The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick: A Novel Read Online Free

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.
    Looking down at the passport and then up at Bloch’s face, the cop said that the usher had lodged a complaint. After a while Bloch decided to apologize. But the cop had already returned the passport, with the comment that Bloch sure got around a lot. Bloch didn’t watch him go but quickly tipped the phone book back into place. Somebody screamed; when Bloch looked up, he saw a Greek workman shouting into the phone in the booth right in front of him. Bloch thought things over and decided to take the bus instead of the train; he turned in his ticket and, after buying a salami sandwich and several newspapers, finally made it to the bus terminal.
    The bus was already there, though of course the door was still closed; the drivers stood talking in a group not far away. Bloch sat on a bench; the sun was shining. He ate the salami sandwich but left the papers lying next to him, because he wanted to save them for the long ride.
    The luggage racks on both sides of the bus remained quite empty; hardly any of the passengers had luggage. Bloch waited outside so long that the back door was closed. Then he quickly climbed in the
front, and the bus started. It stopped again immediately when there was a shout from outside. Bloch did not turn around; a farm woman with a bawling kid had got on. Inside, the kid quieted down; then the bus had taken off.
    Bloch noticed that he was sitting on a seat right over a wheel; his feet slipped down off the curve the floor made at that point. He moved to the last row, where, if necessary, he could comfortably look out the back. As he sat down, his eyes met the driver’s in the rearview mirror, but there was nothing important about it. The movement Bloch made to stow away the briefcase behind him gave him a chance to look outside. The folding door in the back was rattling loudly.
    While the passengers in the other rows of seats all faced the front of the bus, the two rows directly in front of him were turned around to face each other; therefore, most of the passengers seated behind one another stopped talking almost as soon as the bus started, but those in front of him started talking again almost immediately. Bloch found the voices of the people nice; it relaxed him to be able to listen.
    After a while—the bus was now on the road leading to the highway—a woman sitting next to him showed him that he had dropped some change. “Is that your money?” she asked as she fished a single coin out from between the seat and the backrest. Another
coin, an American penny, lay on the seat between