Read Online The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick: A Novel by Peter Handke - Free Book Online Page B

if he himself knew how to swim. He saw the young man force his mouth open wide and nod emphatically, but then he heard him say, “No.” Bloch walked ahead and could hear that he was still talking but did not look back again.
    Outside the castle, he knocked on the window of the gatekeeper’s cottage. He went up so close to the pane that he could see inside. There was a tub full of plums on the table. The gatekeeper, who was lying on the sofa, had just wakened; he made signs that Bloch did not know how to answer. He nodded. The gatekeeper came out with a key and opened the gate but immediately turned around again and walked ahead. “A gatekeeper with a key!” thought Bloch; again it seemed as if he should be seeing all this only in a figurative sense. He realized that the gatekeeper planned to show him through the building. He decided to clear up the confusion but, even though the gatekeeper did not say much, he never had the chance. There were fishheads nailed all over
the entrance door. Bloch had started to explain, but he must have missed the right moment again. They were inside already.
    In the library the gatekeeper read to him from the estate books how many shares of the harvest the peasants used to have to turn over to the lord of the manor as rent. Bloch had no chance to interrupt him then, because the gatekeeper was just translating a Latin entry dealing with an insubordinate peasant. “‘He had to depart from the estate,’” the gatekeeper read, “‘and some time later he was discovered in the forest, hanging by his feet from a branch, his head in an anthill.’” The estate book was so thick that the gatekeeper had to use both hands to shut it. Bloch asked if the house was inhabited. The gatekeeper answered that visitors were not allowed into the private quarters. Bloch heard a clicking sound, but it was just the gatekeeper locking the estate book back up. “‘The darkness in the fir forests,’” the gatekeeper recited from memory, “‘had caused him to take leave of his senses.’” Outside the window there was a sound like a heavy apple coming loose from a branch. But nothing hit the ground. Bloch looked out the window and saw the estate owner’s son in the garden carrying a long pole; at the tip of the pole hung a sack with metal prongs that he used to yank apples off the tree and into the
sack, while the landlady stood on the grass below with her apron spread out.
    In the next room, panels of butterflies were hung. The gatekeeper showed him how splotchy his hands had become from preparing them. Even so, many butterflies had fallen off the pins that had held them in place; underneath the cases Bloch saw the dust on the floor. He stepped closer and inspected those butterflies that were still held in place by the pins. When the gatekeeper closed the door behind him, something fell to the floor outside his field of vision and pulverized even while it fell. Bloch saw an Emperor moth that seemed almost completely overgrown with a woolly green film. He did not bend forward or step back. He read the labels under the empty pins. Some of the butterflies had changed so much that they could be recognized only by the descriptions. “‘A corpse in the living room,’” recited the gatekeeper, standing in the doorway to the next room. Outside, someone screamed, and an apple hit the ground. Bloch, looking out the window, saw that an empty branch had snapped back. The landlady put the apple that had fallen to the ground on the pile of other damaged apples.
    Later on, a school class from outside the town joined them, and the gatekeeper interrupted his tour to begin it all over again. Bloch took this chance to leave.
    Out on the street, at the stop for the mail bus, he sat on a bench that, as a brass plate on it attested, had been donated by the local savings bank. The houses were so far away that they could hardly be distinguished from each other; when bells began to toll, they could not be seen in the