A Life Too Short: The Tragedy of Robert Enke (31 page)

Robert apologised to Djukic´ with a raised hand and a faint smile. It looked as if he was no longer treating his own mistakes in a doom-laden way. Of course, the fans thought, an experienced goalkeeper like Enke wouldn’t be driven mad by anything.

It was one of those football matches in which the goalkeeper is reminded of his impotence, that sometimes he can do nothing but wait. In the fifty-third minute Elche’s Nino finally broke through. He shot, putting some elegant spin on the ball with his instep. Robert saved majestically. Tenerife won 2–1, defender César Belli responsible for the goal against. After hesitating on that first cross, Robert had sorted out the nuts-and-bolts work of a goalkeeper and had caught a few half-dangerous shots. His throws were long and punchy, too. There was nothing more he could do.

The sportswriters in Santa Cruz tried to portray him as the great goalkeeper everyone in Tenerife wanted to see. ‘A header from Zárate flew over the goal as if Enke had guided the ball over the bar with a look,’ wrote
El Día
.

The day after the game, for the first time in his life, Robert read five newspapers in one go, all of them reporting on his comeback in one way or another.

He rewarded himself with a day in Barcelona – out in the morning, back in the evening. The second ultrasound scan was imminent, in the twentieth week of pregnancy. You’ll be able to see the child’s hands and head, said friends with children; if you’re lucky you’ll even be able to tell whether it’s a girl or a boy.

A nurse ran the probe over Teresa’s belly and a picture appeared on the screen, white outlines on a night-black ground. It was a girl. It was Lara.

They sat down in the waiting-room. Dr Onbargi would discuss the scan with them in a moment.

Teresa felt as if they had to wait for an extraordinarily long time.

‘Señora’ – Spanish receptionists always pause before they pronounce foreign names – ‘Enke?’

Dr Leila Catherine Onbargi-Hunter, trained at the Northwestern University of Chicago, with a diploma from the American Congress of Obstetrics and Gynaecology, was one of the doctors who gave the Teknon Medical Centre in Barcelona the reputation of a superior hospital. But she had no easy answer
for
the biggest problem all doctors face: how do you pass on bad news?

Teresa was crying when she ran from the room. Robert tried to support her, even though he himself was having trouble maintaining his composure.

Lara had a heart defect. ‘There’s a high probability that the child will die in the womb, but let’s wait another week, then we’ll examine it again.’

Teresa’s phone rang. Outside the hospital palm-trees stood above hedges trimmed into geometrical shapes. An appointment had been arranged with a heart specialist, immediately, Onbargi’s assistant said. Robert’s return flight was leaving in eighty minutes. It was his last chance to be on time for training the next day.

‘Robbi, get your plane, I’ll do this.’

‘I’m not leaving you on your own right now.’

‘Please, we have enough problems. We don’t want to create another one in football because you don’t make it to training. I’d like you to get your plane.’

He phoned her from the airport. The specialist had recommended that the child be taken from the womb as quickly as possible and given a heart operation.

A day later, Teresa wanted to have Dr Onbargi’s diagnosis calmly explained again. But she was worried that she would be so nervous she would misunderstand certain details. She asked a friend to come along to see the doctor. The child didn’t just have a heart defect, said Dr Onbargi, it also had chromosomal damage. They were talking about Turner Syndrome. People with Turner Syndrome are growth-restricted, they have a high risk of deformations of the ear and a short life expectancy.

Teresa flew to Munich to get a second opinion from the German Heart Centre, and, to cover all scenarios, to find out from a gynaecologist how an abortion would be organised. The cardiologist there diagnosed hypoplastic left-heart syndrome. On no account should a premature delivery be induced, as his colleague in Barcelona had suggested – that would be certain death. After the first year of life three heart operations would
be
necessary, then your child will live. Teresa thought he sounded perfectly calm about it.

Turner Syndrome children are of average intelligence, another friend discovered, and hormone treatment from the age of twelve can regulate their growth. Given the possible damage that had originally been mentioned, these were only the most extreme features of Turner Syndrome, and only a very few patients were badly affected by them.

Teresa’s parents and brothers told her she didn’t know what it meant to bring up such a seriously ill child. Robert’s parents told him they would support whatever decision was made.

Robert was sitting on a holiday island near Africa dealing with all these contradictory opinions being delivered to him from a long way away. How was he to estimate how serious things really were for their child? When Teresa reached a decision about what was to be done before he did, he was glad. Aborting or bringing into the world – he no longer had to make the choice, he realised with relief. Now that she had made her mind up he would of course go along with it, because she was the one carrying the child in her belly. It was only a matter of developing the same solid conviction as Teresa.

This was her child, she said. It should live, with all the consequences.

All of a sudden everything seemed very simple. They knew very well that life with a seriously ill child would be difficult, but the difficulties were abstract so long as the child wasn’t there. Still, when they tried to imagine their life, all three of them together, they felt confident that they would manage, somehow.

One sentence sprang back to life, one he had uttered a year and a half earlier, when Kaiserslautern didn’t want him and Barça rang up: ‘Clearly nothing works normally for me.’ We had laughed at the time.

While he was worried about his child’s life he was ‘reborn as a goalkeeper’, says Lobo Carrasco. Club Deportivo Numancia from the little town of Soria, named after the Numantians who
bitterly
resisted the Romans 150 years before the birth of Christ, came to Santa Cruz as division leaders and went home defeated. Robert made three saves that made the eleven thousand fans in the terraces leap to their feet. ‘People fell in love at first sight,’ says Carrasco. ‘They acknowledged the goalkeeper that Barça had bought, all the more powerfully after everything he had been through. People were gripped by the idea that someone like that was playing for Tenerife.’

Robert was carried by the feeling of being content in goal. Perhaps he would never again turn out for a big club like Benfica or Barça, perhaps he would end his playing days in the Segunda División, but he now knew exactly what he wanted to be like as a goalkeeper, and if he came close to this ideal he would be glad, regardless of which level he was playing at. He had, in the middle of his career, found his style.

He had always taken his bearings from others: in Mönchengladbach from Uwe Kamps, who stuck to the goal-line, who wanted to be spectacular, who dived and punched; in Barcelona he had been driven crazy by Frans Hoek with his cries of
Further forward! Your foot! Van der Sar!
‘That was what annoyed me most, that I let him persuade me that I couldn’t do anything.’ He had always watched his colleagues very closely. Kamps, Bossio, Bonano, Valdés – he could learn something from all of them, even from Álvaro Iglesias, who had for a long time played only in Segunda B but whose positioning at corners and crosses was excellent. Playing abroad enriched him. Robert had noticed that in Germany, the self-appointed country of goalkeepers, he had grown up in the nineties with a very quirky theory of goalkeeping – lurking on the goal-line, exaggerated punches, holding on to the front post for crosses, storming out when the striker advanced on his own, training that was aimed at power endurance. The new goalkeeper was more influenced by the Argentinian school – standing motionless in front of the striker in one-on-one situations, and kicking out of hand sideways-on instead of chest-on. Argentina’s goalkeeper Germán Burgos had even invented an exercise to suppress the human reflex to turn the face away
in
response to shots from a short distance: the goalkeeping coach tied Burgos’s hands behind his back and shot hard at him from close range; all Burgos had to do was parry the ball with his face, again and again. Sometimes his nose broke. Robert learned more from an Argentinian, Roberto Bonano, than from anyone else. He improved his body posture in a duel with a striker after seeing Bonano: he no longer did the splits but, like Bonano, stayed upright, standing frozen in front of the striker, though he kept one knee bent inwards – his trademark – so that the striker couldn’t shoot between his legs. Other goalkeepers couldn’t spring powerfully off the turf with a knee turned inwards. He became a master in the art of stopping strikers in face-to-face situations. From the groin down his pose was still Enke, from the hips up it was Bonano.

But he didn’t want to imitate anyone any more. For the first time he could clearly see what was good for him and what was unsuitable. So in Tenerife he screwed together from all the individual parts he had collected over the years the goalkeeper who would be a model to many others. He placed soberness, calmness, at the heart of his game. He positioned himself clearly further in front of goal than Oliver Kahn, the spectacular saver, but not as far forward as van der Sar, the eleventh outfielder. He wouldn’t hurry out at every cross, as Hoek had demanded, as the next generation of goalkeepers was already learning to do, not least in Germany. Even Álvaro placed himself in the middle of the goal for crosses, three or four yards in front of it, while Robert stood closer to the near post and the goal-line. ‘Robert, it’s too far from there to the back post; when a cross flies over there you won’t be able to get to it.’ He knew Álvaro was right, but this conservative positional play had been a part of his approach to goalkeeping since childhood; he felt secure with it, so he would keep it and leave some crosses to the back of the box to the defenders. But when he did come out for a cross, he caught it safely.

Robert Enke was the mid-point between Kahn and van der Sar, between reaction and anticipation, between conservative play and risk. The middle way often seems boring and is usually sensible.

CD Tenerife, on the brink of relegation when Robert started with them, no longer lost. ‘There are a lot of footballers who have individual significance, and there are a few footballers who have significance for the collective,’ says Lobo Carrasco. ‘Robert belonged to the second category. Before then we were a featherweight team, with him we developed a different mentality, a different inner conviction.’

It’s only two degrees in Madrid and between his fine light-blue shirt and his jacket Carrasco is wearing a kind of polyester tracksuit jacket. On him even that looks fashionable. ‘Just one moment, please,’ he says, and takes out his laptop. He’s writing a book, he says, about a boy who moves into professional football and talks about his experiences. He has a lot of respect for writing, and reads a lot to get better. ‘I’ve built Robert into the book. Because he showed us what a footballer ought to be like.’ He runs his index finger over the laptop screen. Suddenly it’s no longer clear whether he’s speaking freely or reading from a script. ‘In Tenerife, Robert, polite, sensitive in his seriousness, showed us that things can be sorted out when someone rebels against a failure, against an injustice. And how he rebelled against what had been done to him at Barça.’ Carrasco is moved by his own words. ‘If he had had a coach at Barça who had told him after Novelda, “Hang on, you will continue to be my number one, I trust you,” in Barcelona he would have become the player we saw in Tenerife.’ Carrasco, who has worked in professional football for three decades, folds his hands behind his head. ‘In my life I haven’t seen ten goalkeepers with Robert’s potential. He was like a bull. But our life is determined by who we meet at which point in time. If a goalkeeper happens to work with a coach who eliminates him after just one mistake, the damage is done, and that’s psychologically terrible.’

Carrasco hasn’t ordered a coffee or a glass of water. He spends his morning break without a drink. ‘I can’t help remembering that he gave the other goalkeepers gloves – what a magnificent gesture. As if he were saying to his opponents: I’m giving you the same weapons.’

The screen of Carrasco’s laptop is still glowing. ‘It’s the Thursday after Robert’s death’ it says in the middle. ‘I haven’t been able to write since then.’

In Tenerife Robert developed a new awareness of distance. He wasn’t just geographically far away from his previous life, some 2,236 kilometres south of Barcelona, it also felt a long way away. He read the news in the sports papers from the same perspective as the dockers next to him in the café. He had become an outsider. Once he discovered by chance that Timo Hildebrand had mentioned his name in an interview. In 2004 Hildebrand was the rising star among German goalkeepers; he had just set a Bundesliga record: 884 minutes without conceding a goal. You have to think very hard about switching to a big foreign club, said Hildebrand, otherwise you could end up like Robert Enke, who went abroad far too young.

He should have been annoyed about this simplistic way of looking at things. In fact he was glad that Hildebrand remembered him.

When Barça played, he went to a hotel bar to watch the game on satellite TV. The television in the rental flat only received the handful of Spanish terrestrial channels. When she paid a visit, Teresa was pleased to note that he hardly ever watched football on television now. He was proud that he had discovered the hotel bar as a place to do so – a habit, more of a ritual, that he came up with all by himself. The word ‘routine’ has a bad sound to it, but for him it was vital. Something to cling on to.

He watched Barça in a UEFA Cup match. They quickly took the lead, then made it 2–0. It got boring. He got fixated on the man in front of him, who was forever picking his nose. ‘Is that disgusting or what? Look!’ What did he feel when he watched Barça on television? ‘Nothing at all. I never had the feeling of being a part of it.’