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Authors: Peter Handke

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BOOK: The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick: A Novel
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In the Prater he was mugged. One thug jerked his jacket over his arms from behind; another butted his head against Bloch’s chin. Bloch’s knees folded a little, then he gave the guy in front a kick. Finally the two of them shoved him behind a candy stand and finished the job. He fell down and they left. In a rest room, Bloch cleaned off his face and suit.
At a café in the Second District he shot some pool until it was time for the sports news on television. Bloch asked the waitress to turn on the set and then watched as if none of this had anything to do with him. He asked the waitress to join him for a drink. When the waitress came out of the back room, where gambling was going on, Bloch was already at the door; she walked past him but didn’t speak. Bloch went out.
Back at the Naschmarkt, the sight of the sloppily piled fruit and vegetable crates behind the stalls seemed like another joke of some kind, nothing to worry about. Like cartoons, thought Bloch, who liked to look at cartoons with no words. This feeling of pretense, of playing around—this business with the referee’s whistle in the duffelbag, thought Bloch—went away only when, in the movie, a comic snitched
a trumpet from a junk shop and started tooting on it in a perfectly natural way; all this was so casual that it almost seemed unintentional, and Bloch realized that the trumpet and all other objects were stark and unequivocal. Bloch relaxed.
After the movie he waited between the market stalls for the cashier. Some time after the start of the last show, she came out. So as not to frighten her by coming at her from between the stalls, he sat there on a crate until she got to the more brightly lit part of the Naschmarkt. Behind the lowered shutter in one of the stalls, a telephone was ringing; the stand’s phone number was written in large numerals on the metal sheet. “No score,” Bloch thought at once. He followed the cashier without actually catching up with her. As she got on the bus, he strolled up and stepped aboard after her. He took a seat facing her but left several rows of seats between them. Not until new passengers blocked his view after the next stop was Bloch able to think again. She had certainly looked at him but obviously hadn’t recognized him; had the mugging changed his looks that much? Bloch ran his fingers over his face. The idea of glancing at the window to check what she was doing struck him as foolish. He pulled the newspaper from the inside pocket of his jacket and looked down at the letters but didn’t read. Then, suddenly, he found
himself reading. An eyewitness was testifying about the murder of a pimp who’d been shot in the eye at close range. “A bat flew out of the back of his head and slammed against the wallpaper. My heart skipped a beat.” When the sentences went right on about something else, about an entirely different person, with no paragraph, Bloch was startled. “But they should have put a paragraph there,” thought Bloch. After his abrupt shock, he was furious. He walked down the aisle toward the cashier and sat diagonally across from her, so that he could look at her; but he did not look at her.
When they got off the bus, Bloch realized that they were far outside the city, near the airport. At this time of night, it was a very quiet area. Bloch walked along beside the girl but not as if he was escorting her or even as if he wanted to. After a while he touched her. The girl stopped, turned, and touched him too, so fiercely that he was startled. For a moment the purse in her other hand seemed more familiar to him than she did.
They walked along together a while, but keeping their distance, not touching. Only when they were on the stairs did he touch her again. She started to run; he walked more slowly. When he got upstairs, he recognized her apartment by the wide-open door. She attracted his attention in the dark; he walked to her and they started in right away.
In the morning, wakened by a noise, he looked out the window and saw a plane coming in for a landing. The blinking lights made him close the curtain. Because they hadn’t turned on any lights, the curtain had stayed open. Bloch lay down and closed his eyes.
With his eyes closed, he was overcome by a strange inability to visualize anything. He tried to tell himself the names he knew for each thing in the room, but he couldn’t picture anything; not even the plane he had just seen landing, though he might have recognized in his mind, probably from earlier experience, the screeching of its brakes on the runway. He opened his eyes and looked for a while at the corner where the kitchen was: he concentrated on the tea kettle and the wilted flowers drooping in the sink. He had barely closed his eyes again when the flowers and the tea kettle were unimaginable. He resorted to thinking up sentences about the things instead of words for them, in the belief that a story made up of such sentences would help him visualize things. The tea kettle whistled. The flowers were given to the girl by a friend. Nobody took the kettle off the hot plate. “Would you like some tea?” asked the girl. It was no use: Bloch opened his eyes when he couldn’t stand it any more. The girl was asleep beside him.
Bloch grew nervous. If the pressure of everything around him when his eyes were open was bad, the pressure of the words for everything out there when
his eyes were closed was even worse. “Maybe it’s because I just finished sleeping with her,” he thought. He went into the bathroom and took a long shower.
The tea kettle was actually whistling when he came back. “The shower woke me up,” the girl said. Bloch felt as if she were addressing him directly for the first time. He wasn’t quite himself yet, he replied. Were there ants in the teapot? “Ants?” When the boiling water from the kettle hit the bottom of the pot, he didn’t see tea leaves but ants, on which he had once poured scalding water. He pulled the curtain open again.
The tea in the open canister seemed—since the light reached it only through the small round hole in the lid—oddly illuminated by reflection from the inner walls. Bloch, sitting with the canister at the table, was staring fixedly through the hole. It amused him to be so fascinated by the peculiar glow of the tea leaves while inattentively talking to the girl. Finally he pressed the cap back on the lid, but at the same time he stopped talking. The girl hadn’t noticed anything. “My name is Gerda,” she said. Bloch hadn’t even wanted to know. He asked whether she had noticed anything, but she’d put on a record, an Italian song with electric-guitar accompaniment. “I like his voice,” she said. Bloch, who had no use for Italian hits, remained silent.
When she went out briefly to get something for breakfast—“It’s Monday,” she said—Bloch finally had a chance to study everything carefully. While they ate, they talked a lot. Bloch soon noticed that she talked about the things he’d just told her as if they were hers, but when he mentioned something she had just talked about, he either quoted her exactly or, if he was using his own words, always prefaced the new names with a hesitant “this” or “that,” which distanced them, as if he were afraid of making her affairs his. If he talked about the foreman, say, or about a soccer player named Dumm, she could say, almost at once, quite familiarly, “the foreman” and “Dumm”; however, when she mentioned someone she knew called Freddy or a bar called Stephen’s Dive, he invariably talked about “this Freddy?” and “that Stephen’s Dive?” when he replied. Every word she uttered prevented him from taking any deeper interest, and it upset him that she seemed so free to take over whatever he said.
From time to time, of course, the conversation became as natural for him as for her: he asked a question and she answered; she asked one and he made the obvious reply. “Is that a jet?”—“No, that’s a prop plane.”—“Where do you live?”—“In the Second District.” He even came close to telling her about the mugging.
But then everything began to irritate him more and more. He wanted to answer her but broke off in mid-sentence because he assumed that she already knew what he had to say. She grew restless and started moving about the room; she was looking for something to do, smiling stupidly now and then. They passed the time by turning records over and changing them. She got up and lay down on the bed; he sat down next to her. Was he going to work today? she wanted to know.
Suddenly he was choking her. From the start his grip was so tight that she’d never had a chance to think he was kidding. Bloch heard voices outside in the hall. He was scared to death. He noticed some stuff running out of her nose. She was gurgling. Finally he heard a snapping noise. It sounded like a stone on a dirt road slamming against the bottom of a car. Saliva had dripped onto the linoleum.
The constriction was so tight that all at once he was exhausted. He lay down on the floor, unable to fall asleep but incapable of raising his head. He heard someone slap a rag against the outside doorknob. He listened. There had been nothing to hear. So he must have fallen asleep after all.
It didn’t take him long to wake up; as soon as his eyes were open, he felt exposed; as though there was
a draft in the room, he thought. And he hadn’t even scraped his skin. Still, he imagined that some kind of lymph fluid was seeping out through all his pores. He was up and had wiped off everything in the room with a dish towel.
He looked out the window: down below, somebody with an armful of coats on hangers was running across the grass toward a delivery truck.
He took the elevator, left the house, and walked straight ahead for a while. Then he took the suburban bus to the streetcar terminal; from there he rode back downtown.
When he got to the hotel, it turned out that his briefcase had already been brought downstairs for safekeeping, since it looked as if he wouldn’t be back. While he was paying his bill, the bellboy brought the briefcase from the checkroom. Bloch saw a faint ring on it and realized that a damp milk bottle must have been standing on it; he opened the case while the cashier was getting his change and noticed that the contents had been inspected: the toothbrush handle was sticking out of its leather case; the portable radio was lying on top. Bloch turned toward the bellboy, but he had disappeared into the checkroom. The space behind the desk was quite narrow, so Bloch was able to pull the cashier toward him with one hand and then, after a sharp breath, to fake a slap against his
face with the other. The cashier flinched, though Bloch had not even touched him. The bellboy in the checkroom kept quiet. Bloch had already left with his briefcase.
He got to the company’s personnel office in time, just before lunch, and picked up his papers. Bloch was surprised that they weren’t already there ready for him and that some phone calls still had to be made. He asked to use the phone himself and called his ex-wife; when the boy answered the phone and immediately launched into his rote sentence about his mother not being home, Bloch hung up. The papers were ready by now; he put the income-tax form in his briefcase. Before he could ask the woman about his back pay, she was gone. Bloch counted out on the table the money for the phone call and left the building.
The banks were also closed for the lunch break by now. Bloch waited around in a park until he could withdraw the money from his checking account—he’d never had a savings account. Since that wouldn’t take him very far, he decided to return the transistor radio, which was practically brand-new. He took the bus to his place in the Second District and also picked up a flash attachment and a razor. At the store they carefully explained that the goods couldn’t be returned, only exchanged. Bloch took the bus back to
his room and also stuffed into a suitcase two trophies —of course, they were only copies of cups his team had won, one in a tournament and the other in a championship game—and a gold-plated pendant in the shape of two soccer boots.
When no one came to wait on him in the junk shop, he took out his things and simply put them on the counter. Then he felt that he’d put the things on the counter too confidently, as though he’d already sold them, and he grabbed them back off the counter and hid them in his bag; he would put them back on the counter only after he’d been asked to. On the back of a shelf he noticed a china music box with a dancer striking the familiar pose. As usual when he saw a music box, he felt that he’d seen it before. Without haggling, he simply accepted the first offer for his things.
With the lightweight coat he had taken from his room across his arm, he had then gone to the South Station. On his way to the bus stop, he had run into the woman at whose newsstand he usually bought his papers. She was wearing a fur coat while walking her dog. Even though he usually said something to her, staring all the while at her grimy fingernails, when she handed him his paper and his change, here, away from her stand, she seemed not to know him; at least she didn’t look up and hadn’t answered his greeting.
Since there were only a few trains to the border each day, Bloch spent the time until the next train sleeping in the newsreel theater. At one point it got very bright and the rustling of a curtain opening or closing seemed ominously near. To see whether the curtain had opened or closed, Bloch opened his eyes. Somebody was shining a flashlight in his face. Bloch knocked the light out of the usher’s hand and went into the men’s room. It was quiet there; daylight filtered in. Bloch stood still for a while.
The usher had followed him and threatened to call the police. Bloch had turned on the faucet, washed his hands, then pushed the button on the electric dryer and held his hands under the warm air until the usher disappeared.
Then Bloch had cleaned his teeth. He had watched in the mirror how he rubbed one hand across his teeth while the other, loosely clenched into a fist, rested oddly against his chest. From inside the movie house he heard the screaming and horseplay of the cartoon figures.
Bloch remembered that an ex-girlfriend of his ran a tavern in some town near the southern border. In the station post office, where they had phone books for the entire country, he couldn’t find her number; there were several taverns in the village, and their owners weren’t listed; besides, lifting the phone books
—they were all hanging in a row with their spines out—soon proved too much for him. “Face down,” he suddenly thought. A cop came in and asked for his papers.
BOOK: The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick: A Novel
9.38Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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