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

designed especially to tax his strength. Also, his head hurt because he had been caught in the rain.
    The grating details seemed to stain and completely distort the figures and the surroundings they fitted into. The only defense was to name the things one by one and use those names as insults against the people themselves. The owner behind the bar might be called an ice-cream dish, and you could tell the waitress that she was a hole through the ear lobe. And you also felt like saying to the woman with the magazine, “You Purse, you,” and to the man at the next table, who had finally come out of the back room and, standing up, finished his wine while he paid, “You Spot on Your Pants,” or to shout after him as he set the empty glass on the table and walked out that he was a fingerprint, a doorknob, the slit in the back of his coat, a rain puddle, a bicycle clip, a fender, and so on, until the figure outside had disappeared on his bicycle … Even the conversation and especially the exclamations—“What?” and “I see”—seemed so grating that one wanted to repeat the words out loud, scornfully.
    Bloch went into a butcher shop and bought two salami sandwiches. He did not want to eat at the tavern because his money was running low. He looked over the sausages dangling together from a pole and pointed at the one he wanted the girl to slice. A boy came in with a note in his hand. At first the customs guard thought the schoolboy’s corpse
was a mattress that had been washed up, the girl had just said. She took two rolls out of a carton and split them in half without separating them completely. The bread was so stale that Bloch heard them crunch as the knife cut into them. The girl pulled the rolls apart and put the sliced meat inside. Bloch said that he had time and she should take care of the child first. He saw the boy silently holding the note out. The girl leaned forward and read it. Then the chunk she was hacking off the meat slipped off the board and fell on the stone floor. “Plop,” said the child. The chunk had stayed where it had fallen. The girl picked it up, scraped it off with the edge of her knife, and wrapped it up. Outside, Bloch saw the schoolchildren walking by with their umbrellas open, even though it had stopped raining. He opened the door for the boy and watched the girl tear the skin off the sausage end and put the slices inside the second roll.
    Business was bad, the girl said. “There aren’t any houses except on this side of the street where the shop is, so that, first of all, nobody lives across the street who could see from there that there is a shop here and, second of all, the people going by never walk on the other side of the street, so they pass by so close that they don’t see that there is a store here, especially since the shop window isn’t much bigger
than the living-room windows of the houses next door.”
    Bloch wondered why the people didn’t walk on the other side of the street as well, where there was more room and where it was sunnier. Probably everybody feels some need to walk right next to the houses, he said. The girl, who had not understood him because he had become disgusted with talking in the middle of the sentence and had only mumbled the rest, laughed as though all she had expected for an answer was a joke. In fact, when a few people passed by the shop window, it got so dark in the shop that it did seem like a joke.
    “First of all … second of all …” Bloch repeated to himself what the girl had said; it seemed uncanny to him how someone could begin to speak and at the same time know how the sentence would end. Outside, he ate the sandwiches while he walked along. He bunched up the waxed paper they were wrapped in and was ready to throw it away. There was no trash basket nearby. For a while he walked along with the balled-up paper, first in one direction and then in another. He put the paper in his coat pocket, took it out again, and finally threw it