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

couldn’t just paint the ceiling an even blue but actually had to paint a picture. The background did not become a sky because the paint was blindly slapped on the plaster base—which, moreover, had to be wet —with as big a brush as possible, maybe even with a broom, but, Bloch reflected, the painter had to paint an actual sky with small variations in the blue which, nevertheless, had to be so indistinct that nobody would think they were a mistake in the mixing. In fact, the background did not look like a sky because you were used to imagining a sky in the background but because the sky had been painted there, stroke by stroke. It had been painted with such precision, thought Bloch, that it almost looked drawn; it was much more precise, anyway, than the figures in the foreground. Had he added the bird out of sheer rage? And had he painted the bird right at the start or had he only added it when he was quite finished? Might the background painter have been in some kind of despair? Nothing indicated this, and such an interpretation immediately seemed ridiculous to Bloch. Altogether it seemed to him as if his preoccupation with the painting, as if his walking back and forth, his sitting here and there, his going out, his coming in, were nothing but excuses. He stood up. “No distractions,” he muttered to himself. As
if to contradict himself, he went outside, walked straight across the street into an entryway, and stood there defiantly among the empty milk bottles—not that anyone came to ask him to account for his presence there—until it stopped raining. Then he went to a café and sat there for a while with his legs stretched out—not that anyone did him the favor of stumbling over them and starting a fight.
    When he looked out, he saw a segment of the marketplace with the school bus; in the café he saw, to the left and to the right, segments of the walls, one with an unlit stove with a bunch of flowers on it, the one on the other side with a coat rack with an umbrella hanging from it. He noticed another segment with the juke box with a point of light slowly wandering through it before it stopped at the selected number, and next to it a cigarette machine with another bunch of flowers on top; then still another segment with the café owner behind the bar and next to him the waitress for whom he was opening a bottle, which the waitress put on the tray; and, finally, a segment of himself with his legs stretched out, the dirty tips of his wet shoes, and also the huge ashtray on the table and next to it a vase, which was smaller, and the filled wine glass on the next table, where nobody was sitting right now. His angle of vision onto the square corresponded, as he realized now
that the school bus had left, almost exactly with the angle on picture postcards; here a segment of the memorial column by the fountain; there, at the edge of the picture, a segment of the bicycle stand.
    Bloch was irritated. Within the segments themselves he saw the details with grating distinctness: as if the parts he saw stood for the whole. Again the details seemed to him like nameplates. “Neon signs,” he thought. So he saw the waitress’s ear with one earring as a sign of the entire person; and a purse on a nearby table, slightly open so that he could recognize a polka-dotted scarf in it, stood for the woman holding the coffee cup who sat behind it and, with her other hand, pausing only now and then at a picture, rapidly leafed through a magazine. A tower of ice-cream dishes dovetailed into each other on the bar seemed a simile for the café owner, and the puddle on the floor by the coat rack represented the umbrella hanging above it. Instead of the heads of the customers, Bloch saw the dirty spots on the wall at the level of their heads. He was so irritated that he looked at the grimy cord that the waitress was just pulling to turn off the wall lights—it had grown brighter outside again—as if the entire lighting arrangement was