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

the stove so hard that the dust flew.
    He sat down at the table, and the woman threw the logs into the stove. “We already lost one of our kids; he had pumpkins thrown at him,” she said. Two old women came by the window and called in. On the windowsill Bloch noticed a black purse. It had just been bought; the tissue paper stuffing had not even
been taken out yet. “All of a sudden he gave a loud snort and died,” the woman said.
    Bloch could see into the barroom of the tavern across the street; the sun, which was quite low by now, shone in so deeply that the bottom part of the room, especially the surfaces of the freshly waxed floorboards and the legs of the chairs, tables, and people, glowed as though of themselves. In the kitchen he saw the estate owner’s son, who, leaning against the door with his arms across his chest, was talking to the landlady, who, presumably, was still sitting farther away at the table. The deeper the sun sank, the deeper and more remote these pictures seemed to Bloch. He could not look away; only the children running back and forth on the street swept away the impression. A child came in with a bunch of flowers. The woman put the flowers in a tumbler and set the glass at the foot of the trestle. The child just stood there. After a while the woman handed her a coin and she went out.
    Bloch heard a noise as if somebody had broken through the floorboards. But it was just the logs in the stove collapsing again. As soon as Bloch had stopped talking to the woman, the young man had stretched out on the bench and fallen back to sleep. Later several women came and said their beads. Somebody wiped the chalk marks off the blackboard
outside the grocery store and wrote instead: oranges, caramels, sardines. The conversation in the room was soft; the children outside were making a lot of noise. A bat had caught itself in the curtain; roused by the squeaking, the young man had leaped up and rushed toward it instantly, but the bat had already flown off.
    It was the kind of dusk when no one felt like turning on the lights. Only the barroom of the tavern across the street was faintly lit by the light of the juke box; but no records were playing. The kitchen was already dark. Bloch was invited to stay for supper and ate at the table with the others.
    Although the window was now closed, gnats flew around the room. A child was sent to the tavern to get coasters; they were then laid over the glasses so the gnats wouldn’t fall in. One woman remarked that she had lost the pendant from her necklace. Everybody started to look for it. Bloch stayed at the table. After a while he was seized by a need to be the one who found it, and he joined the others. When the pendant was not to be found in the room, they went on looking for it in the hall. A shovel fell over—or, rather, Bloch caught it just before it fell over completely. The young man was shining the flashlight, the woman came with a kerosene lamp. Bloch asked for the flashlight and went out in the street. Bent
over, he moved around in the gravel, but nobody came out after him. He heard somebody shout in the hall that the pendant had been found. Bloch refused to believe it and went on looking. Then he heard that they were starting to pray again behind the window. He put the flashlight on the outside of the windowsill and went away.
    Back in town, Bloch sat down in a café and looked on during a card game. He started to argue with the player he was sitting behind. The other players told Bloch to get lost. Bloch went into the back room. A slide lecture was going on there. Bloch watched for a while. It was a lecture on missionary hospitals in Southeast Asia. Bloch, who was interrupting loudly, started to argue with people again. He turned around and walked out.
    He thought about going back inside, but he could not think of anything to say if he did. He went to the second café. There he asked to have the fan turned off. What’s more, the lights were much too dim,