and arranged them in a precise circle around the blankets: flower, leaf, flower. In the darkness, the pink petals could barely be seen. M. Raphael nodded to M. Ruth. She looked at M. Erez and then walked forward to the circle, where she placed the newborn. He was peaceful and wrapped in thick cloth, with only his head peeking out. He was sleeping.

At M. Raphael’s signal, I took my place at the firing position, beside the wall. The butt of the rifle was cold, but my body was warm. I had trouble maintaining the required distance at this stage. The spoiled members stood around the newborn and trembled. Everyone was waiting for something. No one knew what was to come. I placed my finger on the trigger, and the metal was almost soft to the touch. My hand was steady. ‘The baby’s mine. The baby’s mine.’ What whiners. It had become impossible to listen to. It had been years. At least they had a baby. Not all of us were blessed. From the middle of the circle, a peep was suddenly heard – a thin sound of satisfaction. The worry on M. Ruth’s face was visible. M. Ehud told her that everything was alright. I was ready. I waited for the signal. From here, the night seemed endless. From far away, a sound was heard. It had been years since we heard such a sound. The hair on my arm stood on end. I looked through the sites. There was not a movement in the fields. Again, the sound. A howl. M. Ma`ayan wailed as she always did, and M. Ehud silenced her. Everyone was tense. The howl came closer, and another peep emerged from the blankets. The newborn made a sound. He was calling him. “Everyone, get ready,” said M. Raphael.” Through the night-vision sites the heads of the members did not look real, each with its own deformity. Everything stood out. There was an opportunity here. A small part of the newborn’s head, just enough, peeked out from among the blankets. Then the flowers, the darkness, the lone trees, and then, at a distance, the weeds that began to lay down beneath careful steps.