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

I just finished sleeping with her,” he thought. He went into the bathroom and took a long shower.
    The tea kettle was actually whistling when he came back. “The shower woke me up,” the girl said. Bloch felt as if she were addressing him directly for the first time. He wasn’t quite himself yet, he replied. Were there ants in the teapot? “Ants?” When the boiling water from the kettle hit the bottom of the pot, he didn’t see tea leaves but ants, on which he had once poured scalding water. He pulled the curtain open again.
    The tea in the open canister seemed—since the light reached it only through the small round hole in the lid—oddly illuminated by reflection from the inner walls. Bloch, sitting with the canister at the table, was staring fixedly through the hole. It amused him to be so fascinated by the peculiar glow of the tea leaves while inattentively talking to the girl. Finally he pressed the cap back on the lid, but at the same time he stopped talking. The girl hadn’t noticed anything. “My name is Gerda,” she said. Bloch hadn’t even wanted to know. He asked whether she had noticed anything, but she’d put on a record, an Italian song with electric-guitar accompaniment. “I like his voice,” she said. Bloch, who had no use for Italian hits, remained silent.
    When she went out briefly to get something for breakfast—“It’s Monday,” she said—Bloch finally had a chance to study everything carefully. While they ate, they talked a lot. Bloch soon noticed that she talked about the things he’d just told her as if they were hers, but when he mentioned something she had just talked about, he either quoted her exactly or, if he was using his own words, always prefaced the new names with a hesitant “this” or “that,” which distanced them, as if he were afraid of making her affairs his. If he talked about the foreman, say, or about a soccer player named Dumm, she could say, almost at once, quite familiarly, “the foreman” and “Dumm”; however, when she mentioned someone she knew called Freddy or a bar called Stephen’s Dive, he invariably talked about “this Freddy?” and “that Stephen’s Dive?” when he replied. Every word she uttered prevented him from taking any deeper interest, and it upset him that she seemed so free to take over whatever he said.
    From time to time, of course, the conversation became as natural for him as for her: he asked a question and she answered; she asked one and he made the obvious reply. “Is that a jet?”—“No, that’s a prop plane.”—“Where do you live?”—“In the Second District.” He even came close to telling her about the mugging.
    But then everything began to irritate him more and more. He wanted to answer her but broke off in mid-sentence because he assumed that she already knew what he had to say. She grew restless and started moving about the room; she was looking for something to do, smiling stupidly now and then. They passed the time by turning records over and changing them. She got up and lay down on the bed; he sat down next to her. Was he going to work today? she wanted to know.
    Suddenly he was choking her. From the start his grip was so tight that she’d never had a chance to think he was kidding. Bloch heard voices outside in the hall. He was scared to death. He noticed some stuff running out of her nose. She was gurgling. Finally he heard a snapping noise. It sounded like a stone on a dirt road slamming against the bottom of a car. Saliva had dripped onto the linoleum.
    The constriction was so tight that all at once he was exhausted. He lay down on the floor, unable to fall asleep but incapable of raising his head. He heard someone slap a rag against the outside doorknob. He listened. There had been nothing to hear. So he must have fallen asleep after all.

    It didn’t take him long to wake up; as soon as his eyes were open, he felt exposed; as though there was
a draft in the room, he thought. And he