A Life Too Short: The Tragedy of Robert Enke (29 page)

They jogged on, in silence, Jörg glowing with fury. Only
much
later did it occur to Jörg that they were suddenly their old selves again. Not nurse and patient, but adviser and client, in reversed roles. As so often in the past, the protector was being taught good sense by his charge.

Christmas fell in the middle of this phase of cautious hope. Advent lights burned in the streets, people huddled tightly around wooden stalls decorated with fir branches, hot cups of mulled wine in their hands, steaming breath in front of their faces. Robert felt an oppressive expectation that he should be full of festive cheer as well. Why couldn’t he be like that any more?

Jörg had made an Advent calendar for Tanja, with a little surprise for her every day. Other people’s happiness reminded Teresa how lost she was. She would have liked an Advent calendar herself, she said. He thought he heard sadness in her words: other people got Advent calendars, and she didn’t even have her husband by her side in Barcelona.

Suddenly Robert had an idea: he would send her a calendar by text. Every day he sent her a self-penned four-liner on his phone.

Your heart is something you can’t define
,

It’s easier to find a mountain to climb
.

Now climbing a mountain’s a hard thing to do

When that tiny dwarf down at the bottom is you
.

He liked the image. He was a dwarf. He didn’t notice himself getting any bigger with each rhyme.

The dwarf says to himself: I can’t do that
,

I’m just a stupid idiot
.

He thinks: for that I’m much too small
,

You’d have to be bigger, over all
.

One mistake, Dr Markser said, was to wait for something to happen.
Don’t yield to passivity!
Robert noted, with an exclamation mark, and drove to Gierath. He wanted to surprise Hubert Rosskamp with a visit.

His old friend was fighting ‘to stay ahead of the reaper’s scythe’. In Hubert’s Rhineland singsong even a phrase like that sounded cheerful. He was struggling to recover from a cancer operation.

Hubert was wearing a pair of jogging pants that didn’t exactly bring his ashen face to life. ‘For God’s sake, Robert,’ he yelled, ‘I haven’t even got any strawberry tart in the house!’

They set off for a walk, along the old path where they’d taken the dogs in his Mönchengladbach days. Alamo, the old hunting dog Teresa had found in the street and left with Hubert, was there. The earth was hard under their feet. He would get some strawberry tart, Hubert said. Robert asked about Hubert’s operation, his pain, his progress. He concealed the fact that he was ill too. He had come to help, after all.

‘Will you go on giving me an Advent rhyme every day?’ asked Teresa before she returned to Cologne on 20 December. She and Robert were planning to fly back to Barcelona together for Christmas.

He didn’t think, I’m cured, he just hardly gave his illness any thought. On the radio Michael Jackson sang ‘Billie Jean’, and he danced the moonwalk with Teresa in Jörg’s living-room. They had been invited for a turkey dinner with Jörg’s friends. He didn’t know anyone, but that didn’t bother him; all the better: he would meet some new people. He took along a pile of advertising postcards from a bar. One card showed a black-and-white photograph of a cocktail bar. On the back of it the promised Advent calendar four-liner turned into eight lines:

Today is Saturday, oh so hearty
,

We’re all going to a party
.

Eating turkey, drinking wine
,

Going home and feeling fine
.

Tanja, Terri, Jörg and Rob
,

One of them a real nutjob
.

We’ll have a laugh, it’s really fun
,

This one’s going to run and run
.

Three days later they landed in Barcelona. The ring road from the airport passed the tower blocks of the outer districts – the epitome of hideousness – but he soon spotted the greenness of the Collserola. When they turned into the Calle de Las Tres Plazas in Sant Cugat, he saw their house and knew he was home.

Marco Villa rang that Christmas. He had gone to see a sports psychologist. He couldn’t see how she would help him – breathing exercises, staring at the wall – but it didn’t matter. He had some news, he would just put Christina on the line. His wife was pregnant.

Having a child of our own would be lovely, thought Teresa, but certainly not in the near future. First they would have to recover from what they had just been through.

Four children were waiting impatiently for the arrival of the Christ child when Teresa and Robert turned up at Axel and Susanne’s in Sant Cugat. The hard core of the German expats had been invited for a Christmas party. The presents for the grown-ups were to be funny rather than expensive, they had agreed. Chance decided who received which gift. Teresa drew a man-size pair of turquoise boxer-shorts with Snoopy on the front. She put them on over her jeans. Robert was suddenly sitting on the couch apart from the others. In his hands he held a pile of papers and was going through them with great concentration. Then he got to his feet.

‘I’ve written Teresa a poem for Christmas, and I’d like to read it to her and to you, because I know what you’ve been through with me over the past few months. I’d like to thank you for that.’

He told them about the dwarf.

But now let’s turn to positive things
,

Loud the Christmas bell does ring!

The dwarf looks forward to the feast
–

A test for him, he knows at least
.

A
dog for his dwarf-wife, maybe?

Her little smile is fine to see
.

Or else a cuddly pussy-cat
–

Her little face lights up at that
.

What if it’s not a pet at all?

Why then, the she-dwarf’s face will fall
.

And what if she is filled with wrath

Against her loving little dwarf?

When he had finished, silence fell. At last one of the friends remembered that the author was present and started clapping, and the others quickly joined in. Their applause grew louder, the noise driving the shimmer from their eyes.

It’s two o’clock in the morning. Teresa is already in bed, and outside the window the golf course of Sant Cugat is just a black wall. Robert sits at his desk and lowers his notes. The pages lie in front of him. The scrawly handwriting with the skewed letters curving from left to right at the top leaves no doubt. He wrote that.

He can’t believe he is the same person who wrote that diary over the last five months.

It’s January 2004, a new year, and he has just read through his notebooks for the first time. Does that old human dream really exist? You take down the old calendar, you draw a line under everything, and it all starts over?

It almost seems that way.

Most people who are prone only suffer from depression once, and it usually lasts between three and six months. He wouldn’t go so far as to say: I belong to that group, it’s all behind me. What he feels is that those months already seem incredibly far away. He sees his alien self as a blur, in outline, a person who had nothing to do with him but who for some inexplicable reason slipped into his skin.

He is filled with a quiet urge to act. He will play football again, even if he doesn’t yet know where. The offer from
Manchester
City fell through, and he doesn’t know whether he will ever reach the level of Lisbon again, but it doesn’t matter much. He has a very concrete idea of how to achieve happiness. He will stand in some goal somewhere, he will save a shot and he will feel how that makes other people – the fans, his team-mates – happy. He will go for a walk with Teresa and the dogs; on the forest path she will let the dogs off the lead; the dogs will run; he will put his arm around Teresa and sense her smile without looking.

Teresa is pregnant. They’ve known for nine days. It must have happened during those euphoric Advent days in Cologne. Teresa was shocked by the news: after Robert’s depression she would have liked a bit of peace. But he was pleased; she is pleased now.

If it’s a girl, they already have a name: Lara.

Under his desk-lamp he looks for a pen, a sheet of paper. He has to finish something.

16.01.2004, 02.00 a.m. At the moment I am happy + content. We had a really lovely New Year’s Eve in the Café Delgado. I laughed and danced – incredible!

He looks for a file for his depri-documents. Those are his words: depri-documents, depri-file. He finds a pocket file, bright red, puts his notes in it, along with the dwarf poem, and closes it.

IN THE AFTERNOON
he had time to take a look at life. He walked to Santa Cruz harbour. After he had stood around idly for a while, he discovered a wall and swung himself up on top of it. From there you could see over the cruise-ship quay and up to the cranes and containers of the freight-yard. Beyond that the jagged mountains of Tenerife grew right out of the Atlantic.

Robert sat on the wall and didn’t move. He watched the people in the harbour. ‘How contented they are,’ he thought to himself, and felt he was one of them again.

On the last day of the winter transfer window he had switched to Deportivo Tenerife. The offers he had on the table told him something about his reputation in professional football: AC Ancona, bottom of the league in Italy; FC Kärnten, bottom of the league in Austria: and ADO Den Haag, second from bottom in the Netherlands. He chose to go to Tenerife, in the Spanish Second Division.

Which meant that he ceased to exist for the German football scene. Only people who knew him personally looked for signs of life from him in the small-print foreign results in
Kicker
. Peter Greiber, Cologne’s goalkeeping coach, sent him a text when he read about a 1–0 win for Tenerife: ‘Well done, clean sheet.’ Robert wrote back: ‘Thanks. Unfortunately I wasn’t in goal.’ Even in the Segunda División he was only a substitute goalkeeper. He wasn’t trusted, since he had resigned in Istanbul after only one game and hadn’t played a match for six months.

In Cologne, Jörg wondered: substitute goalkeeper in a second division – is this the end? He phoned Robert. ‘Come on, man, you’ve got to put the pressure on the number one keeper!’

Robert replied, calm down, it’ll happen.

He sat by the harbour every day and saw things differently from Jörg, from the football scene. ‘Football turns you into someone who always wants more, who’s never content,’ he said. Over the past few months he’d learned to be grateful for what he had.

From the harbour he often went to the pedestrian precinct for a milk-shake. He knew the best ice-cream parlour in town, he said. His pride was impossible to ignore. He alone had explored Santa Cruz, and now he was conducting a guided tour of the town.

Teresa had stayed in Barcelona. She was pregnant, she had the dogs, they thought it wasn’t worth moving, he would only be in Tenerife for half a season, until he found something better – with any luck. It was the same situation as the Turkish experiment. But in Istanbul he had felt lost without Teresa. In Santa Cruz he felt inspired.

He was living in a rented four-room flat near García Sanabria Park. The flat was completely furnished, but it still looked empty. Apart from a satellite dish, still unpacked, on the floor, he had brought no personal belongings, and he had changed nothing: he had even left the paintings, still-lifes of oranges and bananas, hanging on the walls. It wasn’t worth settling in for those few months, he said. On the bed was a thriller by Henning Mankell. In the dishrack, hand-rinsed, were a plate and a glass.

‘It was like being a student for him,’ says Teresa.

Every morning he bought two sports newspapers from the kiosk outside his flat. One day as he let his eye slip over the pages he spotted a familiar photograph. It was on the front page, in the top right-hand corner. He wondered why they had used that particular one – the picture was over six months old. He hardly recognised himself in it.

It was the photo of his presentation at Fenerbahçe – his face red, his mouth open, his expression harassed. ‘Look at that picture,’ he said. ‘I’m not even myself.’ He pulled the page out to keep it. He didn’t want to forget what he had felt like during his depression.

He set the newspapers down on the passenger seat. He had to go to training. The club had put a sports car at his disposal – he had had a clause saying as much added to his contract. On the first day the sporting director Francisco Carrasco had come to him and handed him a car-key. His team-mates laughed. ‘What’s up?’ asked Robert. Carrasco had had to pass his staff car on to him, because it was the only one they had. It crossed his mind that professional football in the Segunda División was only superficially the same job as the one he had been doing for ages. His salary was a tenth of what he had been earning with Barça but he was one of the best-paid professionals in Tenerife’s team.

When his first month’s salary from Tenerife came in, he looked at his statement for a long time. After seven months, another credit in his account. ‘That feeling that money was only ever going out was frightening.’ He hesitated. ‘As a footballer you don’t dare say it, because other people are hit much harder. But the feeling of being out of work is no less bad for a professional footballer than it is for an electrician. You feel worthless.’

Another clause in his contract stated that the club would provide Teresa with tickets for three flights from Barcelona. When he realised how cheap the flight was the first time she came, he was ashamed. A hundred and sixty euros return, and he had made Jörg fight for that stipulation. What must they think of him at the club? CD Tenerife had been fighting for years to be able to pay its professionals a half-decent salary, and he, who was receiving a decent wage, was causing difficulties over less than five hundred euros. After training, when one of his team-mates had to go on some errand, Robert often said ‘Here, take it’ and threw him the key to his car.