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

And before that, “Somebody had stopped behind him but had only whistled for his dog.” And before that sentence? Before that sentence he had thought about a woman who had stopped in a park, had turned around, and had looked at something behind him the way one looks at an unruly child. And before that? Before that, the innkeeper had talked about the mute schoolboy, who’d been found dead right near the border. And before the schoolboy he had thought of the ball that had bounced up just in front of the goal line. And before the thought of the ball, he had seen the market woman jump up from her stool on the street and run after a schoolboy. And the market woman had been preceded by a sentence in the paper: “The carpenter was hindered in his pursuit of the thief by the fact that he was still wearing his apron.” But he had read the sentence in the paper just when he thought of how his jacket had been pulled down over his arms during a mugging. And he had come to the mugging when he had bumped his shin painfully against the table. And before that? He could not remember any more what had made him bump his shin against the table. He searched the sequence for
a clue about what might have come before: did it have to do with the movement? or with the pain? or with the sound of table and shin? But it did not go any further back. Then he noticed, in the paper in front of him, a picture of an apartment door that, because there was a corpse behind it, had had to be broken open. So, he thought, it all started with this apartment door, until he had brought himself back to the sentence, “He had been idle too long.”
    Everything had gone well for a while after that: the lip movements of the people he talked to coincided with what he heard them say; the houses were not just façades; heavy sacks of flour were being dragged from the loading ramp of the dairy into the storage room; when somebody shouted something far down the street, it sounded as though it actually came from down there. The people walking past on the sidewalk across the street did not appear to have been paid to walk past in the background; the man with the adhesive tape under his eye had a genuine scab; and the rain seemed to fall not just in the foreground of the picture but everywhere. Bloch then found himself under the projecting roof of a church. He must have got there through a side alley and stopped under the roof when it started to rain.
    Inside the church he noticed that it was brighter than he had expected. So, after quickly sitting down
on a bench, he could look up at the painted ceiling. After a while he recognized it: it was reproduced in the brochure that was placed in every room at the inn. Bloch, who had brought a copy because it also contained a sketchy map of the town and its vicinity with all its streets and paths, pulled out the brochure and read that different painters had worked on the background and foreground of the picture; the figures in the foreground had been finished long before the other painter had finished filling in the background. Bloch looked from the page up into the vault; because he did not know them, the figures—they probably represented people from the Bible—bored him; still, it was pleasant to look up at the vault while it rained harder and harder outside. The painting stretched all the way across the ceiling of the church. The background represented the sky, almost cloudless and an almost even blue; here and there a few fluffy clouds could be seen; at one spot, quite far above the figures, a bird had been painted. Bloch guessed the exact area the painter had had to fill with paint. Would it have been hard to paint such an even blue? It was a blue that was so light that white had probably been mixed into the color. And in mixing them didn’t you have to be careful that the shade of blue didn’t change from day to day? On the other hand, the blue was not absolutely
even but changed within each brush stroke. So you