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

glasses, which she put on the foam-rubber mat that soaked up the water, and the waitress walked toward him, between the young men standing at the bar, and gave him his change, with fingers that were cold, and as he stood up, he put the wet coins in his pocket immediately; a joke, thought Bloch; perhaps the sequence of events seemed so laborious to him because he was drunk.
    He stood up and walked to the door; he opened the door and went outside—everything was all right.
    Just to make sure, he stood there for a while. Every once in a while somebody came out to relieve himself. Others, who were just arriving, started to sing along as soon as they heard the juke box, even when they were still outside. Bloch moved off.
    Back in town; back at the inn; back in his room. “Eleven words altogether,” thought Bloch with relief. He heard bath water draining out overhead; anyway, he heard gurgling and then, finally, a snuffling and smacking.
    He must have just dropped off when he woke up again. For a moment it seemed as if he had fallen out of himself. He realized that he lay in a bed. “Not
fit to be moved,” thought Bloch. A cancer. He became aware of himself as if he had suddenly degenerated. He did not matter any more. No matter how still he lay, he was one big wriggling and retching; his lying there was so sharply distinct and glaring that he could not escape into even one picture that he might have compared himself with. The way he lay there, he was something lewd, obscene, inappropriate, thoroughly obnoxious. “Bury it!” thought Bloch. “Prohibit it, remove it!” He thought he was touching himself unpleasantly but realized that his awareness of himself was so intense that he felt it like a sense of touch all over his body; as though his consciousness, as though his thoughts, had become palpable, aggressive, abusive toward himself. Defenseless, incapable of defending himself, he lay there. Nauseatingly his insides turned out; not alien, only repulsively different. It had been a jolt, and with one jolt he had become unnatural, had been torn out of context. He lay there, as impossible as he was real; no comparisons now. His awareness of himself was so strong that he was scared to death. He was sweating. A coin fell on the floor and rolled under the bed: a comparison? Then he had fallen asleep.

    Waking up again. “Two, three, four,” Bloch started to count. His situation had not changed, but he must
have grown used to it in his sleep. He pocketed the coin that had fallen under the bed and went downstairs. When he put on an act, one word still nicely yielded the next. A rainy October day; early morning; a dusty windowpane; it worked. He greeted the innkeeper; the innkeeper was just putting the newspapers into their racks; the girl was pushing a tray through the service hatch between the kitchen and dining room: it was still working. If he kept up his guard, it could go on like this, one thing after another; he sat at the table he always sat at; he opened the newspaper he opened every day; he read the paragraph in the paper that said an important lead in the Gerda T. case was being followed into the southern part of the country; the doodles in the margin of the newspaper that had been found in the dead girl’s apartment had furthered the investigation. One sentence yielded the next sentence. And then, and then, and then … For a little while it was possible to look ahead without worrying.
    After a while, although he was still sitting in the dining room listing the things that went on out on the street, Bloch caught himself becoming aware of a sentence, “For he had been idle too long.” Since that sentence looked like a final sentence to Bloch, he thought back to how he had come to it. What had come before it? Oh, yes, earlier he had thought,
“Surprised by the shot, he’d let the ball roll right through his legs.” And before this sentence he had thought about the photographers who annoyed him behind the cage.