Free Distant Light by Antonio Moresco Page B

much time went by like this. I only knew that, all of a sudden, just as I was finally about to turn and retrace my steps, or so it seemed, unless the thought had merely passed through my mind, I felt something, like a small rush of air behind me.
    I turned back toward the school. But I could see nothing.
    The silence was such that I could hear the slight hum of the bulb in the streetlamp above my head.
    A few moments later it seemed as though the front door was opening slowly, noiselessly, in the dark.
    I don’t know why, but instinctively I stepped aside, so no one would catch sight of me. I went and stood around the corner of the building opposite, from where I could see without being seen.
    The door was now completely open, but no one came out.
    There was still that enormous silence. Something was rattling somewhere, up above, perhaps the streetlamp in the breeze.
    I peered out from around the corner, from where I could see a large part of the double doors of the main entrance that were completely open, the whole school building still in darkness, even the ground floor, even the corridor there must have been beyond the entrance.
    Then, all of a sudden, a slight sound of footsteps could be heard coming from very far away.
    A few moments later, several children started coming out of the door, one after the other, in silence, with their black smocks and their schoolbags.
    My legs were trembling slightly, I watched them, hardly breathing, hidden round the corner in the dark, as they came out of the doorway and walked down the few steps that brought them level with the street. I tried to make out the shaved head of the boy in the midst of the others.
    A few more came out. I thought that was all, but another two emerged.
    Then no more.
    “He’s not there!” I thought, at last.
    And yet, when it seemed as though there was no one else, he too appeared.
    The door closed immediately behind him, without a sound.
    Each of the children went off in their own direction, none of them exchanging a word, or any gesture of goodbye.
    I was about to come out from the corner where I’d been hiding, to go up to the boy, to take his schoolbag and take him back to his little house far away in the middle of the woods. But then I stopped myself, since he’d already said no to me when I’d offered before.
    “What world is this?” I wondered as I watched the children walking alone in the dark, with their little bare legs sticking out below their smocks, and their schoolbags. “Where, while everyone’s asleep, there are dead children who come out of night classes in silence, alone, and no one knows about it, and no one sees them. They find no one standing there at the door, they don’t even look up in the dark because theyknow there’s no one waiting for them. They go off alone, who knows where … That boy will now cross the deserted village, will take the lane up as far as the beginning of the ridge, then the other narrower path overgrown with vegetation and brambles which climbs through the woods, deep in the night, in the darkness, alone, and will reach his little house, and switch on that little light … How sad it is for dead children like that when they leave dark schools, at night, alone! But then … isn’t it just as sad for those alive?”

20
    It’s getting colder. I begin to feel the air much more, against my face. Even the light is colder – clearer and colder. Something’s also happening to the animals, big and small, on the ground and in the air. I notice it when I’m sitting looking out above this steep drop in the evening or at night, or when I’m walking along the paths in the woods. I seem to be hearing different sounds, a sort of bustle, among the leaves of the trees overhead that are beginning to lose their greenness and dry up, behind the bramble bushes from which come the patter of paws or little padded feet that run away at the sound of my footsteps, but at the last moment, as though they were busy with