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

Bloch had changed and stuffed his dirty clothes in the plastic bag. Almost
nobody was around in the yard outside and on his way out of town. At a construction site a cement mixer was just being turned off; it was so quiet now that his own steps sounded almost indecent to Bloch. He had stopped and looked at the tarpaulins covering the lumber piles outside a sawmill as if there were something else to hear besides the mumbling of the sawmill workers, who were probably sitting behind the lumber piles during their coffee break.
    He had learned that the tavern, along with a couple of farmhouses and the customs shed, stood at a spot where the paved street curved back toward town; a road between the houses, which had once also been paved but recently was covered only with gravel, branched off from the street and then, just before the border, turned into a dirt path. The border crossing was closed. Actually Bloch had not even asked about the border crossing.
    He saw a hawk circling over a field. When the hawk hovered at one spot and then dived down, Bloch realized that he had not been watching the hawk fluttering and diving but the spot in the field for which the bird would presumably head; the hawk had caught itself in its dive and risen again.
    It was also odd that, while he was walking past the cornfield, Bloch did not look straight down the rows that ran through to the end of the field but
saw only an impenetrable thicket of stalks, leaves, and cobs, with here and there some naked kernels showing as well. As well? The brook which the street crossed at that point roared quite loudly, and Bloch stopped.
    At the tavern he found a waitress just scrubbing the floor. Bloch asked for the landlady. “She’s still asleep,” the waitress said. Standing up, Bloch ordered a beer. The waitress lifted a chair off the table. Bloch took the second chair off the table and sat down.
    The waitress went behind the bar. Bloch put his hands on the table. The waitress bent down and opened the bottle. Bloch pushed the ashtray aside. The waitress took a cardboard coaster from another table as she passed it. Bloch pushed his chair back. The waitress took the glass, which had been slipped over the neck of the bottle, off the bottle, set the coaster on the table, put the glass on the coaster, tipped the beer into the glass, put the bottle on the table, and went away. It was starting up again. Bloch did not know what to do any more.
    Finally he noticed a drop running down the outside of the glass and, on the wall, a clock whose hands were two matches; one match was broken off and served as the hour hand. He had not watched the descending drop but the spot on the coaster that the drop might hit.
    The waitress, who by now was rubbing paste wax into the floor, asked if he knew the landlady. Bloch nodded, but only when the waitress looked up did he say yes.
    A little girl ran in without closing the door. The waitress sent her back to the entryway, where she scraped her boots and, after a second reminder, shut the door. “The landlady’s kid,” explained the waitress, who took the child into the kitchen at once. When she came back, she said that a few days ago a man had wanted to see the landlady. “He claimed that he was supposed to dig a well. She wanted to send him away immediately, but he wouldn’t let up until she showed him the cellar, and down there he grabbed the spade right away, so that she had to go for help to get him to go away, and she …” Bloch barely managed to interrupt her. “The kid has been scared ever since that the well-digger might show up again.” But in the meantime a customs guard came in and had a drink at the bar.
    Was the missing schoolboy back home again? the waitress asked. The customs guard answered, “No, he hasn’t been found yet.”
    “Well, he hasn’t been gone for even two days yet,” the waitress said. The guard replied, “But the nights are beginning to get quite chilly now.”
    “Anyway, he’s warmly