A Life Too Short: The Tragedy of Robert Enke (37 page)

It soon transpired that a coach who articulates his thoughts clearly can change a team in a week. Nothing is harder in football than simplicity, but when Dieter Hecking explained his ideas on defence everything that had seemed like a failure for weeks was suddenly clear and simple. Hannover 96 controlled the game in Wolfsburg. Brdaric´ put them 1–0 ahead, but Wolfsburg equalised straight away. Teresa had turned on the television at home, and when the other team scored she automatically caught her breath. There was nothing Robert could have done, she persuaded herself as she watched the replay. Brdaric´ scored again. Hannover had won their first game of the new season. Teresa went to sleep easily that night.

At eight o’clock the next morning Robert went to the clinic. Lara had thrown up a bit but everything was under control, everything was fine, the nurse said. They wanted to keep turns watching over Lara, Teresa in the afternoon, Robert at night. Lara slept, still exhausted from the anaesthetic. Robert read the papers. ‘No one in Hanover’s interested in Neururer any more,’ said the double goal-scorer Brdaric´ in the
Hannoverische Allgemeine
. Robert wasn’t mentioned. It had been the best game for a goalkeeper; he hadn’t had much to do all night. Teresa went jogging in the fields. In the afternoon she took over from Robert. He drove to Empede and watched the football. Bayern were actually losing in Bielefeld, Hamburg were also about to be defeated again in Dortmund – what they really lacked was an outstanding goalkeeper. By the winter break he would decide whether he would go or stay in Hanover.

‘Everything’s fine,’ Teresa said to him when he arrived for
his
night-watch session, ‘but try to give her a bit more food. I didn’t get much fluid into her.’ Lara was already eating small things like a spoonful of porridge. Solid food like a bit of bread she generally just put in her mouth and then spat out again – she didn’t yet know that you could swallow things like that. Sometimes her parents gave her a red lollipop and she sucked away on that for ages. This time Lara only sucked on the lollipop twice before giving it back to Teresa. Was that a sign that her recovery from the operation wasn’t going well? Or was it just the normal moods of a child?

That evening in Empede Teresa made herself a pizza. She thought: good, we’ve got the implants out of the way. What would it be like when Lara could finally talk to them?

In the clinic Robert tried to give her food artificially via the probe, but Lara wasn’t ingesting much of it. He wasn’t too worried. At least she’d eaten something.

At about ten o’clock Teresa called him. Everything’s fine, said Robert. Lara was asleep.

He was allowed to spend the night in his daughter’s room. After an hour or so he heard Lara tossing and turning. He put his hand on her to calm her down. Her body was cold. To busy himself, just to do something, he tried to give her some food via the probe again.

At midnight he called night duty. She might be in pain from the operation, the duty doctor said, and gave her a painkiller. Both she and Robert fell asleep. At about five he woke up. A nurse was standing next to Lara’s bed fiddling with the pulse oximeter. The gauge was at zero. Presumably the sensor was broken, the nurse said. Her movements were urgent yet calm. They changed the sensor. The new one couldn’t find a heartbeat either. The nurse frantically tried to revive Lara. She called the duty doctor. The duty doctor called for the senior physician in charge of the intensive care ward. ‘Who is it?’ the senior physician asked. Lara Enke. She was perplexed. Lara had been stable that afternoon. The nurse sent Robert on to the balcony. He tried to call Teresa. She had left the phone in the kitchen and didn’t hear it ringing
in
her sleep. He dialled the housekeeper’s number and told her, please, drive to Teresa quickly and wake her up. It was a quarter past five in the morning on 17 September 2006. ‘Lara’s gone,’ Robert said repeatedly into the phone, ‘Lara’s gone.’ Then everything went black.

At six, Teresa was about to enter the clinic by the back entrance so that she could get to Lara’s room more quickly. She found Robert outside Lara’s door, lying on the pavement.

‘On the way back from the clinic we immediately said to each other: life goes on. That was our slogan,’ says Teresa. That was their attempt.

The car radio was already broadcasting the news: Robert Enke’s daughter dies. The cause of death seemed to be sudden heart failure. They called family and friends. Everyone said how composed Robert and Teresa sounded. They told everyone, please, don’t come to Empede. They wanted to be alone together.

They laid out Lara at home. The children of the village came to visit her one last time. In the silence one little girl said, ‘What will happen to all her lovely toys?’ Teresa was pulled up short by the innocent cruelty of childhood. It was so easy for children, they just carried on playing. Robert stood next to her as if under anaesthetic, as if he were no longer there.

At the funeral service the day after Lara’s death, for which they asked everyone to wear white, Teresa noticed that something was gnawing away at him.

‘So, training tomorrow – better not?’ he asked, his voice still too fragile to form a whole sentence.

‘Of course, Robbi!’

‘You think?’

‘Of course, if it helps. Football is part of our life. Make sure you go back to everyday life.’

‘And the weekend?’

‘Play.’

‘Yes?’

‘Robbi, whether you play this Saturday or next, it doesn’t
change
anything. It’ll be harder for you to come back the longer you wait.’

On Tuesday, two days later, Robert turned up for training. He dragged a silence behind him: wherever he went conversations dropped away; a mute bubble formed around him. He didn’t sit down in the changing-room. He had something to say to them, he said. Most of the players stared at the floor. ‘As you know, Lara has died. Please, don’t be stand-offish, talk to me openly if you have any questions. Just be perfectly natural about her death.’ He seemed commanding, grounded.

‘It was a moving performance,’ says Tommy Westphal, his friend, the team assistant. ‘But no one asked him about Lara. No one from the team could say a thing to him that went beyond normal sympathy. I had the feeling his team-mates found it harder to deal with the situation than he did.’ How were they to go on talking to each other when Robert was among them? Were they even allowed to go on laughing on the training-ground?

It was no easier for their parents and friends. How were they to express their sympathy and support if Teresa and Robert didn’t want to see anybody?

Robert’s mother escaped to the mountains around Jena. It was a beautiful day, the day after Lara’s death, the third-last day of that fairy-tale summer of 2006. Gisela Enke remembered to drink a large amount of water before she set off. She marched more than she walked, as if she could outpace the news. At some point she tripped on the mountain path. She didn’t try to get up; she felt she wouldn’t be able to do it anyway. Just lie where you are, Robert’s mother said to herself, no one will come by anyway.

Back at home she wrote a letter to Robert and Teresa. She pretended it was Lara who was writing. ‘You remember, Papa, when I spat out my food and covered you from head to toe? You couldn’t bring yourself to laugh that time.’ When Robert and Teresa read the letter they couldn’t help crying, and that did them good.

The next Saturday his father was suddenly standing in front
of
him. Robert was lining up in the changing-room corridor before the game against Bayer Leverkusen. His father threw his arms around him. Robert shivered, touched and embarrassed at the same time. He wasn’t keen on the idea that his father had battled his way past all the stewards to the sanctum of the stadium: ‘I’m Robert Enke’s father, please let me through, I’ve got to get to my son.’

The referee blew his whistle. Six days after Lara’s death, Robert performed strongly in a Bundesliga match against Leverkusen that ended 1–1. He alone registered that he had made a few small mistakes.

It didn’t occur to anyone that Lara’s death might topple him back into a depression. In his grief there was hardly any time or room for the idea. And besides, he seemed so composed.

Marco Villa hadn’t been able to attend Lara’s funeral. He was a professional, he had to play football, now for a Serie D club based in a suburb of Naples where a local meat wholesaler had promised amazing salaries. That day Marco played unemotionally. He thought about Lara and scored a goal without noticing what he was doing. Three thousand people in the stadium applauded him. His team-mates came running over to congratulate him and couldn’t understand why he wasn’t throwing his arms up in the air, why he wasn’t beaming from ear to ear. Before half-time, Marco scored another goal. Then he pretended he’d sprained a muscle and got himself substituted. He sat alone in the dark changing-room while the second half carried on outside. He was a striker, and he had just scored for the first time in seven years.

TERESA HAD SOME
photographs stored on her camera that she still hadn’t printed. They were a few weeks old. They showed Robert with Lara by the Maschsee – their last outing together, by the big lake in Hanover. What would they do with those photos now? How could they do anything with those photos?

‘Let’s put them on the wall,’ said Teresa.

He nodded, so that he didn’t have to speak.

They didn’t want to avoid their daughter’s death, they wanted to remember the beautiful moments. But of course that didn’t work every day.

Teresa stopped eating. She helplessly watched herself getting thinner and thinner, feeling no desire for food. He was pursued by questions. Could Lara’s death have been prevented? What if the doctors had operated on only one of her ears? Would her little heart have stood the strain then? ‘We all overestimated her strength,’ he said, without noticing how loudly he was suddenly talking.

The high chair still stood at the kitchen table. They couldn’t simply clear it away. But how, when they saw that chair, could they keep from thinking how empty it was?

But the countless inner breakdowns, most of which lasted no more than a few minutes, led to an unimaginably beautiful insight: pain brought them together. ‘There are moments in life when you feel very powerfully: I’d like to grow old with this person. That’s how it was with Robbi and Terri after Lara’s death,’ says Marco Villa.

They went together to Lara’s nursery. Her name was still on the door in bright magnetic letters, her toys still lay on the
carpet
. They sat down on the floor. Do you remember, they said to each other. Lara wanting the nurse to put on the same sort of baseball cap as Teresa. Lara eating a whole jar of food on her last day.

They didn’t want to avoid their daughter’s death, they wanted to remember the beautiful moments. And on some days they actually could.

Lara’s death was less than two weeks in the past when Robert got some news. For the first time in seven years he had been included in the Germany squad. Could he only ever experience extremes of sorrow and joy? He persuaded himself that he could be proud of his selection: he didn’t need to be ashamed if he felt something like joy. He felt like a robot issuing orders to itself: be glad.

In early October the national team met in Berlin for a training-camp. At the end of the week they would play a friendly against Georgia, and he was to be substitute goalkeeper. The director of media at the German Football Association cautiously asked him how he felt about a press conference. His inclusion after such a long time was obviously newsworthy.

Of course he would do it, said Robert.

But he would have to expect questions about Lara.

He was prepared for that, said Robert.

He hadn’t talked to reporters since her death, which hadn’t been very hard: journalists, even from the tabloids, had reverently kept their distance. Now here he was in Berlin sitting on a podium in front of a hundred of them. He asked if he could say something before the first question. ‘First of all I would like to take the opportunity, in my wife’s name as well as my own, to say thank you to all the incredible numbers of people who have expressed their sympathy to us over the last few weeks. Each individual letter was very welcome, and helped us go on a little further. Please publish that. It’s really important to my wife and me.’

The questions that followed were asked in muted voices. He kept interrupting his answers with a little cough.

‘Lara’s illness forced me to confront life and death,’ he said,
which
is why even before her death he had been preoccupied with the question of what would happen if she died. ‘Things have to go on. Grief can’t defeat you.’

Robert’s performance was one of the most impressive ever experienced at a football press conference, the sportswriters wrote afterwards. Testimony to his enormous strength.

Robert himself didn’t feel enormously strong. He had simply pulled himself together. ‘I was just scared that people would avoid me because they didn’t know how to respond to me. That’s why I tried from the outset to be as natural as possible.’

After two or three months he sometimes spoke about Lara on the phone of his own accord. He had been looking at photographs of her only yesterday, he might say, and ‘in every other picture she was laughing’. But once when we talked about her for a newspaper article – publicly, so to speak – he said, ‘Come on, let’s leave the television on’ (there was a football match on at the time). That way he wouldn’t hear his own words so much. ‘I can’t run away from her death,’ he said. ‘I know I have to come to terms with it.’ Coming to terms, he then said, that sounds wrong now, but he couldn’t think of a better phrase. I knew what he meant, didn’t I? I nodded, and we stared at the television.

Shortly before Christmas their dead daughter put them to the test again. Should they go on living in Empede to be close to her grave, or should they move on? Perhaps they could only really leave the horror behind them by moving away from it. Robert’s contract with Hannover 96 was due to run out in six months. The moment to make the decision had come: stay or go? The options of Hamburg and Leverkusen had fallen through. Through a happy chance, Hamburg SV had suddenly been able to sign up an excellent goalkeeper in the form of Frank Rost. Bayer Leverkusen wanted to try their hand with Butt and the talented Adler in the background. ‘If my goalkeeping coach hadn’t had me, presumably he would have brought in Robert,’ says René Adler. ‘He was always taken with Robert.’ That left VfB Stuttgart, who were on their way to the German championship and were wooing Robert.