The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick: A Novel (11 page)

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Authors: Peter Handke

She turned on the radio on the kitchen cabinet; it was nice to watch her walking back and forth while the music came out of the radio. When somebody in a movie turned on the radio, the program was instantly interrupted for a bulletin about a wanted man.

While they sat at the table, they talked to each other. It seemed to Bloch that he could not say anything serious. He cracked jokes, but the landlady took everything he said literally. He said that her blouse was striped like a soccer jersey and wanted to go on, but she asked him whether he didn’t like her blouse, what bothered him about it. It did no good to assure her that he had only made a joke and that the blouse went very nicely with her pale skin; she went on to ask if her skin was too pale for him. He said, jokingly, that the kitchen was furnished almost like a city kitchen, and she asked why he said “almost.” Did people there keep their things cleaner? Even when Bloch made a joke about the estate owner’s son (he’d proposed to her, hadn’t he?), she took him literally and said the estate owner’s son wasn’t available. He tried to explain, using a comparison, that he had not meant it seriously, but she took the comparison literally as well. “I didn’t mean anything by it,” Bloch said. “You must have had a reason for saying it,” the landlady answered. Bloch
laughed. The landlady asked why he was laughing at her.

The little girl called from the bedroom. She went in and calmed her down. When she came back, Bloch had stood up. She stood in front of him and looked at him for a while. But then she talked about herself. Because she was standing so close to him, he could not answer and took a step backward. She did not follow him, but hesitated. Bloch wanted to touch her. When he finally moved his hand, she looked to one side. Bloch let his hand drop and pretended that he had made a joke. The landlady sat on the other side of the table and went on talking.

He wanted to say something, but then he could not think of what it was he wanted to say. He tried to remember: he could not remember what it was about, but it had something to do with disgust. Then a movement of the landlady’s hand reminded him of something else. He could not think of what it was this time either, but it had something to do with shame. His perceptions of movements and things did not remind him of other movements and things but of sensations and feelings, and he did not remember the feelings as if they were from the past but relived them as happening in the present: he did not remember shame and nausea but only felt ashamed and nauseated now that he remembered
without being able to think of the things that had brought on shame and nausea. The mixture of nausea and shame was so strong that his whole body started to itch.

A piece of metal knocked against the windowpane outside. The landlady answered his question by saying that it was the wire from the lightning rod that had come loose. Bloch, who had seen a lightning rod at the school, immediately. concluded that this repetition was intentional; it could be no accident that he ran across a lightning rod two times in a row. Altogether he found everything alike; all things reminded him of each other. What was the meaning of the repeated appearances of lightning rods? How should he interpret the lightning rod? “Lightning rod”? Surely that was just another word game? Did it mean that he was safe from harm? Or did it indicate that he should tell the landlady everything? And why were the cookies on the wooden plate fish-shaped? What did they suggest? Should he be “mute as a fish”? Was he not permitted to talk? Was that what the cookies on the wooden plate were trying to tell him? It was as if he did not see any of this but read it off a posted list of regulations.

Yes, they were regulations. The dishrag hanging over the faucet told him to do something. Even the cap of the bottle left on the table, which by now had
been cleared, summoned him to do something. Everything fell into place: everywhere he saw a summons: to do one thing, not to do another. Everything was spelled out for him, the shelf where the spice boxes were, a shelf with jars of freshly made jam … things repeated themselves. Bloch noticed that for quite a while he had stopped talking to himself: the landlady was at the sink gathering bits of bread out of the saucers. You had to clean up after him all the time, she said, he didn’t even shut the table drawer when he took out the silverware; he just left books he had looked through open, he took off his coat and just let it drop.

Bloch answered that he really felt that he would let everything drop. It wouldn’t take much for him to let go of this ashtray in his hand, it even surprised him to see that the ashtray was still in his hand. He had stood up, still holding the ashtray in front of him. The landlady looked at him. He stared at the ashtray a while, then he put it down. As if in anticipation of the insinuations all around him, which repeated themselves, Bloch repeated what he had said. He was so helpless that he repeated it once more. He saw the landlady shake her arm over the sink. She said that a piece of apple had slipped up her sleeve and now it didn’t want to come out. Didn’t want to come out? Bloch imitated her by shaking his own
sleeve. It seemed to him that if he imitated everything, he would stay on the safe side, so to speak. But she noticed it immediately and mimicked his imitation of her.

As she did that, she came near the refrigerator, on top of which there was a bakery carton. Bloch watched her as she, still mimicking him, touched the carton from behind. Since he was watching her so intently, she shoved her elbow back once more. The carton began to slip and slowly tipped over the rounded edges of the refrigerator. Bloch could still have caught it, but he watched until it hit the floor.

While the landlady bent down to pick up the carton, he walked one way and then another; wherever he stopped he shoved things into the corner —a chair, a lighter on the stove, an egg cup on the kitchen table. “Is everything all right?” he asked. He asked her what he wanted her to ask him. But before she could answer, something knocked on the window in a way the wire from a lightning rod would never knock against a pane. Bloch had known it a moment beforehand.

The landlady opened the window. A customs guard was outside asking to borrow an umbrella for the walk back to town. Bloch said that he might as well go along with him, and the landlady handed him the umbrella which hung under the work pants on the
doorframe. He promised to bring it back the next day. As long as he hadn’t brought it back, nothing could go wrong.

On the street he opened the umbrella; the rain immediately rattled so loudly that he did not hear whether she had answered him. The guard came running along the wall of the house to get under the umbrella, and they started off.

They were only a few steps away when the light in the tavern was turned off and it became completely dark. It was so dark that Bloch put his hand over his eyes. Behind the wall that they were just passing he heard the snorting of cows. Something ran past him. “I almost stepped on a hedgehog just then!” the guard exclaimed.

Bloch asked how he could have seen a hedgehog in the dark. The guard answered, “That’s part of my profession. Even if all you see is one movement or hear just one noise, you must be able to identify the thing that made that movement or sound. Even when something moves at the very edge of your vision, you must be able to recognize it, in fact even be able to determine what color it is, though actually you can recognize colors only at the center of your retina.” They had passed the houses by the border by now and were walking along a short cut beside the brook. The path was covered with sand of some kind,
which became brighter as Bloch grew more accustomed to the dark.

“Of course, we’re not kept very busy here,” the guard said. “Since the border has been mined, there’s no smuggling going on here any more. So your alertness slips, you get tired and can’t concentrate any more. And then when something does happen, you don’t even react.”

Bloch saw something running toward him and stepped behind the guard. A dog brushed past him as it ran past.

“And then if somebody suddenly steps in front of you, you don’t even know how you should grab hold of him. You’re in the wrong position from the start and when you finally get yourself right, you depend on your partner, who is standing next to you, to catch him, and all along your partner is depending on you to catch him yourself—and the guy you’re after gives you the slip.” The slip? Bloch heard the customs guard next to him under the umbrella take a deep breath.

Behind him the sand crunched. He turned around and saw that the dog had come back. They walked on, the dog running alongside sniffing at the backs of his knees. Bloch stopped, broke off a hazelnut twig by the brook, and chased the dog away.

“If you’re facing each other,” the guard went on, “it’s important to look the other guy in the eyes. Before
he starts to run, his eyes show which direction he’ll take. But you’ve also got to watch his legs at the same time. Which leg is he putting his weight on? The direction that leg is pointing is the direction he’ll want to take. But if the other guy wants to fool you and not run in that direction, he’ll have to shift his weight just before he takes off, and that takes so much time that you can rush him in the meantime.”

Bloch looked down at the brook, whose roaring could be heard but which could not be seen. A heavy bird flew up out of a thicket. Chickens in a coop could be heard scratching and pecking their beaks against the boards.

“Actually, there aren’t any hard-and-fast rules,” said the guard. “You’re always at a disadvantage because the other guy also watches to see how you’re reacting to him. All you can ever do is react. And when he starts to run, he’ll change his direction after the first step and you’re the one whose weight is on the wrong foot.”

Meanwhile, they had come back to the paved road and were approaching the edge of town. Here and there they stepped on wet sawdust which the rain had swept out to the street. Bloch asked himself whether the guard went into so much detail about something that could be said in one sentence because he was really trying to say something else by it. “He spoke
from memory,”
thought Bloch. As a test, he himself
started to talk at great length about something that usually required only one sentence, but the guard seemed to think that this was completely natural and didn’t ask him what he was driving at. So the guard seemed to have meant what he said before quite literally.

In the center of town some people who had been taking a dance lesson came toward them. “Dance lessons”? What did that phrase suggest? One girl had been searching for something in her “purse” as she passed, and another had been wearing boots with “high tops.” Were these abbreviations for something? He heard the purse snapping shut behind him; he almost closed up his umbrella in reply.

He held the umbrella over the customs guard as far as the municipal housing project. “So far I have only a rented apartment, but I’m saving up to buy one for myself,” said the guard, standing on the staircase. Bloch had come in too. Would he like to come up for a drink? Bloch refused but stood still. The lights went off again while the guard was going up the stairs. Bloch leaned against the mailboxes downstairs. Outside, quite high up, a plane flew past. “The mail plane,” the guard shouted down into the dark, and pushed the light switch. It echoed in the stairwell. Bloch had quickly gone out.

At the inn he learned that a large tourist group had arrived and had been put up on cots in the
bowling alley; that’s why it was so quiet down there tonight. Bloch asked the girl who told him about this if she wanted to come upstairs with him. She answered, gravely, that that was impossible tonight. Later, in his room, he heard her walk down the hall and go past his door. The rain had made the room so cold that it seemed to him as if damp sawdust had been spread all over. He set the umbrella tip-down in the sink and lay on the bed fully dressed.

Bloch got sleepy. He made a few tired gestures to make light of his sleepiness, but that made him even sleepier. Various things he had said during the day came back to him; he tried to get rid of them by breathing out. Then he felt himself falling asleep; as before the end of a paragraph, he thought.

He woke up gradually and realized that somebody was breathing loudly in the next room and that the rhythm of the breathing was forming itself into sentences in his half-sleep; he heard the exhale as a long-drawn-out “and,” and the extended sound of the inhale then transformed itself inside him into sentences that—after the dash that corresponded to the pause between the inhale and the exhale—in—variably attached themselves to the “and.” Soldiers with pointed dress shoes stood in front of the movie house, and a vase was on the TV set, and a truck filled with sand whizzed past the bus, and a hitchhiker
had a bunch of grapes in his other hand, and outside the door somebody said, “Open up, please.”

“Open up, please.” Those last three words did not fit at all into the breathing from next door, which became more and more distinct while the sentences were slowly beginning to fade out. He was wide awake now. Somebody knocked on the door again and said, “Open up, please.” He must have been wakened by that, since the rain had stopped.

He sat up quickly, a bedspring snapped back into place, the chambermaid was outside the door with the breakfast tray. He hadn’t ordered breakfast, he could barely manage to say before she had excused herself and knocked on the door across the hall.

Alone in the room, he found everything rearranged. He turned on the faucet. A fly immediately fell off the mirror into the sink and was washed down at once. He sat down on the bed: just now that chair had been to his right, and now it was to his left. Was the picture reversed? He looked at it from left to right, then from right to left. He repeated the look from left to right; this look seemed to him like reading. He saw a “wardrobe,” “then” “a” “wastebasket,” “then” “a” “drape”; while looking from right to left, however, he saw