They asked me for them the evening before, the names, and it was the headmaster who asked me, in the doorway of the staff room while I already had my bag in my hand, and he said he wanted them by this evening and that the criterion was the most recent enrolment, and I said all right, and I went home, and at home I cooked and washed and put things away, and my son was studying in the other room with the radio low, and I stayed in the kitchen and tried the names out under my breath to hear which ones I could manage to say.

Because I know the names by heart, all of them, twenty-two years I have been at this school. It is not something to boast about. It is something that happens.

And there were three I could not manage to say, and they were the three who come from the houses behind the canal, and one of them has my brother's name and the other two do not. It has nothing to do with anything. But that is how it was.

In the morning the yard was the way it is every morning, with the dust sitting still because there was no wind, and with the low wall you can see the canal from, and behind the canal the white road I have seen a thousand times from the yard and have never once taken, not once in twenty-two years, and the three arrived with their shoes wet to the ankle because in September the canal rises and they cross anyway, and they had lined up without saying anything, and one had taken off a shoe and was shaking it out.

And I mark the homework with two pencils, a red one for the mistakes and a blue one for the things I liked, and the blue one is always shorter than the red one, and this is the only thing I know about myself for certain. About the three from the canal I know almost nothing. What I know I was told. I did not see it.

The headmaster came past and said nothing and looked at my hands.

Then he came back and brought me a second sheet. He did not argue, because he never argues. He put it in my hand open so that I would read it on my own, and he only said that this was the sheet that would come down from the directorate if they had mine done over, and he went off towards the head's office.

And I read it.

And on the second sheet there were the names of children I know do not make it, and there was the girl who lives with her grandmother and the grandmother cannot walk, and there was the little brother of the boy who stopped coming last year in February, and there was another one I am not writing down, and further down, almost at the bottom, there was one of the three from the canal as well, the one with my brother's name, and then I understood that I was not choosing between saving them and not saving them, I was choosing between saving two now and having no say any more about all the ones who come after, or losing three now and keeping it.

And there was no third thing. I looked for the third thing the whole time the headmaster was crossing the yard. There was not one.

I read out the list the criterion had made.

All the names in the order I had been given them, one after another, in the voice I use for the register and not in another voice, and as I read the yard grew quieter with every name, and not because the children were keeping quiet, the children were quiet already, but because the ones who heard their own name stopped moving, and someone who stops moving makes less noise than someone who is still. This is something I did not know before that morning. Now I know it.

And I read the three as well.

And I did not call them aside, and I did not explain anything to anyone, and I did not tell the second-grade teacher that the small one has had a cough since August, and I did not touch anyone on the shoulder the way I always do when I walk down the line, and I did not add anything after the last name, not good morning, not go in, and I stayed there with the sheet in my hand and my arm down by my side, and the three stayed where they were because nobody had told them whether they were to step out of the line or not, and nobody told them, and one of them put his shoe back on.

Then the bell rang.

And the children went in the way they always go in, two by two, pushing a little at the door, and the yard emptied in less than a minute, and I stayed outside with the sheet, and for the first time in twenty-two years I heard the canal.

Because you can hear the canal, behind the low wall, when there is nobody in the yard, and it makes a sound that is not of water running but of water standing. And in twenty-two years I had never heard it. Not because it was not there before, the canal has always been there. But because in twenty-two years I had never stayed in the yard after the bell.