A Life Too Short: The Tragedy of Robert Enke (45 page)

28. Robert and Teresa with their adopted daughter Leila
.

29 April 2009: Leila entered our life at about half-past four! She is a ray of sunshine, and there was a sense of intimacy straight away!

30 April 2009: Leila is at home! Lara has a sister! We’re a family again!

The Bundesliga paid no heed to his paternal joy. The same day he had to set off again, to a hotel in Bochum, to play football the next day. He called Teresa from the hotel at least ten times that afternoon. What was Leila doing? Were her eyes open, those penetrating blue eyes? Had she had anything to drink?

That was a blessing they hadn’t had before: just watching their daughter drink quite normally from a bottle.

He amazed the fans in Bochum. While stretched horizontally in the air he stopped a header by Wahid Haschemian, shots from Mimoun Azaouagh, and more besides. Hannover won 2–0. At their fifteenth attempt they had finally won an away game.
Kicker
raved about ‘Enke in a brilliant mood’ and didn’t realise how precisely the description applied to him.

He got home at half-past two in the morning. His heart was still beating quickly from the exertion of the Bundesliga game. He sat down on the bed beside Teresa and Leila and looked at them for an eternity.
I even got some sleep myself!
he noted in his diary.

Over the next few weeks Hannover drew 1–1 with Frankfurt and beat Karlsruhe 3–2.
Leila remains undefeated
, he concluded.

He called his friends to tell them that he had become a father again. The conversation inevitably turned to his future. ‘The market for goalkeepers in the Bundesliga is closed, nothing’s moving,’ he said. ‘Perhaps the job at VfL Wolfsburg will come up. That would be ideal, then I could stay in Empede and commute. If not, I’ll just stay with Hannover, and I’ll be happy there too.’

Leila changed his view of life. The fuss at the club wasn’t actually all that bad, it suddenly seemed to him. They had a new sporting director in the form of Jörg Schmadtke – ‘I hope
he
can become a balancing element between the team and the coach’.

People valued him at the club, he felt at home, and whether they were eighth or eleventh it wasn’t the end of the world. It was just football.

Since his comeback Robert had played perhaps the best half-season of his career, and he rounded it off in May with a brilliant performance for his country against China.

The season came to an end, and Robert was right: none of the Bundesliga clubs higher up the table was looking for a new keeper. His daydreams about Bayern Munich had been shattered in the strangest way: Bayern’s new coach was Louis van Gaal, his tormentor from Barcelona. He certainly wouldn’t be buying him any time soon. The only one who made Robert an offer was Tim Wiese.

‘Maybe you’ll join Werder after all,’ Bremen’s goalkeeper said to him at a national team training-camp. Robert looked at him and waited for the punchline. ‘If Manchester United sign me.’

Robert smiled, then did a double-take when he saw Wiese’s face: he plainly believed that United were interested in him.

It was summer again. The pressure that had weighed down on him even on training-free days fell away. During the holidays he would start up a conversation with a stranger next to him on a plane, or pose like a fan with a cardboard Benfica player at a shopping centre in Lisbon.

Before visiting Portugal he planned to meet up with Marco in the Rhineland and go to the wedding of Simon Rolfes, a colleague from the national team. At the wedding in Eschweiler near Aachen he spotted René Adler. They immediately started talking, and he didn’t notice as they moved a few metres away from everyone else in the castle garden. They talked about injuries, pressure and Tim Wiese, and at some point – Robert didn’t know how much time had passed – they were entirely free of the feeling that as competitors for the same role they were supposed to keep aloof from each other.

Everyone stressed passionately that he absolutely had to move to a big club abroad, René said, but he was unsure whether he should really go away – whether he was mature enough for that. Robert told him about Frank de Boer, Frans Hoek and Novelda, about his great humiliation. He encouraged René not to let anyone – agents, team-mates or newspapers – force him into a state of mind where he thought he had to go further and higher as quickly as possible. All this desire for the next step obscured for most professionals how well they were currently doing. Perhaps the time would come when René himself felt it was time to go, but until then it was better to enjoy what he had rather than focus on a more prestigious club that might never come in for him.

For René it was the most honest conversation he had ever had with a team-mate. ‘Among Bundesliga professionals you’re always showing off about how strong you are. It was really good to talk to someone about anxieties, about the problems involved in dealing with pressure; problems that torment everyone.’

Afterwards René thought about their conversation, and as he did so he didn’t just become aware that he would have to be certain before he risked the leap to a world-class club. As Robert had advised him, he also called to mind everything he had achieved already. After all he was, at the age of twenty-four, already in the Germany squad. Of course he wanted more – he wanted to be the German number one. And of course he would make a huge effort to ensure he was first-choice keeper for the 2010 World Cup. But there was something else that was equally important: not wearing himself out for the dream. He said to his goalkeeping coach and foster father R
ü
diger Vollborn, ‘If Robbi plays the 2010 World Cup, I’ll have no problem with that. The world won’t come to an end. I’ll sit down on the subs bench and watch what happens next.’

At Simon Rolfes’s wedding Robert went back into the banqueting hall in Haus Kambach and loudly drew in a breath, as he always did when he wanted to say something important. Then he said to Teresa, ‘René’s a really sound guy.’

On holiday in Portugal, after thirsting for action for a few days he started training for the 2009–10 campaign. It was to be the season of his life, involving a friendly duel for the number one position at the World Cup in South Africa. Like René he was confident that he could live with whatever decision Germany’s coaches made. But he was sure in a strange way that he would be in goal in South Africa.

The Portuguese sun had left him tanned. Leila was on a blanket on the terrace. Bare-chested, he was doing press-ups over his daughter, and every time he lowered his body he gave her a kiss.

ROBERT ENKE INVENTED THE
kissing machine. He was sitting on the parquet floor in Jörg Neblung’s house in Cologne, lifting Jörg’s one-year-old daughter Milla gradually into the air with the jerky movements of a robot. ‘I am the kissing machine,’ he said to his godchild and went on bumpily working away until he had hoisted the child up in front of his face. There the machine concluded its programme with a smacker on the chops.

Jörg watched them and thought how great Robert looked. He was wearing a white summer shirt, and his skin was bronze against it. He had interrupted his holiday in Lisbon to play a benefit game in Germany.

‘Again?’ he asked Milla, and the kissing machine started whirring into action.

A month later Jörg saw Robert again. In July he travelled, with the image of the kissing machine in his head, to Carinthia where Hannover 96 were training for the new season. He found a sober-looking goalkeeper.

‘I don’t know what’s up. I’ve been feeling limp all day.’

‘That’s normal, Robbi, you’re getting old.’

He would turn thirty-two in a few weeks.

Jörg tried his best, but they couldn’t really get a decent conversation under way. They got stuck on the usual professional topics: disability insurance, René Adler, and the evergreen question of whether Hannover should play with one or two strikers. ‘This season we’re battling against relegation,’ Robert prophesied. Over the last few years the club had spent millions on players who hadn’t raised the team’s quality or lifted its mood. Now there was no money left for reinforcement, and
Michael
Tarnat, one of the founding fathers of Cabin Two, had ended his career.

Jörg thought that Hannover’s bleak outlook programme might be oppressing Robert.

‘I’m always so tired,’ Robert said to Teresa on the phone.

‘You’re always tired at training-camp.’

Hanno Balitsch noticed that Robert often withdrew to his room in the afternoon while the others stayed on the hotel terrace telling the old stories, like the one about how they’d covered Mille with eggs and feathers two years earlier. The jokes and the shop-talk with his team-mates had always been Robert’s favourite time of day. Often he’d imitated the well-known German television comedy character Stromberg.

Even at training Robert now no longer really seemed to belong to the team. He practised alone a lot with goalkeeping coach Jörg Sievers. The World Cup season had begun and he was working hard on his game. But he still couldn’t understand why he always found it so hard to get out of bed in the morning.

‘The holidays were really stressful as well,’ he said when he rang Marco from his hotel room.

Marco wondered for a moment: how could they have been stressful? When they’d seen each other on holiday in the Rhineland, Robert had told him how wonderful everything was.

‘In the last two weeks in Lisbon I was never properly able to rest. My brother was there, and there were arguments. Sick street dogs were running around the property and we had to take them to the vet, so that was another day gone, and because of the house we were constantly dealing with workmen of various kinds. But I’ll tell you about that in greater detail one day.’

The exhaustion was still with him when he got back from Carinthia. He tried to ignore it.

Andreas Köpke visited him at training in Hanover. The day before, Köpke had been with Tim Wiese in Bremen. A year before the World Cup Köpke wanted to give his keepers
a
few pointers on how they could improve their game. He had put together a DVD of scenes from matches to demonstrate his concept of the ideal goalkeeper. For Robert, one sequence featuring Chelsea’s goalkeeper Petr Cech was particularly interesting. For crosses, Cech stood in the middle of the goal, often a few yards in front of the goal-line; Robert stood much closer to the near post, and to the goal-line. ‘When you’re standing in the middle you can take down crosses aimed behind the goalkeeper or far into the penalty area, where you’d never get to otherwise,’ Köpke explained to him. Álvaro Iglesias, the second division keeper from Tenerife, had said exactly the same thing to him already five years earlier. Now that Germany’s goalkeeping coach had said it to him he tried out Cech’s approach during training.

When he started the season on 2 August with a cup match against the Regionalliga West side Eintracht Trier, Robert was tense. He thought it was normal. But it was starting again.

The Mosel Stadium in Trier had low terraces with light-blue corrugated-iron roofs, and wasn’t even sold out. At half-time Hannover were leading 1–0 and could have had two or three more goals. Trier drew strength from the narrow deficit – everything was still to play for. Excited by playing in the spotlight, the Regionalliga side went for it. A cross flew in towards the edge of the six-yard box in front of Robert. He saw Trier’s Martin Wagner sprinting for the ball and dashed out, spreading his arms to make the goal small. But Wagner had already equalised. No one holds a goalkeeper responsible for a goal like that – just the goalkeeper himself. He had got there too late. Four minutes later the score was 2–1. His defence, confused by the equaliser, had left Robert on his own against two Trier attackers.

There was no getting around it: Trier, a team from the Fourth Division of the German league, was another Novelda. The course of the game was exactly the same, even down to the timing of the first two goals. The fact that Trier won 3–1 rather than 3–2 was neither here nor there.

29. Robert between Hanno Balitsch (rear) and Mikael Forssell (front) at a Hannover 96 training-camp
.

The season was just one game old and Hannover 96 had already lost faith that things could end well for them. For a whole summer the players and Dieter Hecking had made a great effort to persuade themselves that things could work out between them. But this defeat brought out all the destructive thoughts in the team: the playing system with one defensive midfield player and two strikers wasn’t working; they weren’t a real team any more; when would the club finally release them from their coach? Working with them must have been a source of torment for Hecking.

Thoughts raged in Robert’s head, too, and again and again he reached the same conclusion: nothing was going to work out. The black thoughts multiplied, his head grew leaden under their weight, and suddenly it became clear to him just what he had been incubating since July.

He had a moleskin diary in which he recorded his appointments. For Wednesday, 5 August 2009 he wrote
10 and 3.30 pm training
. Immediately after that he now added:
At the moment it’s incredibly hard to be positive. It hit me quite quickly and unexpectedly. Talked to Terri and told her about my need to open up. I know myself that it’s impossible
.