A Life Too Short: The Tragedy of Robert Enke (50 page)

There was no training on Monday – one less test, but one day more when he had too much time to think. Teresa helped him get up. Sometimes she had to return several times until he did it. When Jörg was there he pulled open the window, took Robert’s pillow and shouted, ‘Come on, Robbi, you can’t just lie there all day! It’s just your head, not you!’ Usually Robert lay there motionless and said nothing. Once Teresa had got so desperate that she kicked the bed. His room only had two narrow windows: if only they had a brighter house so that he’d find it harder to hide away from the day! He lay in bed and pretended he couldn’t see her.
All
of a sudden, however, he said with despair in his voice, ‘I don’t want to play on Saturday.’ He lay there all morning after that.

Over the next few days the fears competed. The fear of having to play was chased by the fear of being discovered, so he went to training every day. On Thursday the reporters asked him if he was going to be in goal against 1 FC Cologne. ‘I’ll have to discuss that with the coach.’ They had seen the training session and wrote that it could be assumed Robert Enke was returning to the team.

On Friday the team was due to set off for Cologne after morning training. Teresa was playing with Leila in the nursery when Robert came downstairs.

‘How are you today?’

‘I can’t play. Take a look at my thigh. There’s nothing there now, all the muscle mass has gone.’

She had already heard this line thirty times, and thirty times she had answered, ‘Robbi, you’ve been training all the time, your legs are as strong as ever. It’s not over!’ This time she answered, ‘Look, there’s no point in any of it any more. Let’s go to the clinic.’

For a moment he said nothing. Then he just said, ‘OK,’ and sat down with Leila on the fluffy carpet.

He wanted to check in at the private clinic in Bad Zwischenahn Valentin Markser had recommended. Teresa fetched the clinic’s brochure and phoned Markser.

‘We’re doing it,’ she said.

Markser asked how Robert was. Then he said he would call senior consultant Friedrich Ingwersen at the clinic, and call her back.

Meanwhile, she rang Jörg.

‘We’re going to the clinic.’

Jörg was surprised by his reaction: he was relieved. ‘OK, but make sure that you’ve left the house when it goes public.’

Teresa had to go to the bathroom before they left. She managed to hold back the tears until she had closed the door
behind
her. That was the end of the dream that they would get their lovely former life back. It was over.

And a moment later – or was it the same one? – she thought: at last it’s over.

Valentin Markser rang back. Dr Ingwersen wasn’t at the clinic today but he’d made some enquiries and another doctor would welcome them: he was waiting for their phone-call. Teresa jotted down the doctor’s name.

Then she wondered out loud: ‘But we should also call the youth welfare office before they find out from the newspaper.’ What would they say if it was discovered that Leila’s adoptive father had to be treated for depression? Could they take his daughter away from him? He had too many other anxieties to have to worry about that as well. Robert dialled the number of the youth welfare office without hesitating. Teresa had insisted on him making the phone-call because she knew there’d be no going back as soon as the lady from the adoption agency was informed. Then he couldn’t suddenly turn round on the way to Bad Zwischenahn.

Her colleague wasn’t there, an unfamiliar woman’s voice said on the phone, did he want to leave a message?

‘No, thanks.’

After he had put the phone down, an acrid smell hit Teresa’s nose.

‘What’s that?’

‘I’m sweating so much.’

‘Shall I call them?’ she asked, and waited for him to hand her the clinic’s telephone number.

‘Not quite yet.’ He wanted to go to the bathroom first, to wash.

Two minutes later he came charging back into Leila’s nursery, stripped to the waist. ‘I’m going to the stadium now! I’m playing tomorrow!’

‘Robbi, look at yourself, you can’t possibly play.’

‘I’m playing!’

‘At least let’s call Valentin and Jörg again.’

Dr Markser wanted to talk to him. Immediately Robert’s
voice
was calm, his reasoning sensible. He wanted to try again. He would keep the clinic option open. Markser couldn’t force a man who said clearly that he wanted to play football, and who denied having any suicidal thoughts, to go to a clinic.

‘You still have the option of Robbi dropping out before the game,’ said Jörg. ‘In that case he should just pretend he’s pulled a muscle during the warm-up.’

Robert got dressed.

‘I’m off then.’

‘What? On your own? You can’t do that, Robbi.’

Teresa rang Markser again. He couldn’t go on his own, under any circumstances, Dr Markser agreed.

They left Leila with the housekeeper and were soon on their way. Teresa phoned Markus Witkop, the physiotherapist, from the car. Robert could pull a muscle whenever he liked, at the final training session today, during the warm-up tomorrow, during the game or, as far as he was concerned, even in the hotel, said Witkop. He would do his bit to make sure the truth didn’t come out.

Teresa waited in the car during training so that the reporters didn’t get suspicious. She didn’t dare go into town, because what if he dropped out during training and she wasn’t nearby?

Hannover 96 practised their corner-and free-kick variations, and at the end the coach let the team play freely for ten minutes so that they could let off a bit of steam. On the way back to the changing-rooms Robert trotted along with Hanno Balitsch, some distance behind the rest of the team.

‘Hanno, I can’t play tomorrow.’

‘What do you mean you can’t play tomorrow?’

‘My legs are tired. I can’t lift myself off the ground.’

‘Robs, you’ve just saved three balls in training that no one else in Germany could have saved, and you’re trying to tell me you have no strength in your legs?’

‘I can’t feel myself jumping. I can’t feel anything at all.’

‘Then just play tomorrow without feeling in front of fifty thousand people. You’ll do brilliantly in spite of everything.’

From the car, Teresa saw him coming towards her.

‘I’m going with the team,’ he said.

The players were travelling by train to Cologne. They walked through the main station with their headphones on. Robert grabbed himself a single seat by the window.

Tommy Westphal was startled. ‘Have you forgotten me?’

Robert always sat beside Hanno on the bus and beside Tommy on the train.

‘Oh, right, no,’ Robert replied, with no intention of moving to a pair of seats.

He looks tired, Westphal thought, I expect he wants a bit of peace. For a moment he recalled something that had surprised him during the week. A third of the way through the season, Robert had given fifteen or twenty pairs of his gloves to his fans. He usually did that only in the winter or summer break, when he knew a new delivery was coming in. He could have asked Robert what lay behind this action, but now he had to find another seat. Well, OK, Tommy thought to himself, perhaps he got a new delivery of gloves in October for some reason.

Once Robert had left, Teresa wondered what she should do.

‘You don’t need to go to Cologne especially,’ Jörg said to her. He would call in at the hotel later; until then Hanno and Witti were by Robert’s side.

‘But I think it’s worse for me if I’m not in Cologne,’ Teresa said.

That evening in the hotel, Tommy saw Robert sitting in the lobby with Teresa, Jörg and Markus Witkop. Of course, he thought to himself, Jörg lived in Cologne and Teresa was probably using the game as an opportunity to visit Jörg and his wife Tina. They’d recently had a child as well, if he remembered correctly. Tommy tried in vain to make eye contact with someone in the group, then walked on. They seemed to be deep in a serious conversation.

‘Look, I’m really sorry to drag you into this too,’ Robert said to Witkop.

‘No problem.’

‘But you’ll get into trouble if it comes out.’

‘I’d like to do it for you.’

Anyone in the football business with a hint of sensitivity is tormented by a bad conscience because he doesn’t see his wife and children for so many evenings and weekends. For Jörg Neblung, that Saturday, 31 October, was one of the days when he really didn’t want to leave Tina on her own under any circumstances. He had planned for them to move house that day.

While Jörg was unpacking boxes in his new home, Sebastian Schmidt, a colleague from his agency, went to the football with Teresa. An hour before kick-off they had no idea whether Robert was about to run out on to the pitch or whether he would be overwhelmed by fear in the changing-room.

‘I need a glass of sparkling wine,’ said Teresa.

He appeared on the pitch for the warm-up. He looked concentrated and powerful in his tight black tracksuit. His face was fuller again, from all those pizzas and sweets. Anyone who knew him, and who looked carefully, wondered why he apathetically let some of Sievers’s balls go straight past him.

A quarter of an hour before the whistle the teams went back to the changing-rooms to put on their shirts. The coach said another few words – pass the ball calmly back and forth in defence, better to pass it back rather than riskily forward. Under their new coach, Andreas Bergmann, Hannover had climbed to eleventh place in the Bundesliga. They were back where they belonged.

The players took up position in the corridor outside the changing-rooms. Outside on the pitch a row of red-skirted cheerleaders waited for them. The stadium announcer had put on the club song. There were Cologne fans ‘in Rio, in Rome, in Gladbach, Pr
ü
m and Habbelrath’ sang De Höhner, ‘the chickens’, a popular local band. The fans waved their red and
white
scarves, and when it grew quieter the referee marched out.

As captain, Robert stood directly behind him. In his right hand he carried his gloves, in his left he held the hand of a black-haired boy who had been chosen as mascot for the game. Just as the referee started moving, Robert jerkily twisted his head to the right as if to rest it on his shoulder. It was the same movement that had told Teresa ten years ago in that shopping-centre in Lisbon that the fear was inside him.

The captains had to go to the centre circle.

‘White or yellow, Herr Enke?’ asked the referee, Helmut Fleischer.

‘White.’

The referee threw the coin in the air and caught it again.

‘White!’

Team captains have normally thought for a long time before hand about which half they would like to start in. Robert looked frantically behind him at one goal, looked ahead to the other goal, grabbed his nose and said, ‘Ermmm …’

Five seconds later Fleischer was looking at him in amazement.

‘We’ll stay where we are,’ Robert said at last.

‘Fine!’ said the referee cheerfully.

Helmut Fleischer, an orthopaedist with the army in F
ü
rstenfeldbruck, blew his whistle and two completely different games began. Forty-five thousand people watched Robert Enke in goal again in an ordinary Bundesliga clash after some sort of infection. Teresa and Sebastian watched Robert starting the riskiest game of his career.

One of the side-effects of his anti-depressants was that they slowed down his reactions. How could a man under the influence of these drugs play in goal in a Bundesliga game? Could a man who found the question ‘Three or six roses?’ overtaxing at a florist’s stall decide, when a cross came into his area at speed, whether to run out or not? Could a patient who no longer has enough concentration to form complex sentences stay on high alert for ninety minutes of top-flight football?

Less than half a minute had passed, without a single Hannover player having got anywhere near the ball, when Lukas Podolski abruptly launched the ball long and low into the Hannover penalty area from over forty yards out. Robert ran towards the ball. A split-second later forty-five thousand people muttered with disappointment because Enke had blocked the through-ball without a Cologne striker getting anywhere near it. Teresa and Sebastian yelled with enthusiasm. It was an everyday feat for a goalkeeper, but it was impossible to ignore how quickly and resolutely he had run out to collect that pass. He’d hardly had time to think, which was his good fortune. A goalkeeper’s instinct, trained over twenty years, had made his decision for him.

But could he keep his concentration?

Slowly and carefully, Hannover moved the ball around their defence, and when Cologne had the ball they did exactly the same. As soon as the game took off in midfield both teams made crude mistakes. Sometimes Hannover showed a bit of spirit. Cologne, on the other hand, were revealed as a team without an even vaguely passable concept of attack. In the most banal way they kept trying to pass the ball through into the free space behind Hannover’s defence. Robert had to run out several times to intercept harmless through-balls. Teresa and Sebastian cheered every time he collected the ball. What’s up with them? said the expressions of their neighbours on the terraces.

At last Podolski energetically broke through on the left wing; Robert came out again and safely gathered the ball. Forty-five thousand people were watching a goalkeeper putting in a solid performance.

Anyone who knew about his illness, though, could tell that he wasn’t quite right. He had been standing by the near post waiting for Podolski’s cross – not, as he had recently started doing, more in the middle of the goal. His instinct was unspooling movements he had made his own since boyhood; for more complicated manoeuvres he lacked both attention and strength. Teresa saw him repeatedly tensing his body when the ball was
far
away in the other half of the pitch. He was using up an incredible amount of energy just to guard against losing his concentration.

After thirty-seven minutes Jan Rosenthal put Hannover 1–0 up. The goal changed nothing. Cologne continued to pass the ball long and badly. They couldn’t think of anything else to do. One corner for Cologne, and then it would be half-time.