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

the lid of the coal bucket was open, and in the bucket itself the handle of the coal shovel could be seen (an April fool’s joke), and the floor with the wide boards, the cracks still wet from mopping, not forgetting the map on the wall, the sink next to the blackboard, and the corn husks on the windowsill: one single, cheap imitation. No, he would not let himself be tricked by April fool’s jokes like these.
    It was as if he were drawing wider and wider circles. He had forgotten the lightning rod next to the door, and now it seemed to him like a cue. He was supposed to start. He helped himself out by walking around the school back to the yard and talking with the janitor in the woodshed. Woodshed, janitor, yard: cues. He watched while the janitor put a log on the chopping block and lifted up the ax. He said a couple of words from the yard; the janitor stopped, answered, and as he hit the log, it fell to one side before he had struck it, and the ax hit the chopping block so that the pile of unchopped logs in the background collapsed. Another one of those cues. But the only thing that happened was that he called to the janitor in the dim woodshed, asking whether this was the only classroom for the whole school, and the janitor answered that for the whole school there was only this classroom.
    No wonder the children hadn’t even learned to read by the time they left school, the janitor said suddenly, slamming the ax into the chopping block and coming out of the shed: they couldn’t manage even to finish a single sentence of their own, they talked to each other almost entirely in single words, and they wouldn’t talk at all unless you asked them to, and what they learned was only memorized stuff that they rattled off by rote; except for that, they
couldn’t use whole sentences. “Actually, all of them, more or less, have a speech defect,” said the janitor.
    What was that supposed to mean? What reason did the janitor have for that? What did it have to do with him? Nothing? Yes, but why did the janitor act as if it had something to do with him?
    Bloch should have answered, but he did not let himself get involved. Once he got started, he would have to go on talking. So he walked around the yard a while longer, helped the janitor pick up the logs that had been flung out of the shed during the chopping, and then, little by little, wandered unobtrusively back out onto the street and was able to make his getaway with no trouble.
    He walked past the athletic field. It was after work, and the soccer team was practicing. The ground was so wet that drops sprayed out from the grass when a player kicked the ball. Bloch watched for a while, but it was getting dark, and he left.

    In the restaurant at the railroad station he ate a croquette and drank a couple of glasses of beer. On the platform outside, he sat on a bench. A girl in spike heels walked back and forth in the gravel. A phone rang in the traffic supervisor’s office. A railroad official stood in the door, smoking. Somebody came out of the waiting room and stopped again immediately.
There was more rattling in the office, and loud talking, like somebody talking into a telephone, could be heard. It had grown dark by now.
    It was fairly quiet. Here and there someone could be seen drawing on a cigarette. A faucet was turned on sharply and was turned off again at once—as though somebody had been startled. Farther away people were talking in the dark; faint sounds could be heard, as in a half-sleep: ah ee. Somebody shouted: “Ow!” There was no way to tell whether a man or a woman had shouted. Very far away someone could be heard saying, very distinctly, “You look worn out.” Between the railroad tracks, just as distinctly, a railroad worker could be seen standing and scratching his head. Bloch thought he was asleep.
    An incoming train could be seen. You could watch a few passengers getting off, looking as if they were undecided whether to get off or not. A drunk got off