A Life Too Short: The Tragedy of Robert Enke (13 page)

‘OK, I’ll learn to do that in three months, Moreira. And you’ve got to learn German, too.
BRING MIR WASSER!
Bring me water. That’s the most important sentence you’ll have to understand as my substitute goalkeeper, you understand?
BRING MIR WASSER!
’

Moreira can still say the phrase today, and a few other
things
too, as became clear when we first met at the Stadium of Light. ‘
Gute Nacht!
’ Moreira said. It was two o’clock in the afternoon.

‘Moreira, let’s take a look at the Bundesliga on German television,’ Robert said one Saturday evening in the hotel room.

‘But we can watch the goals on Eurosport with an English commentary, then I’ll understand something.’

‘No, it’s better if we watch it in German.’

‘Better?’

‘Yes, yes. Oh, and Moreira, after that there’s a good Eddie Murphy movie on ZDF.’

‘But it doesn’t even have subtitles!’ Moreira moaned once the film had started. ‘Eddie Murphy’s speaking German!’

‘Doesn’t matter, Moreira, it’s fine like this.’

‘But Robert, we could watch Portuguese television. They have films in English with Portuguese subtitles.’

‘He always had his own way,’ Moreira recalls affectionately, ‘and I’ve never slept as well as I did with him in the room, because the German films were so boring.’

Today, at the age of twenty-eight, Moreira wears his hair down to his shoulder. It frames a soft face, though like almost all goalkeepers it is marked by collisions with strikers. There’s a big graze under his right eye. He’s remained true to Benfica throughout those eleven years, even though the club uses him as an understudy for the more expensive goalkeepers Benfica buy who are wrongly considered more important because of the size of their transfer fee.

11. Robert with his goalkeeping ‘little brother’ José Moreira
.

‘Have you seen Moreira play lately?’ Robert would ask every time we fell to talking about great goalkeepers in later years.

‘Robbi, I don’t even watch Portuguese television.’

‘You’ve
got
to watch Moreira.’

His eyes laughed when he talked about Moreira, the goalkeeper who learned from him, who made him feel unexpectedly jaunty in training, who was his accomplice and not his rival.

In the Palácio Fronteira you could feel like a marquis, even if you were only living in the guest-house. There were more bathrooms than there had been rooms in the flat in Mönchengladbach: six. The garden walls were tiled with blue and white
azulejos
, with motifs of medieval battles and trumpet-playing monkeys.

Phone-calls from Germany were always fun.

‘Oh no, it’s raining here again.’

‘Really? We’re sitting in the garden in our T-shirts.’

They explored the city, the fortress of San Jorge and the Gulbenkian Museum, the Eleven bar and the Blues Café; they made their first acquaintances among the Benfica professionals. Sometimes they just sat in the garden and looked at the lights of Lisbon, gold in the afternoon, milky at twilight.

Teresa’s pangs of conscience at giving up her studies faded away. ‘The truth is that I enjoyed not having to work or study.’ When Robert was at training she lay in the garden reading thrillers, irritably skipping over paragraphs with nothing but descriptions of places. Something had to happen in books.

One morning she was sticking photographs of their summer holiday in southern Holland into an album. Robert in his floppy hat in the dunes, smiling. ‘We had dark times ahead of us’ she wrote underneath. It wrote itself so easily. It seemed so long ago.

‘I don’t think Robert’s going to have any more panic attacks,’ she told his father when he visited them in Lisbon.

‘Sadly I wouldn’t be so sure,’ Dirk replied.

Teresa shivered for a second, then shook the thought gently away.

For now, Robert went on flying. When Benfica beat FC Gil Vicente 2–0 at the end of October, the team was unbeaten after
seven
games. Since the 1–1 against Rio Ave at the start of the season Robert hadn’t let in a single goal. ‘Enke is an exorcist’, the
Record
wrote poetically.

More and more people came to visit from Germany. Teresa’s mother was the next one. The autumn light made the garden brighter, milder. Callers from home said that they’d turned on the heating for the first time recently; Robert and Teresa were still swimming in their pool in the palace garden.

‘It’s wonderful here,’ said Teresa’s mother.

‘And I know someone who didn’t even want to go to Lisbon,’ Robert called out from the pool. He turned with a cheeky smile to Teresa. ‘Remind me, why didn’t you want to go to Lisbon?’

AT A TIME
of night when the ringing of the phone usually means a call from a lover or bad news, Marco Villa woke with a start. It was 25 November 1999. He looked at the clock: just before midnight. Robert Enke’s name flashed up on the screen of his mobile.

After Borussia’s relegation, Marco had moved to Austria. The word ‘provinces’ had assumed a new connotation for him. He was playing for the top-flight team SV Ried. The town, hidden in a dip in the foothills of the Alps between Salzburg and Linz, had eleven thousand inhabitants, and the team had won the Austrian Cup in 1998. The stadium in Ried was called Keine Sorgen Arena – ‘No Worries Arena’. Marco could already feel Ried’s carefree attitude having an effect on him; he’d scored eight goals for the club in five months.

He answered the phone. ‘Robbi?’

‘You know what’s just happened?’

Marco sensed that he didn’t want to know.

‘I’ve let in another seven goals.’

‘Oh, shit, Robbi.’

Robert just laughed. As if losing 7–0 in the UEFA Cup to Celta Vigo hadn’t left him downcast, just simply seemed unbelievable.

Benfica had gone into the game intent an defending tightly. The coach’s vision was for it to be a classic first-leg cup tie, putting everything, decisions and drama, off until the second leg. Then, after a quarter of an hour, Celta Vigo scored. Something broke. Benfica, despite their glorious past and Jupp Heynckes’s fresh promise and their great start to the domestic
season
, were all of a sudden wandering about with their own contradictory thoughts. On the one hand they had only come to defend, on the other they now had to start attacking. Benfica lost their cohesion, and Celta Vigo, who had one of the strongest squads in European club football at the time, found themselves with unexpected room for manoeuvre, especially Claude Makelele in midfield and the Russians Alexander Mostovoi and Valeri Karpin in attack. Their passing game was a whirlwind. Makelele appeared unmarked in front of Robert, then Mario Turdó calmly sent a shot flying in a parabolic curve into the sky over his head. After forty-two minutes the score was 4–0. At half-time Heynckes furiously explained all the things they needed to do to improve. Sixteen minutes of play later, with a third of the game still to go, the score was 7–0. ‘The game was basically Robert versus eleven players,’ says Moreira. ‘And each time a goal was scored he didn’t have a chance.’

When Robert walked off the pitch, he looked at the Benficistas, the eight thousand fans who had made the trip across the border into southern Galicia. The sight of them, the overwhelming beauty of their sadness, stayed with him for ever. ‘Eight thousand people, and none of them making a sound.’

The club president, João Vale e Azevedo, stormed into the changing-room, ranting and shouting. The three thousand fans waiting for the team at Lisbon airport found their voices too. Robert calmly told reporters, ‘Seven goals down is something I’m quite familiar with.’

‘A defeat is a different defeat for a goalkeeper if it isn’t his fault,’ Walter Junghans remarks.

Two days later, before the home game against Campomaiorense, Robert was back with Moreira in his hotel room. In Vigo, Robert’s little goalkeeping brother had been absent because of an injury.

‘As soon as I’m not there, you let in seven goals.’

‘Moreira,
bring mir Wasser
!’

The TV was on – German television.

‘Why do only a thousand fans come to some Primeira Liga
games
in this country, but three thousand of them get up in the middle of the night to shout at us at the airport? I don’t understand this country, Moreira.’

‘Robert, it’s normal, you’re in Portugal.’

‘And why does no one here speak English? Are there no schools in Portugal?’

‘English is compulsory up to year eight, and then they all forget it. It’s perfectly normal, you’re in Portugal.’

‘Where there are speed limits of 120 km/h on the motorways and everyone drives at 190.’

‘Perfectly normal. You’re in Portugal, we’re all mad here.’

‘And why am I so fond of this country?’

‘I can’t tell you that, Robert.’

In their palace, four months after moving in, Teresa and Robert learned something new about Portugal: nowhere in the world is it as cold as in the warm countries of southern Europe.

Like many flats in southern Italy, Spain or Portugal, the guest-house of the Palácio Fronteira had no heating. Teresa and Robert hadn’t noticed that when they moved in on a sunlit day in August. ‘There was a fireplace in every room, and in the seventeenth century five members of staff probably went through the rooms making sure the fires were lit,’ says Teresa.

The cold crept damply through the walls. In the kitchen they could see their breath. The clothes in the wardrobe began to smell musty. They bought two electric radiators and started living in one room in a house with six bathrooms. Before Hubert Rosskamp, the huntsman from Gierath, came on a visit, Teresa begged him to bring electric blankets. Half an hour before they went to bed she’d switch them on. ‘The worst thing was when you’d left something in the bathroom. Then you had to get back out of bed.’

Robert was luckier. He could shower at the stadium. Soon he started brushing his teeth there as well.

Needless to say, the winter visitors to the palace weren’t quite as keen as the summer guests. ‘This is the world’s first
walk
-in fridge,’ said Teresa’s brother Florian. One morning Teresa saw him standing motionless in front of the house, arms folded and eyes closed, his head turned towards the sun.

‘Flo, what are you doing?’ she cried.

‘I’m warming myself up!’

During his stay in Lisbon Teresa’s brother began to feel a little irritated. He liked Robert, and enjoyed his conversations with him, but why did Robert never ask him what he did? Why did Teresa’s boyfriend never ask any questions when he told them about his life as a teacher in Munich?

It was footballer’s disease. Professional footballers get used to being constantly asked questions, and gradually they forget how to take an interest in other people.

Unlike Florian, Hubert didn’t notice Robert’s social shortcoming. Hubert didn’t wait for people to ask him questions anyway. If he wanted to say something, then Hubert said it. In the Stadium of Light, Robert introduced him to Portugal’s legendary player Eusebio. ‘Eusebio, this is Hubert.’ Eusebio gave him the thumbs up. Teresa and Robert showed Hubert the city, the tower of Belém, the view of the Atlantic, and all the while Hubert couldn’t believe how touchingly these people were looking after him.

Marco and Christina came shortly before Christmas. Panathinaikos, one of the twenty-five biggest clubs in Europe, had discovered Marco Villa the goal-scorer in that dip in the Alpine foothills and immediately bought him. After Christmas he would be in Greece.

Without realising it, Robert and Marco were part of the vanguard of a new age. Professional football was leading the way in globalisation. A handful of foreigners played in the English Premier League in 1992; seven years later a third of the five hundred or so premiership professionals came from abroad. Young men like Robert and Marco, who, if they had been born ten years earlier, might have switched from Mönchengladbach to Bremen or Frankfurt, became modern-day migrant labourers. No one had prepared them for it.

In the only warm room in the ice-palace Teresa and Christina
sat
on the sofa, Robert and Marco on the floor. They were playing the guessing-game of City, Country, River.

‘E,’ said Marco.

‘What river do you have?’ Robert asked the ladies.

‘The Ems,’ said Teresa.

‘Oh, we’ve got that too,’ said Robert.

‘N,’ said Christina.

‘What’s your river?’ asked Robert.

‘Neckar,’ said Christina.

‘Got that one,’ said Robert.

Eventually Teresa and Christina realised that the men didn’t know any rivers at all, but were just stealing their answers. ‘Suspicion naturally fell on me because I was always the one fooling around,’ says Marco. But Robert was the one eager not to lose the game.

For breakfast the next day Teresa served scrambled egg without the yolk, as an experiment.

‘What’s that?’ Marco asked, darting a conspiratorial glance at Robert, raising his eyebrows and grinning.

Robert dismissed him with a gruff shake of the head. You didn’t make jokes about Teresa.

At lunchtime Robert and Marco went off to their favourite fast-food restaurant. They were standing at the counter when Marco became aware of a buzzing noise behind them. He turned round. Dozens of children were peering through the windows of the restaurant, the first ones were already coming in, and a few minutes later they were surrounded by a hundred or so giggling and laughing Portuguese kids.