The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick by Peter Handke

Author:Peter Handke
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: Classics, Contemporary
ISBN: 9780374531065
Publisher: Farrar Straus Giroux
Published: 1970-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

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. 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.

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