A Life Too Short: The Tragedy of Robert Enke (49 page)

He had done it. They had done it. Teresa couldn’t quite believe it, but she was ecstatic. She had had to live with his gloominess for two months, all the moods and injustices of a depressive. She had made an effort to react patiently to his endless complaints, even when she thought her patience was exhausted. Scientific studies showed that divorce rates in marriages with a depressed partner were nine times as high as non-depressive marriages. And they were about to survive again.

On the third day after returning to training he was still well. On the fourth he came back from training with three roses. Before he gave her the flowers, he recited a poem he had written himself. It was about the two Robbis: one Robbi loved her very much, the other one could no longer show it.

The act of buying the roses had reminded him, however, that the illness was still slumbering within him. When the florist had asked him how many roses he wanted he hadn’t been able to answer. Three or six? It hammered away in his head. Three or six? He didn’t know how long it was before he said in a panic, ‘Three, please.’

On the morning of the fifth day he didn’t feel like training. He had an appointment with the fitness trainer in the gym. The team were at the hotel; they were playing SC Freiburg that afternoon. He called Edward Kowalzuk and said he would rather skip training today, he wasn’t feeling so good. Not a problem, said the fitness trainer. You didn’t contradict Robert Enke at Hannover.

It’s a test, Robert said to himself, to see how he was if he didn’t compulsively structure his day from start to finish.

That afternoon, on the way to the stadium, he wondered, why didn’t I go to training? How am I ever supposed to be a good goalkeeper again if I don’t train? It’s too late – I haven’t trained now and I’ll never be able to catch up.

At the stadium he went to the changing-room to wish the team luck. He also looked in on the treatment room. Something had changed. His photograph on the wall had disappeared. One of the physiotherapists had stuck a poster of the substitute goalkeeper Florian Fromlowitz over it – just a small gesture, to give the young man a boost before the difficult task that lay ahead of him. Robert said nothing and left the room.

He sat down in the terraces. It was a while before kick-off and he didn’t want anyone to talk to him, so he picked up the match programme to use it as a shield. He flicked through it and stopped at the cartoon. Fromlowitz was shown as a human brick wall standing in front of a goal.

What was this? Had they totally written him off here? Did everyone suddenly think Fromlowitz was the number one goalkeeper?

Hannover won 5–2. Fromlowitz played decently, and Robert took the cheers of the fans as an insult to him. Did no one need him here any more? Had they already forgotten him? Was he a face from history that you could just stick a different face over?

In Empede, Teresa tried to catch him out with logic. It was understandable enough that the physios should try to build up the substitute goalkeeper: it wasn’t aimed at Robert. And it wouldn’t occur to anyone that Fromlowitz was a rival. As soon as he came back he would be playing again.

‘You’re right,’ he said, but the abrupt movement with which he turned away told Teresa that she could no longer reach him with logic.

She hoped things would be better the following morning. Maybe it had just been a bad day.

In the past, when she woke up on a Sunday morning Teresa
had
often experienced a feeling of dread in the second or so it took her to get her bearings: ‘What happened yesterday, did they win or lose?’ She knew the answer would determine how nice Sunday was. Now that same dread ran through her again, but with a slightly different question: what mood would Robert be in when he woke up?

He didn’t feel bad, but he didn’t feel good either.

Over the next few days he didn’t want to get up again in the morning. Teresa would lie just to get him out of bed: ‘I have such stomach pains, could you please look after Leila for ten minutes?’

He fought his way through the days, but a fear had returned, the original fear: the fear that all fears would return.

The following Saturday he went to Cologne to see Valentin Markser, as he did on almost all his free days. Russia versus Germany was on TV, the second leg of the World Cup qualifier. It was almost exactly a year since the first leg, before which he had fractured his scaphoid bone. Again he sat in front of the television, again René Adler played outstandingly, again the commentator hyped René. With the 1–0 victory Germany qualified for the World Cup in South Africa, which was to be the highlight of his career. The television pictures showed a jubilant German team triumphantly thrusting their fists into the air. Robert felt as if the fists of his happy team-mates were punching him in the face.

Four days later he pulled out of a training session.

He slipped back into the past. He couldn’t stop thinking about those four or five bright days in late September. Why had he suddenly been alive again then, and why, above all, had the illness come back after that? What had he done wrong to allow the darkness to take him by surprise again?

‘It’s over, Terri. I had the chance to get out of it and I missed it.’

‘Robbi, imagine for example that you’re moving to Lisbon and you haven’t done a language course first. You don’t say, it’s too late, I’ll never be able to learn Portuguese.’

‘Brilliant example.’

‘It’s not over yet! You got better for a while. That only suggests that you will soon be really better.’

She often went with him to training now. The important thing was that he didn’t feel lonely. Above all he was to be left unsupervised as little as possible.

The goalkeeping coach put each of his three keepers through the wringer in turn. Teresa went and stood on the sideline, virtually level with the goal; the pensioners who came every day stood closer to the halfway line. The coach volleyed the ball at the left-hand corner of the goal, and as soon as Robert had stopped the ball he had to get up again and jump across to save a shot into the right-hand corner. Three repetitions, then it was Fromlowitz’s turn. When she noticed that Robert was losing his concentration as he waited, and hanging his head, she gave the advertising hoardings a quick kick. He felt the sound rather than heard it, and looked over at her. She clenched her fist. Concentrate. Fight.

After two such visits the sports journalists were on the phone to Jörg. Why was Frau Enke always coming to training?

She didn’t dare go after that. But because she couldn’t leave him alone with his thoughts for that half-hour car journey every day she continued to drive in with him. Sometimes she went to the museum, sometimes she waited in the car, for maybe two hours.

That wasn’t the end of it. In the afternoon he also had to be kept busy; he must have no time to brood. She persuaded him to go to the zoo with her and Leila. There he saw a ten-year-old child arguing with its parents, and had a sudden fear of the future. ‘How are we going to manage, with the house, with the dogs, and when Leila’s bigger?’ In the evening she gave him a picture-book about the Hanover region. ‘Choose a place where we can all go for an outing,’ she said. One of the dogs chewed up the book after it had lain unused for days beside Robert’s bed.

16 October 2009. The team is going to Frankfurt, and I don’t think I’ll ever go with them again
.

It was in that mood that he received a message from Teresa to say his mother was coming.

Gisela Enke had, like the other members of the family, stuck to Robert’s request to leave him in peace. In her family, this kind of reservation was considered simple good manners. But his mother had had enough. She hadn’t spoken to or seen her
sick
son for almost two months. She simply told Teresa to say that she was coming, not for him but for Leila. ‘I want to see my grandchild.’

30. Gisela Enke with her son Robert on her back
.

Robert’s mother was already sitting in the kitchen in Empede when he returned from training the next evening. One impulse within him still worked: his mother’s presence relaxed him, as it had done in the past, even if he wasn’t enthusiastic about her visit. She opened a bottle of red wine and he even had a glass with her. There was a certain formality to their conversation because his mother sensed that there was something there she wasn’t allowed to touch. But he made the effort to speak to her, which was more than he did for most people. He even told her a bit about the depths of his illness. When they got up from the table at last it was half-past ten. He hadn’t stayed up as late as that in weeks.

The next morning his mother hugged him. ‘Lovely to have you here,’ he said, and set off for training. When he came back it was as if the previous evening had never happened.

‘Would you like an espresso?’ Teresa asked after lunch.

‘No.’

‘But you always have an espresso.’

‘But not now.’

He wanted to punish himself. He didn’t deserve any beautiful moments, and the day before he had had a glass of red wine, so he had to punish himself all the more.

His mother told his father about her visit.

‘I can’t get through to him,’ said Dirk Enke.

‘Well, then do what I did and just go there.’

‘No, I don’t want to impose. He’s an adult. If he doesn’t want to see me, I have to respect that.’

But in the end his father found a way of getting round his own reticence. His son-in-law had bought himself a new car and it needed to be collected from the Volkswagen factory in Hanover. He could do that, said Dirk Enke. He was in the area so could he drop by? he asked Teresa on the phone. She collected him from the station. When Robert opened the door, by way of greeting he said, ‘You’re lucky to find me
alive
.’ He made no attempt to hide his irritation about the visit.

‘Have you actually read
Black Dog
?’ his father asked him at the kitchen table.

‘Of course.’

‘How often?’

‘I’m not enjoying this conversation, I’m going to bed,’ said Robert, and got to his feet. It was just before half-past nine.

‘So we’ll talk again tomorrow?’

‘We won’t talk tomorrow.’ He was already on his way out of the kitchen.

Dirk Enke didn’t need to be a psychotherapist to recognise that depression hadn’t left his son with much of his true personality.

Sometimes Robert startled his team-mates at Hannover 96. Tommy Westphal got curious text messages from him. ‘What time’s training tomorrow?’ ‘When is bed-rest before the game?’ Why did he ask that? Robert knew all those things. Someone like Robert didn’t forget things like that.

Arnold Bruggink, who had played with him now for over three years, was struck that Robert showed hardly any emotions in training.

‘Everything all right, Robert?’

‘Yes, fine, it’s all great.’

When Westphal and Bruggink didn’t get answers from Robert, they started providing their own. Maybe Robert wasn’t getting much sleep because his daughter was keeping him up at night. Perhaps it was nagging away at him that he had lost his position as Germany’s number one.

Autumn rain had softened the pitch, and Robert had blades of grass stuck to his face. Goalkeeping coach Jörg Sievers told him, ‘That was great today, you’ll soon be ready.’ Sievers meant well. Robert panicked. There was no way he could play with his head, and not with his body either. Was he the only one who had noticed how his muscles were wasting away?

‘He wasn’t in perfect physical shape, but he was good enough
for
the Bundesliga,’ says Jörg. ‘He just couldn’t see it any more.’

He was sitting at the kitchen table with a mountain of sweet-papers in front of him. It was his pudding. He had already had an extra-large pizza and a bowl of ice-cream. The new drugs Markser had prescribed for him made him ravenous.

Jörg was sitting opposite him at the table. He couldn’t remember how many times he’d made the trip from Cologne now; he was there for Robert more than for his family. ‘You’ll manage to get off the game against Stuttgart on Saturday,’ said Jörg, ‘but then you’ll have missed five weeks since the bacteria were discovered. The journalists can see how well you are playing every day in training.’

Jörg didn’t say it straight out, but next week Robert would either have to play or reveal the truth.

THE CAR RADIO
came on automatically when he turned the key in the ignition. He let the music play; he wouldn’t hear it anyway. The B6 was free, it was a Sunday morning – nothing to be seen that could prevent the situation he was heading towards. The day before, Hannover had beaten VfB Stuttgart 1–0. The last game in what could credibly be seen as his period of grace had been and gone.

He was on the way to the stadium. Ideally, he would perform really badly at training and then everyone would recognise that he couldn’t play yet. But if he trained badly everyone would ask what was up with him, and then someone was bound to see through him.

And what good would it do him if he managed to get out of the next match? The game after that still awaited him. As far as his fear allowed him to look into the future, Robert saw nothing but tests that he would fail, that he had to fail.