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

belfry. A plane flew overhead, so high that he could not see it; only once did it glint. Next to him on the bench there was a dried-up snail spoor. The grass under the bench was wet with last night’s dew; the cellophane wrapper of a cigarette box was fogged with mist. To his left he saw … To his right there was … Behind him he saw … He got hungry and walked away.
    Back at the tavern, Bloch ordered the cold plate. The waitress, using an automatic bread-slicer, sliced bread and sausage and brought him the sausage slices on a plate; she had squeezed some mustard on top. Bloch ate; it was getting dark already. Outside, a child had hidden himself so well while playing that he had not been found. Only after the game was over did Bloch see him walk along the deserted street. He pushed the plate aside, pushed the coaster aside as well, pushed the salt shaker away from himself.
    The waitress put the little girl to bed. Later the child came back into the barroom in her nightgown and ran around among the customers. Every so
often, moths fluttered up from the floor. After she came back, the landlady carried the child back into the bedroom.
    The curtains were pulled shut and the barroom filled up. Several young men could be seen standing at the bar; every time they laughed, they took one step backward. Next to them stood girls in nylon coats, as if they wanted to leave again immediately. When one of the young men told a story, the others could be seen to stiffen up just before they all screamed with laughter. The people who sat preferred to sit against the wall. The mechanical hand in the juke box could be seen grabbing a record and the tone arm coming down on it, and some people who were waiting for their records could be heard quieting down; it was no use, it didn’t change anything. And it didn’t change anything that you could see the wristwatch slip out from under the sleeve and down to the wrist when the waitress let her arm drop, that the lever on the coffee machine rose slowly, and that you could hear somebody hold a match box to his ear and shake it before opening it. You saw how completely empty glasses were repeatedly brought to the lips, how the waitress lifted a glass to check whether she could take it away, how the young men pummeled each other’s faces in fun. Only when somebody shouted for his check did things become real again.
    Bloch was quite drunk. Everything seemed to be out of his reach. He was so far away from what happened around him that he himself no longer appeared in what he saw and heard. “Like aerial photographs,” he thought while looking at the antlers and horns on the wall. The noises seemed to him like static, like the coughing and clearing of throats during radio broadcasts of church services.
    Later the estate owner’s son came in. He was wearing knickers and hung his coat so close to Bloch that Bloch had to lean to one side.
    The landlady sat down with the estate owner’s son, and could be heard as she asked him, after she had sat down, what he wanted to drink and then shouted the order to the waitress. For a while Bloch saw them both drinking from the same glass; whenever the young man said something, the landlady nudged him in the ribs; and when she wiped the flat of her hand across his face, he could be seen snapping and licking at it. Then the landlady had sat down at another table, where she went on with her routine motions by fingering another young man’s hair. The estate owner’s son had stood up again and reached for his cigarettes in the coat behind Bloch. When Bloch shook his head in answer to a question about whether the coat bothered him, he realized that he had not lifted his eyes from one and the same spot for quite a while. Bloch shouted, “My check!”
and everybody seemed to become serious again for a moment. The landlady, whose head was bent backward because she was just opening a bottle of wine, made a sign to the waitress, who was standing behind the bar washing