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

the guard rails
circled around the trees themselves. The wipers that lay on the windshield did not point in exactly the same direction. The ticket tray next to the driver seemed open. Something like a glove lay in the center aisle of the bus. Cows were sleeping in the meadows next to the road. It was no use denying any of that.
    Gradually more and more passengers got off at their stops. They stood next to the driver until he let them out in front. When the bus stood still, Bloch heard the canvas fluttering on the roof. Then the bus stopped again, and he heard welcoming shouts outside in the dark. Farther on, he recognized a railroad crossing without gates.
    Just before midnight the bus stopped at the border town. Bloch immediately took a room at the inn by the bus stop. He asked the girl who showed him upstairs about his girlfriend, whose first name—Hertha—was all he knew. She was able to give him the information: his girlfriend had rented a tavern not far from town. In the room Bloch asked the girl, who was still in the doorway, about the meaning of all that noise. “Some of the guys are still bowling,” the girl answered, and left. Without looking around, Bloch undressed, washed his hands, and lay down on the bed. The rumbling and crashing downstairs went on for quite a while. But Bloch had already fallen asleep.
    He did not wake up by himself but must have been roused by something. Everything was quiet. Bloch thought about what might have wakened him; after a while he began to imagine that the sound of a newspaper opening had startled him. Or had it been the creaking of the wardrobe? Maybe a coin had fallen out of his pants, hung carelessly over the chair, and had rolled under the bed. On the wall he noticed an engraving that showed the town at the time of the Turkish wars; the townspeople strolled outside the walls; inside them the bell was hanging in the tower so crookedly that it had to be ringing fiercely. Bloch thought about the sexton being yanked up by the bell rope. He noticed that all the townspeople were walking toward the gate in the wall; one child apparently was stumbling because of the dog slinking between his legs. Even the little auxiliary chapel bell was pictured in such a way that it almost tipped over. Under the bed there had been only a burned-out match. Out in the hall, farther away, a key crunched again in a lock; that must have been what had roused him.
    At breakfast Bloch heard that a schoolboy who had trouble walking had been missing for two days. The girl talked about this to the bus driver, who had spent the night at the inn before, as Bloch watched through the window, he drove back in the almost-empty bus.
    Later the girl also left, so that Bloch sat alone in the dining room a while. He piled the newspapers on the chair next to him; he read that the missing boy was not almost crippled but had trouble talking. As soon as she came back, the girl, as though she owed him an explanation, told him that the vacuum cleaner was running upstairs. Bloch didn’t know what to say to that. Then empty beer bottles clinked in the crates being carried across the yard outside. The voices of the delivery men in the hall sounded to Bloch as though they came from the TV set next door. The girl had told him that the innkeeper’s mother sat in that room and watched the daytime shows.
    Later on Bloch bought himself a shirt, some underwear, and several pairs of socks in a general store. The salesgirl, who had taken her time coming out of the rather dim storage room, seemed not to understand Bloch, who was using complete sentences in speaking to her; only when he told her word for word the names of the things he wanted did she start to move around again. As she opened the cash-register drawer, she had said that some rubber boots had also just arrived; and as she was handing him his things in a plastic shopping bag, she had asked whether he needed anything else: handkerchiefs? a tie? a wool sweater? At the inn