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

he said. When the waitress sat down with him, he soon pretended that he wanted to put his arm around her; she realized that he was only pretending and leaned back even before he could make it clear to her that he was just pretending. Bloch wanted to justify himself by really putting his arm around the waitress, but she had already stood up. When Bloch wanted to
get up, the waitress walked away. Now Bloch should have pretended that he wanted to follow her. But he had had enough, and he left the café,
    In his room at the inn he woke up just before dawn. All at once, everything around him was unbearable. He wondered whether he had wakened just because at a certain moment, shortly before dawn, everything all at once became unbearable. The mattress he was lying on had caved in, the wardrobes and bureaus stood far away against the walls, the ceiling overhead was unbearably high. It was so quiet in the half-dark room, out in the hall, and especially out on the street, that Bloch could not stand it any longer. A fierce nausea gripped him. He immediately vomited into the sink. He vomited for a while, with no relief. He lay back down on the bed. He was not dizzy; on the contrary, he saw everything with excruciating stability. It did not help to lean out the window and look along the street. A tarpaulin lay motionless over a parked car. Inside the room he noticed the two water pipes along the wall; they ran parallel to each other, cut off above by the ceiling and below by the floor. Everything he saw was cut off in the most unbearable way. The nausea did not so much elate him as depress him even more. It seemed as though a crowbar had pried him away from what he saw—or, rather, as though the things
around him had all been pulled away from him. The wardrobe, the sink, the suitcase, the door: only now did he realize that he, as if compelled, was thinking of the word for each thing. Each glimpse of a thing was immediately followed by its word. The chair, the clothes hangers, the key. It had become so quiet earlier that no noises could distract him now; and because it had grown, on the one hand, so light that he could see the things all around him and, on the other hand, so quiet that no sound could distract him from them, he had seen the things as though they were, at the same time, advertisements for themselves. In fact, his nausea was the same kind of nausea that had sometimes been brought on by certain jingles, pop songs, or national anthems that he felt compelled to repeat word for word or hum to himself until he fell asleep. He held his breath as though he had hiccups. When he took another breath, it came back. He held his breath again. After a while this began to help, and he fell asleep.

    The next morning he could not imagine any of that any more. The dining room had been straightened up, and a tax official walked around while the innkeeper told him the prices of everything. The innkeeper showed the official the receipt for a coffeemaker and the freezer; the fact that the two men
were discussing prices made his state during the night seem all the more ridiculous to Bloch. He had put the newspapers aside after quickly leafing through them and was now listening only to the tax official, who was arguing with the innkeeper about an ice-cream freezer. The innkeeper’s mother and the girl joined them; all of them talked at once. Bloch broke in to ask what the furnishings for one room in the inn might cost. The innkeeper answered that he had bought the furniture quite cheap from nearby farmers who had either moved away or left the country altogether. He told Bloch a price. Bloch wanted that price broken down item by item. The innkeeper asked the girl for the inventory list for a room and gave the price he had paid for each item as well as the price he thought he could get for a chest or a wardrobe. The tax official, who had been taking notes up to that point, stopped writing and asked the girl for a glass of wine. Bloch, satisfied,