A Life Too Short: The Tragedy of Robert Enke (24 page)

Robert’s mood had improved, even though his situation at Barça hadn’t. Had time healed wounds? Had he discovered a way to deal better with setbacks? Had he actually discovered the happy substitute’s secret of being able to watch a game without any stress? ‘I think mostly it had something to do with the fact that the end of the season was approaching,’ says Jörg Neblung. ‘Robbi knew he would have to change clubs then, so he didn’t take everything that happened at Barça all that seriously anymore.’

He’d phased out the sessions with Dr Geldschläger. He couldn’t have said whether the conversations had helped him or not, but he was sure of one thing: not going any more helped him. It gave him the feeling of having left something behind.

His mother and Teresa’s parents visited at the same time. Teresa’s parents went to the museums – Miró, Picasso, the Contemporary Art Museum – Gisela took the train to the harbour every day, sat in a little café where the waiter greeted
her
with a beaming smile, and looked at the sea. ‘Teresa’s mother knows much more about art than I do,’ Gisela says. ‘I’d just have felt strange going to museums with her.’ As always, Gisela’s presence brought out her son’s casual humour, as if he was inspired by her panache.

Good luck, then, the combined parents said as Robert waved goodbye before the Champions League match against Bayer Leverkusen.

17. Robert with Teresa’s family
.

Teresa dropped him off at the stadium. He went to the changing-room, and right behind the door he looked as usual at the sheet of paper stuck to the wall with sellotape.

His name wasn’t on the list.

No one had told him anything, he had just been quietly crossed off, even from the subs bench. In professional football, where people talk a lot about each other but not much with each other, that’s a way of forcing a player to resign.

He trotted out of the stadium in a trance. He stood in the
car
park, so dumbfounded that he forgot that taxis and trains existed. He thought, how am I going to get home?

He guessed it wasn’t just by chance that he had been eliminated from the game against Leverkusen, a club from his homeland. His humiliation was to be as complete as possible. Radomir Antic´ was a coach who came down on the weakest players when he wanted to demonstrate his strength.

Back home in Sant Cugat the parents fluttered nervously around. How were they to deal with Robert without becoming an additional burden? What could they do to stop him from slipping back into despair? He did what only Teresa usually did in stressful situations. He went to smoke a cigarette on the terrace. He didn’t feel much better afterwards, the humiliation hurt, but he could deal with it. ‘Why should I get agitated?’ he said. His voice faded away, it went blank. ‘I’ve been dead to Barça for ages.’

Eike Immel phoned again. Things in Vienna weren’t looking so hot as he had thought. But in the summer he and Christoph Daum were moving to Fenerbahçe. Istanbul was just crazy – the fans, the enthusiasm, enormous potential, absolutely underestimated. They should sit down together. They were very interested in taking him with them.

Turkey. The word sounded strange, far away. It sounded like the end of the football world.

It was too early to make a decision, he managed to say, but many thanks for the offer.

It would be a long summer, Jörg Nebling warned him. So far there had only been offers from Fenerbahçe, FC Carinthia and FC Bruges. ‘Not all that exciting if you’re coming from Barça,’ said Jörg. His contract in Barcelona lasted another two seasons. Jörg had spoken on the phone several times to managing director Pérez Farguell to find out whether Robert was to go or whether he could stay. Pérez used a lot of words to say nothing at all. Barça preferred to pass on its messages symbolically.

Robert was allowed to turn up for training for the
new
2003–04 season even though Barça had signed a new goalkeeper and promoted another one from the B-team. Five goalkeepers assembled at La Masía – two too many. Still no one said anything. This was considered respectful; Enke still had a contract, they weren’t going to say straight out: just go. Another list was hung up in the changing-room, this one for a summer tour of the United States, and once again Robert wasn’t on it, and the same thing happened to Roberto Bonano, who had been a solid shot-stopper in the Champions League quarter-final only weeks before. It was July, a year after Robert’s arrival, and the lovely time in Barcelona was over almost before it had begun.

After an hour full of memories of Robert Enke, Victor Valdés’s eyes filled up. ‘People had written him off after Novelda. That often happened at Barça: a mistake, and the press ticks off the goalkeeper, and the public shouts, “Get rid of him!”, as they did particularly in those days. After Zubizarreta’s resignation we had a decade when no goalkeeper seemed to be good enough for Barça, and that reflex set in again immediately after Novelda: he’s not the one either.’ Valdés folds his arms in front of his chest. ‘But I saw Robert at training every day, and I’d like to think I’m not mistaken when I see a goalkeeper. He was a great one.’

Robert had only played three and a half games for Barça: two in the Champions League, when there was nothing at stake, twenty minutes against Osasuna, when Bonano was injured, and in Novelda. But was he really any worse than Bonano or Valdés?

‘He had problems adjusting to Barça’s particular way of playing. But I think in most aspects he was a level above me at the time.’ This from Valdés, the man who became Barça’s undisputed number one the following season. ‘If Novelda hadn’t happened, Robert would have become a very good goalkeeper for Barça.’

‘Of course,’ says Teresa, a life’s journey away, up in northern Germany, ‘I sometimes wondered how life would have continued
if
that one game had gone differently.’ She has found her own answer. ‘Presumably nothing at all would have been different. Presumably he would have blundered in the next game, or the one after that. In those days he wasn’t a match for the pressure at Barça.’

We were in the garden in Empede, Barcelona was four years in the past, it was summer, and Robert, equipped like almost all goalkeepers with two left hands when it came to DIY, said, ‘Did you see that I’ve put up this parasol all by myself?’ That was when I first dared to ask about Novelda.

‘Even now, at the sound of that word everything inside me contracts,’ he said. ‘When I think about Patrik Andersson’s face when he furiously yelled at me the next morning. “You can’t put up with that from de Boer!” Or the heat on the air-conditioned team bus before the game.’ When he’d been sweating on the inside.

After they left Spain, Teresa went back to Barcelona several times to visit her friends in Sant Cugat. Every time she did, he came up with a reason not to go.

LA MASÍA LAY DESERTED
in the half-shade of the massive stadium walls. It would take the morning sun another good hour to bathe the whole pitch in harsh light, but the heat of the day was already in the air. The silence screamed at Robert Enke: they have left you behind.

The previous day FC Barcelona had set off for the United States. Robert, Roberto Bonano and striker Dani García had to train by themselves at La Masía. The emptiness reminded the three men of everything that was no longer there: the laughter of team-mates, the rhythmical thunk of the ball when Barça passed it, the eternal hope of summer that this time the season would all turn out fine. The silence of La Masía screamed at them: you’re not needed any more, find another club as soon as possible.

It was a Monday; July was almost over. In Germany and England the new season was due to begin in a few days’ time. It was unrealistic to think that a suitable offer might reach him now.

‘We have no alternative to Fenerbahçe,’ said Jörg, ‘and if we look at it soberly, it’s not the worst club in the world. The salary’s okay, and you can become a champion there and put yourself in the shop window again.’

‘We’ll make it,’ said Teresa. ‘It’s only a year, after all.’

They had been telling him that for days, but Robert said nothing. At the time the Turkish league was seen as a collecting point for players who had had a hiccup in their career. In Robert’s eyes, Turkey was synonymous with failure.

Mid-July. Two weeks earlier, on the way back from holiday in Germany to Barcelona, Robert had visited Fenerbahçe’s German coaches at a training-camp in Bitburg.

Meet them at least once, Jörg and Teresa had said to him.

He dined with Christoph Daum and Eike Immel in the hotel restaurant. The weather was still nice enough to sit on the terrace. Teresa was by his side. Daum opened his eyes wide and spoke as if auditioning for a part in the theatre, Immel was naturally cordial, and delighted in throwing in anecdotes from the old days. Robert, whom Teresa had only seen drunk once in her life, when he was seventeen, kept generously topping himself up with red wine.

Someone still valued him as a goalkeeper. For an evening, the thought filled him up. He relaxed, he asked a lot of questions: what sort of quality was Fenerbahçe’s defence, could you get by with English in Istanbul. How pleasantly natural Teresa and Robert were, what calm determination emanated from them, it occurred to Immel. ‘When Daum and I drove away, we were really euphoric. “It’s
got
to be him,” we said to each other.’

Two weeks later, after that Monday training session at a deserted La Masía, Robert was driving home when he decided to phone Jörg.

‘I’ve talked myself round. German coaching team, good money, let’s just try it.’

When Jörg Neblung got to Istanbul he thought he had arived in a biblical scene. ‘And he divided the waters’ – he couldn’t help thinking of that passage in the Old Testament when he stepped out of Ataturk airport next to Christoph Daum. Hundreds of fans received the coach and his retinue, hands and heads stretched towards them, but they could walk quickly because simply by moving forward Daum found he could part the human waves. After many antics and the very public documenting of his cocaine consumption, Daum had ruined his reputation in Germany. In Turkey he was somebody. In the
mid
-nineties he had turned the Istanbul club Besiktas into champions and cup-winners. The previous season Fenerbahçe had finished sixth – a terrible disappointment for the most popular club in the country; Daum represented a promise that everything would be good again.

For Robert it was the usual scenario. After Mönchengladbach, Benfica and Barça, he had once again ended up with a club whose current performance was no match for past glories.

He arrived in Istanbul shortly after Jörg, on his own. Teresa would stay with friends in Sant Cugat, along with the dogs, and regularly visit him, they had agreed. He was to spend only a season in Turkey, it was just a stop-gap. Maybe after that he would even go back to Barça; his contract there had only been suspended for a year. He himself had insisted that they were on no account to move to Istanbul for good. He wanted to avoid the feeling that the decision was final; he needed the certainty that he could go back to Sant Cugat at any time, even if it was only for a few days off. But now he was alone, for the first time in his life.

The number of fans at the airport had dwindled to a few individual groups. A few then recognised him and shouted something that he didn’t understand. To judge by their faces the words were friendly, but how could he be sure? He knew what it said in the papers. Fenerbahçe had sold the Turkish national goalkeeper R
ü
st
ü
Reçber, a great hero, to Barça. Club president Aziz Yildirim, who was used to making decisions by decree, had dreamed of having France’s world champion, Fabien Barthez, as a replacement. And then Daum had insisted on bringing in this German, who Yildirim didn’t even know, and who Barça didn’t want any more! The Turkish papers had passed judgement before he landed in Istanbul. What business did a substitute goalkeeper have at Fener?

He had to get up on a podium in front of these newspaper reporters. Two buttons of his white shirt were open, his shirt hung casually from his trousers – Istanbul in August. The photographers gestured to him to stand near Fenerbahçe’s blue and yellow flag. He put one hand on the club flag, and with
his
other hand gave the cameras the thumbs-up as a sign meaning ‘Brilliant to be here, great to be playing for Fenerbahçe!’ His face said the opposite. His cheeks were red, his eyes wide and uneasy.

Jörg decided to pretend not to be aware of Robert’s tension. He didn’t want to make it any worse by addressing it. Instead he sent a request to Yildirim asking whether he might be prepared to pose for a photograph with Robert. Such a picture might relax the situation a bit, creating the impression that the club president thought highly of the new goalkeeper, or at least tolerated him.

Yildirim ignored the request.

It doesn’t matter, Jörg tried to reassure himself. The important thing is for the coach to stand by Robert.

They drove to the hotel the club had booked for Robert – a high-class place, but one of fading charm, amid the sea of houses on the Asian side of the city. Pierre van Hooijdonk, Robert’s friend from his Lisbon days, who was signed by chance at the same time as Fenerbahçe’s new star striker, was being put up in a luxury hotel on tree-lined slopes on the other side, with a view across the Bosphorus.