A Life Too Short: The Tragedy of Robert Enke (46 page)

He was wondering: why now? The first clinical depression had hit him in 2003 when he felt worthless with FC Barcelona as a misunderstood goalkeeper. But this time he could see no similar trigger. He never did find a clear answer to the question of why the black thoughts returned that summer, and no one will ever be able to give him an answer.

There were things weighing upon him at that time, of course. He felt the pressure, self-created but multiplied by the media, not to allow himself a single mistake from now on, in the season of his life, if he wanted to be Germany’s number one. The tense situation at Hannover 96, in which as captain he was caught in the middle, was also tearing at his nerves. Lara’s death was ever-present, even though he had come to terms with it as best he could over a period of almost two years – but one can never forget the death of a child. It could be that that burden alone brought the darkness back. But it’s equally possible that his second clinical depression was triggered by something else, perhaps a minor factor that neither Robert nor his psychiatrist nor anyone else could have recognised. Depressions don’t arise according to a pattern. If someone is susceptible to the illness it’s quite possible that he will regularly cope with extremely stressful situations without any difficulty, but at a particular moment will be thrown off the rails by what might appear from the outside to be a trivial or mundane matter.

He thought he knew what needed to be done. He would
have
to get up early in the morning, ideally change Leila’s nappy, not spend long over breakfast, and then get off to training. If he started the day in a structured way, if he did one thing after another, the fear wouldn’t find so much room inside his head. The crucial thing was the morning. He woke up with a fear of the day, and if he stayed in bed even for a minute that fear would take him prisoner.

Hanno Balitsch couldn’t understand it. Robert was constantly biting his lips, and he hardly spoke these days. Even when he was with the other players trotting down the beaten path from the training-ground back to the changing-rooms he seemed strangely stand-offish. His gaze wasn’t focused on anything any more. He looked right through his team-mates.

After training the outfield players kept on their boots, which had short plastic studs, as they jogged the few hundred metres back to the changing-rooms. The goalkeepers, who used long aluminium studs, swapped their boots for trainers, for reasons of comfort. Hanno exploited the opportunity when Robert knelt down on the pitch on his own for a moment to change his footwear.

‘Are you leaving the sinking ship, Robs?’

‘What do you mean?’

Hanno had been wondering about what might be troubling his friend and he had remembered something Robert had recently confided in him: he could be joining Schalke before the start of the Bundesliga if Bayern Munich managed to winkle away Schalke’s goalkeeper Manuel Neuer. Schalke’s coach Felix Magath had once sounded out Robert over such an eventuality.

‘No, nothing happening there,’ Robert said.

‘But something’s bringing you down.’

‘Yes, but I can’t tell you right now.’

‘OK.’

Hanno didn’t ask any more questions. He and Robert had a friendship with clear boundaries. They didn’t talk about private concerns. Hanno had the feeling that ‘Robs wasn’t the type who could cope if you told him private things like, “I’m
having
problems at home at the moment”. He would have felt uncomfortable about that.’

They walked to the changing-rooms together, the only sound Hanno’s football boots clattering on the tarmac of the car park.

At home, Robert said to Teresa, ‘Shit, Hanno’s noticed something.’

In the afternoon he looked for something he could do to prove that he was still in control of things. He cleaned the jacuzzi. He didn’t feel any improvement. Then he got furious: why should cleaning the jacuzzi make anything better? How were things
ever
to get better?

Over dinner, Teresa thought out loud. Perhaps they should tell somebody, at least their best friends, so that he didn’t have to live in a cloak-and-dagger way all the time?

Before training the next morning he asked Hanno if he had a moment.

‘Have you ever had any experiences with depression?’

‘No,’ Hanno replied cautiously, thinking that someone in Robert’s family must suffer from it.

‘I have serious problems with it.’

The term ‘depression’ meant something to Hanno Balitsch, as it does to most people. But on the way home, when he thought about what sort of an illness it was, he realised he couldn’t put his finger on anything concrete at all.

Hanno bought the book
My Black Dog
by Matthew Johnstone. It’s a little picture book in which a young man with a magnificent quiff is pursued by a black dog. When the black dog appears, the man can’t enjoy anything any more; he can’t concentrate on anything, or eat anything, he’s just frightened of the black dog. And he’s so ashamed of his fear that he doesn’t tell anyone about the black dog – which only makes everything worse. ‘Keeping an emotional lie takes an incredible amount of energy,’ says the man in the picture book. ‘How I put my depression on a leash’ is the book’s subtitle.

‘Now I can understand a little bit what Robs goes through,’ Hanno said to Teresa.

She asked him to keep an eye on her husband. It was important that he didn’t stray during training, that he didn’t slip into dark thoughts. ‘If you notice that he’s letting things slide, give him a kick in the backside.’

‘Teresa, much as I’d love to, I can’t have a go at the team captain in front of everybody.’

‘OK, then just push him in a positive direction.’

Hanno Balitsch gazes steadily with clear eyes. He’s convinced that things in life are always best solved straightforwardly, even though this has caused him a few problems in his career. He stopped talking to the
Bild
reporters after he felt they had treated him unfairly; since then he could be sure of a devastating review if he delivered a below-average game. Robert admired Hanno’s openness while at the same time being startled by it. ‘Hanno can be very aggravating for the coach and his team-mates, but also for our opponents,’ he once said. They had immediately got on. ‘Where football was concerned, Robs and I were often of the same opinion,’ Hanno says and smiles, ‘although we usually expressed it differently. I was perhaps often too blunt. I said things to the coach or the sporting director that as a player I shouldn’t have said. Robs could say the same thing and all of a sudden it sounded diplomatic, acceptable.’

It struck Hanno as a little bit strange that he was now giving Robert encouragement and praise for saves in training he had thought were perfectly everyday for four years. But if there’s one thing Hanno can do it’s take things as they are with a shrug. He persuaded Robert to play table tennis with him after training; he took him along to lunch. Once Robert’s mobile rang when he was on his way to the restaurant with Hanno. It was Teresa.

‘I’m going to lunch,’ Robert said to her.

‘Are you alone?’

‘Don’t worry. I’ve got your pit-bull with me.’

A week after the defeat in Trier, Robert travelled to Berlin with the team on the InterCity Express for the first Bundesliga game of the season. As always on train journeys he sat next to Tommy Westphal and went through his club mail. ‘He’s a creature of habit,’ Tommy thought to himself. Robert thought the letters were going to fall out of his hand. He felt so incredibly tired.

Hannover lost 1–0 to Hertha BSC. He had guessed, he had known, that nothing was going to work out any more. Jörg Neblung was watching the game on television in Cologne and thinking the opposite. ‘Amazing how Robbi can play, even in his state!’ His defenders had obstructed Robert’s view a quarter of an hour before the end of the game and he only saw Raffael de Araújo’s long-distance shot when it came flying over their heads straight at his goal, and still he managed to deflect the ball around the post with his fingertips. If he could stop shots like that, his depression couldn’t be all that advanced, Jörg thought to himself. He wanted to tell Robert, ‘Your save was sensational.’

Robert phoned him first. ‘I can’t feel anything any more,’ he said blankly. ‘No nerves, no joy, nothing. I stood out there on the pitch and didn’t care about anything.’

What Robert did still feel was the presence of the black dog. He put his baseball cap back on and went to see Dr Stroscher. For the second time in his life he needed anti-depressants. He was adamant that he wanted the same medicine that had helped him in 2003. By now the drug existed in an advanced version, which was supposed to mean it was more effective. He couldn’t wait too long for it to take effect, he felt.

On 16 August he and Teresa were invited to the Wilkes’ as their younger daughter was turning six. The weather was good enough to have a party in the garden. He felt battered. Everyone was bound to expect him to talk to them, but how could he do that? He didn’t think he could conduct a sensible conversation. He lay down on a lounger and pretended to go to sleep.

Uli Wilke thought, ‘How lovely. He feels so much at home here that he can just lie down and have a nap.’

Teresa, however, was getting impatient. She knew that afterwards he would be racked with self-reproach because he couldn’t even behave normally at a children’s party. That was the trap of depression: it stripped him of the power to do the most normal things, and then the impression that he couldn’t accomplish anything any more dragged him all the more deeply into the illness.

She rested her hand on his shoulder. He stretched on the lounger and pretended to wake up.

‘Come on, let’s play some tennis.’

She pressed a racquet into his hand. He was to hit the ball, and she would try to catch it. She held Leila in one arm as she didn’t want the child to start crying as soon as she set her down, on top of everything else.

Sabine Wilke wondered why Teresa was always answering on Robert’s behalf, why she talked to him as if he were a little child: ‘Come on, Robbi, have a piece of cake, you like cake.’ It was a great effort for him to decide all by himself whether he wanted plum cake or cheesecake. He felt chronically overtaxed by the minimal demands of everyday life. But he manoeuvred himself through the day: he trained, he smiled at the birthday party, he played his part. Doing something, however much energy it took, was still better than giving in to fatigue and having a rest. Because then the thoughts came.

Then he saw three unopened letters in his office and felt that the place was subsiding into chaos. He thought, I just can’t get my papers in order, I can’t do anything any more. He thought, it’s all too late anyway, I’ve done everything wrong already.

There was just a slim margin between the need to be pushed and the danger of being overstretched. And his work at Hannover 96 became an extraordinary strain on his nerves; even for a healthy professional it would have been. President Martin Kind and sporting director Jörg Schmadtke persuaded Hecking that it was best for everyone if he stepped down. The pious wish to start over again after the tensions of the previous
year
had proved illusory after only two Bundesliga matches of the new season. It was 19 August – the same week in which Robert wasn’t capable of making his mind up between two types of cake at a children’s party. Now he was supposed to respond to Hecking’s departure in front of the television cameras, and as captain he was supposed to help the new coach Andreas Bergmann settle in – and he had to deal with the pangs of conscience he felt because they were partly responsible as a team for the fate of their coach.

When Hannover won their first game under Bergmann 2–0, the players in the changing-room at Nuremberg celebrated as if they had avoided relegation. Robert wasn’t there. He had to give one television interview after the other. Nearly half an hour after the final whistle he at last reached the changing-room.

Hanno Balitsch knew what an effort it had been for Robert to face all those reporters. ‘Herr Kuhnt,’ he said to Hannover’s press spokesman, ‘it’s not right for Robs to have to give all the interviews, which means he’s not here when the team celebrates. We’ve got to share out the interviews.’

No one suspected anything. The press spokesman thought what Hanno said was quite understandable: it was important for team spirit that they all celebrate together.

There always seemed to be a logical explanation for Robert’s altered behaviour. Tommy Westphal was struck by the fact that Robert was suddenly turning down all the charity benefits to which he had previously always given so much time. Well, all right, of course he’s going to want to be at home with his little daughter, Tommy said to himself.

On the long bus journeys to away games, Robert gradually told Hanno everything about his black dog. They could chat without fear of being overheard because at least three-quarters of the players had headphones on. Robert told him about his flight from Lisbon, about Novelda, Frank de Boer and Istanbul. Depression kills all positive feelings, he explained to Hanno, ‘suddenly everything strikes you as pointless, hopeless’. It was as if access to his brain had been reduced to a tiny crack
through
which only negative impulses could slip. Non-depressives could rarely grasp the power of depression because they didn’t understand that it was an illness. People wondered why he saw everything in such a negative way, why he couldn’t pull himself together. They didn’t understand that he was powerless in the face of it. He could no longer control it. His brain functions were altered; synapses inside his head seemed to be blocked. He found it hard to concentrate from day to day, but he could talk lucidly and in great detail about his illness.

He wasn’t getting better. On 24 August, his thirty-second birthday, he started crying when his sister Anja rang. For other well-wishers, like Torsten Ziegner, his boyhood friend from Jena, he effortlessly played the part of the cool goalkeeper – ‘I just need to keep on playing well then I’ll be number one in the World Cup’. When his mother wished him a happy birthday, he asked straight out, ‘Mum, have you ever suffered from depression?’