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

and at the bar the sponge didn’t fall but slapped into the sink; and the landlady’s daughter, with clogs on her bare feet, didn’t walk through the barroom but clattered through the barroom; the wine didn’t flow but gurgled into the glasses; and the music didn’t play but boomed from the juke box.
    He heard a woman scream in fright, but in a tavern a woman’s scream didn’t mean anything;
therefore, the woman could not have screamed in fright. Nevertheless, he had been jolted by the scream; it was only because of the noise, because the scream had been so shrill.
    Little by little the other details lost their significance: the foam in the empty beer bottle meant no more to him than the cigarette box that the man next to him tore open just enough so that he managed to extract a single cigarette with his fingernails. Nor did the used matches lying loose everywhere in the cracks between the floorboards occupy his attention any more, and the fingernail impressions in the putty along the windowframe no longer seemed to have anything to do with him. Everything left him cold now, stood once more in its place; like peacetime, thought Bloch. The stuffed grouse above the juke box no longer forced one to draw conclusions; and the flies sleeping on the ceiling did not suggest anything any more.
    You could see a man combing his hair with his fingers, you could see girls walking backward as they danced, you could see men standing up and buttoning their coats, you could hear cards sloshing as they were shuffled, but you didn’t have to dwell on it any more.
    Bloch got tired. The tireder he got, the more clearly he took in everything, distinguished one thing from
another. He saw how the door invariably stayed open when somebody went out, and how somebody else always got up and shut the door again. He was so tired that he saw each thing by itself, especially the contours, as though there was nothing to the things but their contours. He saw and heard everything with total immediacy, without first having to translate it into words, as before, or comprehending it only in terms of words or word games. He was in a state where everything seemed natural to him.
    Later the landlady sat down with him, and he put his arm around her so naturally that she did not even seem to notice. He dropped a couple of coins into the juke box as though it were nothing and danced effortlessly with the landlady. He noticed that every time she said something she added his name to it.
    It wasn’t important any more that he could see the waitress clasping one hand with the other, nor was there anything special about the thick curtains, and it was only natural that more and more people left. They could be heard as they relieved themselves out on the street and then walked away.
    It got quieter in the barroom, so that the records in the juke box played very distinctly. In the pause between records people talked more softly or almost held their breath; it was a relief when the next
record came on. It seemed to Bloch that you could talk about these occurrences as things that recurred forever; the course of a single day, he thought; things that you wrote about on picture postcards. “At night we sit in the tavern and listen to records.” He got tireder and tireder, and outside the apples were dropping off the trees.

    When nobody but him was left, the landlady went into the kitchen. Bloch sat there and waited until the record was over. He turned off the juke box, so that now only the kitchen light was still on. The landlady sat at the table and did her accounts. Bloch approached her, a coaster in his hand. She looked up when he came out of the barroom and looked at him while he approached her. It was too late when he remembered the coaster; he wanted to hide it quickly, before she saw it, but the landlady looked away from him and at the coaster in his hand and asked him what he was doing with it, if perhaps she had written a bill on it that hadn’t been paid.