A Life Too Short: The Tragedy of Robert Enke (25 page)

Robert didn’t want to go out.

Jörg stayed with him there for three days. Once he’d arranged for Robert to move to van Hooijdonk’s hotel, he set off cheerfully, because ‘the conditions looked
good
for him to settle in quickly’, with his old friend van Hooijdonk nearby, two or three German Turks like Ali G
ü
nes from Freiburg on the team, German coaches, and a city which, in districts like Galata and Beyoglu, was as lively as his beloved Lisbon.

18. Robert with the Fenerbahçe flag after signing the contract
.

He drove to training with van Hooijdonk every day, a simple forty-kilometre journey – and they didn’t even have to go as far as the end of the city. The traffic flowed chronically slowly on the Bosphorus Bridge. Robert thought, it’s lucky Pierre’s here, at least I’ll have a bit of fun. Pierre thought, what’s up with Robert? He got worked up about everything – about the traffic, about his team-mates’ lack of concentration, about everything. After that he wouldn’t speak at all for ages.

An estate agent employed by the club showed him some flats. Okay, he’d take that one – just so that the decision was made.

We once spoke on the phone. I mentioned in passing that I was going out for sushi with a friend. That banal word ‘sushi’ set something off in him. ‘And here I am stuck in traffic in Istanbul on this fucking bridge!’ He sounded so angry, or perhaps desperate, that I was taken aback.

Effectively he was only alone for three days. Jörg went, then Teresa visited. In the three days in between, Fener played a pre-season match against Kocaelispor. Thirty minutes before kick-off a sheep was sacrificed on the pitch. I’m glad Teresa isn’t here yet with her love of animals, he thought. When she arrived at last in Istanbul he was already thinking about how he would cope without her for weeks after she left.

He showed her the flat he had found, and she was horrified. There was hardly any light in the room. It was the afternoon, it was summer, and Teresa had to turn on the lights in the kitchen. Startled by the sudden brightness, cockroaches fled.

‘Robbi!’

‘When I looked at the flat it seemed fine to me.’

‘But now have a think about how we live in Barcelona. What was it that you liked about that so much?’

He shrugged.

‘Teresa and I may have made some mistakes,’ says Jörg. ‘Because he’d been better in Barcelona, we thought he could cope with Istanbul, just as he picked himself up again after escaping from Lisbon, or even after Novelda.’ For Teresa and Jörg, Robert was just a sensitive person who sometimes lost his equilibrium in extreme situations, but who then, once he had driven away the melancholy with tremendous self-control, emerged strengthened from the darkness.

Teresa helped him to find another flat in Istanbul and flew back to Barcelona four days later, one day before the start of the season. In a fortnight Jörg was coming out again, and she herself would be back in three weeks. They thought that once he had overcome his initial anxiety things would be fine, as they had been in Lisbon. He only had to convince himself how good he was in the first few games. With any luck nothing would happen until then.

Jörg sent a fax to Robert Enke, Swissotel, room 1296. ‘Morning, Robbi, attached the current press cuttings. Spoke briefly on the phone to Eike yesterday; he told me you were making a very good and confident impression … nice to hear! There’s no doubt about your status and your abilities – I hope you’re receptive to statements like that at the moment!!! Otherwise I hope everything’s Kebab. G
ü
leg
ü
le, Jörg.’

The night before the start of the 2003–04 Turkish season the teams stayed at Fenerbahçe’s training-centre in Samandira, far to the east of the city. Robert had a single room and wanted to watch the Bundesliga – Bremen against Gladbach, Hannover against Bayern – just as he had always done at Benfica with José Moreira the night before a game. In Fenerbahçe he could only get one German channel, and that didn’t have broadcasting rights for the Bundesliga.

Moreira hadn’t been able to get through to Robert for weeks. After their time in Benfica they spoke regularly on the phone; Robert had always called back when he found the number of his little goalkeeping brother among his missed calls. Now there
was
silence from Robert. ‘This is the last number I had for him,’ says Moreira, showing me his phone-book – it’s a Spanish number. Later, Moreira talked to van Hooijdonk. ‘How’s Robert doing? You were with him at Fenerbahçe, weren’t you?’

‘Robert’s not the same,’ said van Hooijdonk. ‘He doesn’t talk any more. He’s gone strange.’

Robert sat in his room in Samandira and the hours to kick-off dragged their feet. He looked for a piece of paper, found Jörg’s fax, and wrote on the back ‘Istanbul Diary’. Then he started writing.

10.08.2003. At the training-camp in Samandira. Tonight’s the first league game. It’s pretty bleak here
.

I’m, as you would expect, not so great. It’s a mixture of fear, nerves and homesickness. Homesickness for my life with Terri and the doggies. Terri flew off yesterday
.

I often wonder why I did this thing with Fenerbahçe, and long for a time when I still had the decision ahead of me. I probably wouldn’t be in a terrific state in Barcelona either, with no prospects, but I would have Terri, my friends and my milieu where I feel safe
.

I’m a bit disappointed by the training staff. Daum should put a lot more stress on discipline. I barely have any contact with the team
.

In that mood, he drove to the stadium.

It was forty kilometres back to the city centre; another traffic jam on the bridge. Fenerbahçe’s stadium wasn’t far from the Topkapi Palace, home to the Sultans, the rulers of the Ottoman Empire. The terraces were four yellow and blue walls made up of fifty-two thousand fanatics, their opponents, Istanbulspor, not worth bothering with.

Robert wore a gleaming dark-blue jersey with a hint of a V-neck and a pair of shorts almost as wide as a boxer’s. He looked good in his new gear, strong yet agile. His face was only seen in photographs later on.

In Barcelona, Teresa escaped with Dickens. She rode into the forest and let the horse gallop. The speed forced her to concentrate on what she was doing and not think that a football match was happening right now in Istanbul.

Istanbulspor were on the brink of bankruptcy. At the end of the season the team would rescue itself from relegation with a single point’s advantage. Fener tried to dominate the game, but Istanbulspor had come to defend – the prerogative of the small team. Fener couldn’t get through. They started to get nervous. Then, only eighteen minutes into the game, a long pass was hit from Istanbulspor’s half. Robert ran out but realised in a tenth of a second that he would never get to the ball. Istanbulspor’s only striker, the Israeli Pini Balili – who had become a Turkish citizen called Atakan Balili – already had it, Fener’s defenders far behind him. From nearly thirty yards out he lobbed it over Robert’s head with gusto. The keeper, stuck on the eighteen-yard line, ran desperately back, chasing the shot, sensing that he would just be fetching it out of the net.

On the terraces, Eike Immel was convinced ‘there was nothing he could do about that goal. It was preceded by an incredibly stupid misplaced pass from Selçuk, and the counterattack so quickly that Robert didn’t have time to correct his position.’ Robert, on the other hand, shouted loudly at himself when he booted the ball away towards the centre circle. His foot got caught in some toilet paper that fans had thrown into his area. He thought someone had switched him into slow-motion. In his perception, everything seemed to be moving with extraordinary slowness. Later he remarked to Jörg, ‘Everything was wrapped in fog.’

In the second half, the ball came to him after a back-pass. Robert showed no sign of doing anything with it. A murmur in the terraces swelled to a rumble. Immel felt his heart beating faster. Kick the ball away, man! he thought. The Istanbulspor players, who hadn’t bothered to trouble the goalkeeper since the goal, hesitated; then the first of them, Balili, began to run at him. And still Robert didn’t move. As if he didn’t know what to do with the ball; as if he had forgotten how to execute
a
simple pass. Get rid of the thing, quickly! Immel wanted to shout.

Too late.

Balili swiped the ball away from Robert. There was confusion in Fener’s box. Fifty-two thousand people were shouting, shrieking wildly, stunned by the chaos on the pitch. Finally a defender saw off the threat.

Immel needed time to recover from the shock. ‘Robert had a complete brainstorm,’ he said.

After fifty-seven minutes the score was 3–0 to Istanbulspor. Coins, lighters and bottles flew around Robert’s ears. He knew his own fans were standing behind his goal.

When Teresa got back home she knew she could find the result on Teletext but came up with any excuse not to turn on the TV. She would shower first.

A quarter of an hour later, her phone rang.

‘Hello, it’s Gunnar.’

As children, Robert’s friends had found it exciting that Robert had a brother who was six years older. His big brother could tell them something about music and girls. Gunnar had become a father at the age of twenty-one. Ever since Robert had become a travelling professional sportsman they’d only seen each other for a few days in the holidays, and spoken occasionally on the phone.

‘Yes, Gunnar?’ said Teresa.

‘I just wanted to call.’

‘Gunnar, if you know anything, then please tell me.’

‘Yes. Three-nil.’

‘Won or lost?’

‘Lost.’

Teresa broke down on the stairs.

She tapped in his phone number again and again. ‘It was dark outside by now,’ remembers Jörg, who was trying as well. Finally Robert phoned Teresa back. He was on that bridge again, in the traffic jam.

He was coming home, he said. He was giving up.

‘For God’s sake, Robbi, don’t do anything rash. Please sleep on it for a night at least, and let’s talk about it again tomorrow.’

No, he had made the decision during the game. There was no more doubt about it.

‘I understand how you feel, everyone feels like chucking it all in when things aren’t going well. But afterwards it would only get worse. Keep at it for another week or two, one or two games, and you’ll get through it, I know. We’ll get through this. I love you.’

She was afraid that if he gave up he would collapse completely. And that he would never forgive himself.

Her words did me good
, he wrote in his diary. But he’d been adamant on the phone: no, he couldn’t do it any more. His career was over.

Robert made one more phone-call before switching off his phone so that no one could reach him.

Marco answered enthusiastically, as always, when he heard his friend’s voice. After that he didn’t say anything for a long time. ‘I’m going to pieces here, I’ve got to get away, it’s not working.’ In Marco’s memory, his friend’s sentences circled constantly in his head, getting faster and faster and making him dizzy.

‘Robbi, just relax, try to pull yourself together. And if that doesn’t work, leave.’

‘But then I’ll be unemployed.’

‘For six months, and what’s that? You’ll find another club in the winter transfer market.’

Marco was shocked by his friend’s plan to jack everything in but less bemused with the prospect of being without football for six months. He had just switched voluntarily from 1 FC Nuremberg to AC Arezzo in Italy’s Serie C. He’d believed that if he restarted his career at a distinctly lower level in a country where no one judged him by the three goals from his first seven Bundesliga games he would finally be rid of the constant pressure on his temples. Three days before his first game in
Italy
he heard the coach talking about him on television, saying, ‘He’s a player you just have to click your tongue at.’ Marco’s temples immediately tightened again. He dragged himself stiffly, limply, impotently through that first game. ‘If all you have is football, and it goes wrong,’ Marco says, ‘you’re left with nothing but doubts.’

The next morning Robert woke up with the feeling that he had gone to sleep only a short time before. He had to get away from Turkey.

First of all, however, he looked for a sheet of paper.

11.08.2003. I’m finished. We lost the game 0–3. Didn’t look good from the first goal. After that I was very nervous in the second half. Was mocked by some of the fans. Spoke today to Father, Jörg and Terri. Would like to get away from Istanbul, do a proper course of therapy at last. At any rate, it can’t go on. Understood yesterday that I’m simply not up to the demands. Jörg tries to persuade me to have someone fly in or to take some medication. I don’t want to do that, I don’t want to do that here. Terri just rang and had to put the phone down again to cry. I feel helpless and anxious, I don’t leave the hotel room, I’m afraid of people’s eyes. I’d just like to live without anxiety and nerves. I know that breaking this contract will have far-reaching consequences, but I can’t think about anything else. I don’t know how to go on. I want to talk to Daum today, don’t know how to put it. Afraid of his reaction. Know that I’ve missed the opportunity to start a course of therapy several times in the past
.