The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick: A Novel (12 page)

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Authors: Peter Handke

. Bloch closed the curtains and went out.

The dining room downstairs was filled with the tourists. The innkeeper led Bloch into the other room, where the innkeeper’s mother was sitting in front of the TV set with the curtains closed. The innkeeper opened the curtains and stood next to Bloch; once Bloch saw him standing to his left; then, when he looked up again, it was the other way around. Bloch ordered breakfast and asked for the newspaper. The innkeeper said that the tourists were reading it just now. Bloch ran his fingers over his face; his cheeks seemed to be numb. He felt cold. The flies on the floor were crawling so slowly that at first he mistook them for beetles. A bee rose from the windowsill but fell back immediately. The people outside were leaping over the puddles; they were carrying heavy shopping bags. Bloch ran his fingers all over his face.

The innkeeper came in with the tray and said that the newspaper still wasn’t free. He spoke so softly
that Bloch also spoke softly when he answered. “There’s no hurry,” he whispered. The screen of the TV set was dusty here in the daylight, and the window that the schoolchildren looked through as they walked past was reflected in it. Bloch ate and listened to the show. The innkeeper’s mother moaned from time to time.

Outside he noticed a stand with a bag full of newspapers. He went outside, dropped a coin into the slot next to the bag, and then took out a paper. He had so much practice in opening papers that he read the description of himself even as he was going inside. He had attracted a woman’s attention on the bus because some change had fallen out of his pocket; she had bent down for it, and had noticed that it was American money. Subsequently, she had heard that similar coins had been found beside the dead cashier. No one took her story seriously at first, but then it turned out that her description matched the description given by one of the cashier’s friends who, when he called for the cashier in his car the night before the murder, had seen a man standing near the movie house.

Bloch sat back down in the other room and looked at the picture they had drawn of him according to the woman’s description. Did that mean that they did not know his name yet? When had the paper been
printed? He saw that it was the first edition, which usually came out the evening before. The headline and the picture looked to him as if they had been pasted onto the paper; like newspapers in movies, he thought: there the real headlines were also replaced by headlines that fitted the film; or like those headlines you could have made up about yourself in penny arcades.

The doodles in the margin had been deciphered as the word “Dumm” and, moreover, with a capital at the beginning; so it was probably a proper name. Was a person named Dumm involved in the matter? Bloch remembered telling the cashier about his friend Dumm, the soccer player.

When the girl cleared the table, Bloch did not close the paper. He learned that the gypsy had been released, that the mute schoolboy’s death had been an accident. The paper carried only a school picture of the boy because he had never been photographed alone.

A cushion that the innkeeper’s mother was using as a backrest fell from the armchair onto the floor. Bloch picked it up and went out with the paper. He saw the inn’s copy lying on the card table; the tourists had left by now. The paper—it was the weekend edition—was so thick that it did not fit into the rack.

When a car drove past him, he stupidly—for it was quite bright out—wondered why its headlights were turned off. Nothing in particular happened. He saw the boxes of apples being poured into sacks in the orchards. A bicycle that passed him slid back and forth in the mud. He saw two farmers shaking hands in a store doorway; their hands were so dry that he heard them rustling. Tractors had left muddy tracks from the dirt paths on the asphalt. He saw an old woman bent over in front of a display window, a finger to her lips. The parking spaces in front of the stores were emptying; the customers who were still arriving came in through the back doors. “Suds” “poured” “over” “the doorsteps.” “Featherbeds” “were lying” “behind” “the windowpanes.” The blackboards listing prices were carried back into the stores. “The chickens” “pecked at” “grapes that had been dropped.” The turkeys squatted heavily in the wire cages in the orchards. The salesgirls stood outside the doors and put their hands on their hips. The owner stood inside the dark store, absolutely still behind the scale. “Lumps of yeast” “lay” “on the counter.”

Bloch stood against the wall of a house. There was an odd sound when a casement window that was ajar next to him opened all the way. He had walked on immediately.

He stopped in front of a brand-new building that
was still unoccupied but already had glass in its windows. The rooms were so empty that the landscape on the other side could be seen through the windows. Bloch felt as though he had built the house himself. He himself had installed the wall outlets and even set in the windowpanes. The crowbar, the sandwich wrapping, and the plastic food container had also been put on the windowsill by him.

He took a second look: no, the light switches stayed light switches, and the garden chairs in the landscape behind the house stayed garden chairs.

He walked on because—

Did he have to give a reason for walking, so that—?

What did he have in mind when—? Did he have to justify the ‘“when” by—? Did this go on until—? Had he reached the point where—?

Why did anything have to be inferred from the fact that he was walking here? Did he have to give a reason for stopping here? Why did he have to have something in mind when he walked past a swimming pool?

These “so thats,” “becauses,” and “whens” were like regulations; he decided to avoid them in order not to—

It was as if a window that was slightly ajar was gently opened beside him. Everything thinkable,
everything visible, was occupied. It was not a scream that startled him but a sentence upside down at the top of a series of normal sentences. Everything seemed to have been newly named.

The stores were already closed. The window displays, now that nobody was walking back and forth in front of them any more, looked too full. Not a single spot was without at least a stack of cans on it. A half-torn receipt hung out of the cash register. The stores were so crowded that …

“The stores were so crowded that you couldn’t point to anything any more because …” “The stores were so crowded that you couldn’t point to anything any more because the individual items hid each other.” The parking spaces were now completely empty except for the bicycles of the salesgirls.

After lunch Bloch went to the athletic field. Even from far away he heard the spectators’ screaming. When he got there, the reserves were still playing a pregame match. He sat on a bench at the sidelines and read the paper as far as the supplements. He heard a sound as if a chunk of meat had fallen on a stone floor; he looked up and saw that the wet heavy ball had smacked off a player’s head.

He got up and walked away. When he came back, the main match had already started. The benches were filled, and he walked beside the playing field to the space behind the goal. He did not want to stand
too close behind the goal, and he climbed up the bank to the street. He walked along the street as far as the corner flag. It seemed to him that a button was coming off his jacket and popping on the street; he picked up the button and put it in his pocket.

He started talking to some man who was standing next to him. He asked which teams were playing and about their standings in the league. They shouldn’t play the ball so high in a strong wind like this, he said.

He noticed that the man next to him had buckles on his shoes. “I don’t know either,” the man answered. “I’m a salesman, and I’m here for only a few days.”

“The men are shouting much too much,” Bloch said. “A good game goes very quietly.”

“There’s no coach to tell them what to do from the sidelines,” answered the man. It seemed to Bloch as though they were talking to each other for the benefit of some third party.

“On a small field like this you have to decide very quickly when to pass,” he said.

He heard a slap as if the ball had hit a goalpost. Bloch told about how he had once played against a team whose players were all barefoot; every time they kicked the ball, the slapping sound had gone right through him.

“In the stadium I once saw a player break his leg,”
the salesman said. “You could hear the cracking sound all the way up in the top rows.”

Bloch saw the other spectators around him talking to each other. He did not watch the one who happened to be speaking but always watched the one who was listening. He asked the salesman whether he had ever tried to look away from the forward at the beginning of a rush and, instead, to look at the goalie the forwards were rushing toward.

“It’s very difficult to take your eyes off the forwards and the ball and watch the goalie,” Bloch said. “You have to tear yourself away from the ball; it’s a completely unnatural thing to do.” Instead of seeing the ball, you saw how the goalkeeper ran back and forth with his hands on his thighs, how he bent to the left and right and screamed at his defense. “Usually you don’t notice him until the ball has been shot at the goal.”

They walked along the sideline together. Bloch heard panting as though a linesman were running past them. “It’s a strange sight to watch the goalie running back and forth like that, without the ball but expecting it,” he said.

He couldn’t watch that way for very long, answered the salesman; you couldn’t help but look back at the forwards. If you looked at the goalkeeper, it seemed as if you had to look cross-eyed. It was like seeing somebody walk toward the door and instead of
looking at the man you looked at the doorknob. It made your head hurt, and you couldn’t breathe properly any more.

“You get used to it,” said Bloch, “but it’s ridiculous.”

A penalty kick was called. All the spectators rushed behind the goal.

“The goalkeeper is trying to figure out which corner the kicker will send the ball into,” Bloch said. “If he knows the kicker, he knows which corner he usually goes for. But maybe the kicker is also counting on the goalie’s figuring this out. So the goalie goes on figuring that just today the ball might go into the other corner. But what if the kicker follows the goalkeeper’s thinking and plans to shoot into the usual corner after all? And so on, and so on.”

Bloch saw how all the players gradually cleared the penalty area. The penalty kicker adjusted the ball. Then he too backed out of the penalty area.

“When the kicker starts his run, the goalkeeper unconsciously shows with his body which way he’ll throw himself even before the ball is kicked, and the kicker can simply kick in the other direction,” Bloch said. “The goalie might just as well try to pry open a door with a piece of straw.”

The kicker suddenly started his run. The goalkeeper, who was wearing a bright yellow jersey, stood absolutely still, and the penalty kicker shot the ball into his hands.

“The goalie watched as the ball rolled across the line …”

ALSO BY PETER HANDKE

The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick Short Letter, Long Farewell A Sorrow Beyond Dreams The Ride Across Lake Constance and Other Plays A Moment of True Feeling The Left-Handed Woman The Weight of the World Slow Homecoming
Across
Repetition
The Afternoon of a Writer Absence
Kaspar and Other Plays The Jukebox and Other Essays on Storytelling My Year in the No-Man’s-Bay On a Dark Night I Left My Silent House Crossing the Sierra de Gredos

Farrar, Straus and Giroux
18 West 18th Street, New York 10011

Originally published in 1970 by Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, as
Die Angst des Tormanns Beim Elfmeter

www.fsgbooks.com

The publishers and the translator express their thanks to Wayland Schmitt and Ruth Hein for their help in preparing the translation.

eISBN 9781466806818

First eBook Edition : December 2011

First American edition published in 1972 in the United States by Farrar, Straus and Giroux