The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick: A Novel by Peter Handke Read Free Book Online

down, getting up, going out, standing around, coming back in? asked the landlady. Was he doing it to tease her? Instead of answering, Bloch read her a joke from the newspaper under the apple parings. Since from where he sat the
paper was upside down, he read so haltingly that the landlady, leaning forward, took over the job. Outside, the waitress laughed. Inside, something fell on the floor in the bedroom. No second sound followed. Bloch, who had not heard a sound the first time either, wanted to go and see; but the landlady explained that earlier she had heard the little girl waking up; she had just got out of bed and would probably come in any minute now and ask for a piece of cake. But Bloch then actually heard a sound like whimpering. It turned out that the child had fallen out of bed in her sleep and couldn’t figure out where she was on the floor next to the bed. In the kitchen the girl said there were some flies under her pillow. The landlady explained to Bloch that the neighbor’s children, who, because of the death in their family, were sleeping over here for the duration of the wake, passed the time by shooting the rubber rings from Mason jars at flies on the wall; in the evening they put the flies that had fallen on the floor under the pillow.
    After a few things had been pressed into the girl’s hand—the first one or two she dropped again—she gradually calmed down. Bloch saw the waitress come out of the bedroom with her hand cupped and toss the flies into the garbage can. It wasn’t his fault, he said. He saw the baker’s truck stop in front of the
neighbor’s house and the driver put two loaves on the doorstep, the dark loaf on the bottom, the white one on top. The landlady sent the little girl to meet the driver at the door; Bloch heard the waitress running water over her hand at the bar; lately he was always apologizing, the landlady said. Really? asked Bloch. Just then the little girl came into the kitchen with two loaves. He also saw the waitress wiping her hands on her apron as she walked toward a customer. What did he want to drink? Who? Nothing right now, was the answer. The child had closed the door to the barroom.
    “Now we’re alone,” said Hertha. Bloch looked at the kid standing by the window looking at the neighbor’s house. “That doesn’t count,” she said. Bloch took this as a hint that she had something to tell him, but then he realized that what she had meant was that he should start talking. Bloch could not think of anything. He said something obscene. She immediately sent the child out of the room. He put his hand next to hers. She told him off, softly. Roughly, he grabbed her arm but let go again immediately. Outside on the street he bumped into the kid, who was poking a piece of straw at the plaster wall of the house.
    He looked through the open window into the neighbor’s house. On a trestle table he saw the corpse; next to it stood the coffin. A woman sat on a stool in
the corner and dunked some bread into a cider jar; a young man lay asleep on his back on a bench behind the table; a cat lay on his stomach.
    As Bloch came into the house, he almost fell over a log in the hallway. The woman came to the door; he stepped inside and talked with her. The young man had sat up but did not say anything; the cat had run out. “He had to keep watch all night,” the woman said. In the morning she had found him quite drunk. She turned around to the dead man and said a prayer. Now and then she changed the water in the flowers. “It happened very quickly,” she said. “We had to wake up our little boy so that he could run into town.” But then the kid hadn’t even been able to tell the priest what had happened, and so the bells hadn’t been tolled. Bloch realized that the room was being heated; after a while the wood in the stove had collapsed. “Go get some more wood,” said the woman. The young man came back with several logs, some under each arm, which he dropped next to