A Life Too Short: The Tragedy of Robert Enke

by Reng, Ronald

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Ronald Reng

  List of Illustrations

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  The Waning Power of Poetry

  One: A Child of Fortune

  Two: The Snap

  Three: Defeats Are His Victory

  Four: Fear

  Five: The City of Light

  Six: Happiness

  Seven: Ever Further, Ever Higher

  Eight: Feet

  Nine: Novelda

  Ten: Thoughts by the Pool

  Eleven: Wrapped in Fog

  Twelve: No Light, Not Even in the Fridge

  Thirteen: The Holiday Island

  Fourteen: There is Robert, There is No Goal

  Fifteen: Lara

  Sixteen: Afterwards

  Seventeen: In the Land of Goalkeepers

  Eighteen: Leila

  Nineteen: The Black Dog

  Twenty: The Cheerfulness of Xylophones Silenced

  Epilogue: The View of the Palace

  Notes

  Copyright

  About the Book

  Why does an international footballer with the world at his feet decide to take his own life?

  On 10 November 2009 the German national goalkeeper, Robert Enke, stepped in front of a passing train. He was thirty two years old.

  Viewed from the outside, Enke had it all. Here was a professional goalkeeper who had played for a string of Europe’s top clubs including Jose Mourinho’s Benfica and Louis Van Gaal’s Barcelona. Enke was destined to be his country’s first choice for years to come. But beneath the bright veneer of success lay a darker story.

  In A Life Too Short, award-winning writer Ronald Reng pieces together the puzzle of his lost friend’s life. Reng brings into sharp relief the specific demands and fears faced by those who play top-level sport. Heartfelt, but never sentimental he tells the universal tragedy of a talented man’s struggles against his own demons.

  About the Author

  Ronald Reng is the highly-acclaimed author of The Keeper of Dreams: One Man’s Controversial Story of Life in the English Premiership (Yellow Jersey Press), which won Biography of the Year at the 2004 British Sports Book Awards.

  Also by Ronald Reng

  The Keeper of Dreams

  List of Illustrations

  7: picture alliance/Sven Simon

  10: Getty Images/Martin Rose

  14: picture alliance/dpa

  16: Silke Witzel

  18: ddp images/AP/Murad Sezer

  24: Getty Images/Vladimir Rys

  21, 26, 27, 29: Ulrich zur Nieden

  1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 11, 12, 13, 15, 17, 19, 20, 22, 23, 25, 28, 30: private individuals

  Through these balmy summer days, which seem made for ease and pleasure, the testing continues: what part is being tested he is no longer sure. Sometimes it seems he is being tested simply for testing’s sake, to see whether he will endure the test.

  Youth, J. M. Coetzee

  The Waning Power of Poetry

  ‘I would like a poem,’ Teresa says, and for a second that lasts an eternity the house falls silent.

  Robert looks quizzically at his wife to see if she really means it. Is he supposed to give her a poem for her birthday? ‘It’d be nice,’ Teresa adds casually, and thinks no more about it.

  But he can’t get the idea out of his head.

  It’s a few years since he last read a poem, let alone wrote one. He tries to remember. A poem, he thinks, has to rhyme; a good poem, he believes, is like a hint of a smile, with delicate humour between the lines. With that idea in his head, Robert starts writing.

  Some afternoons he lies to Teresa, saying he’s going to his office for a while to go through tax documents or to complete some other paper-work. Then he sits down at his desk with a biro and a note-pad. His gaze drifts to the garden. The rear side of his office is one huge window; it gives him a feeling of wellbeing when the sunbeams fall on him in the spring. But now, in the winter, it’s less pleasant at his desk. The heating in the office is unreliable. Their house in Empede, on the flat terrain of Lower Saxony, is a converted farm. His office used to be the stable.

  The words he puts down on the paper look bent and rough – he hardly ever uses his valuable goalkeeper’s fingers to write. But in his head the words start forming rhymes more and more quickly, and he’s filled with joy – not like the flood of happiness he experiences when he steers a difficult shot over the bar, quite gentle, but so intense that Robert has to keep on writing, in the office, in the hotel the evening before a Bundesliga match, on scraps of note-paper, on the backs of bills. Sometimes, if he has no paper to hand, he taps his ideas into his mobile phone. By the time the big day, 18 February 2009, arrives he has written 104 lines.

  He wishes Teresa a happy birthday while they’re still in bed. When she goes to the bathroom he creeps into the hall and lets the dogs out. They have nine of them, and two cats. Teresa rescued them from the streets during their years in southern Europe. On her last birthday she’d wished for a pet pig. He’d decided to take it as a joke.

  He lights candles in the living-room.

  ‘Let’s do the presents this afternoon, when we’ve got more peace,’ says Teresa when she comes in.

  He shakes his head; it won’t take long. He asks her to sit down at the old farmhouse table, just for a moment. As he presses her gently into the chair by her shoulders he can’t help smiling with anticipation. Then he takes his place on the other side of the table.

  He sets his poem down in front of him. But he speaks by heart.

  For your birthday, what will it be?

  A diamond, beautiful to see?

  Perhaps a watch from the jeweller’s store?

  It won’t be cheap, of that you can be sure.

  And what about having a pig for a pet?

  Robbi will put down his foot about that!

  Cats, then, or horses, or maybe a dog?

  No, please, stop it, my head’s in a fog.

  So, for her birthday, what’s it to be?

  Oh no, what she wants is a poem from me!

  It isn’t too big, or too much, or too dear

  Yet the very thought of it fills me with fear.

  Teresa is struck dumb with joy. Verse by verse he presents her with her whole life: the move to Empede, her love of animals, even the death of their daughter Lara, who was born with a serious heart defect and died after an operation at the age of two.

  Then Lara came with her imperfect heart –

  That was something that tore us apart.

  But she was strong, and even in pain

  She still lived up to the family name.

  When he’s finished, Teresa has tears in her eyes. She says only one sentence, ‘Please read it to me again.’

  He starts again, at the beginning, all twenty-six verses, all 104 lines. At the end he says:

  We can’t then help wondering what’ll come next

  Along life’s long journey – it’s got me perplexed.

  Will Grandpa stay, or will he not?

  Are we going to move house? I don’t know a jot!

  I won’t let things become too much of a worry –

  The days soon pass, there is no great hurry.

  Only one thing is certain, and this much is true;

  The one thing is this: that I need and love you.

  Robert Enke is thirty-one, the German national football team’s goalkeeper, strong, good-natured and happy. It will be the last birthday that Teresa celebrates with him.

  On Tuesday, 10 November 2009, he calls �
��Hallo Ela!’ from the kitchen when the housekeeper arrives at nine o’clock. He gives his second daughter, Leila, ten months old, a kiss on the forehead and says goodbye to Teresa. On the magnetic board in the kitchen he has noted in felt-tip pen all the things that need doing, including a reminder to get four tickets for the Bayern Munich game. Then he’s out of the door. He has two individual training sessions today: in the morning with the fitness coach, in the afternoon with the goalkeeping coach of Hannover 96. He’ll be back at about half-past six, as always. That was what he said to Teresa.

  But there’s no training arranged for this Tuesday.

  I get through to him on his mobile in the car just after half-past twelve. I’m to pass on two requests: an English journalist friend of mine wants to interview him, and the German Olympic Sport Library wants to invite him as guest speaker to their annual conference in January. Hey, am I your secretary, passing on requests to you like this, I try to joke. But he’s abrupt on the phone. Of course, I think, he’s in the car between training sessions; he probably wants to get to lunch in the Espada or at Heimweh, as always. ‘I’ll call you back tonight, Ronnie, OK?’ he says. I can’t remember how he signed off.

  That evening I only get calls from other people.

  Robert Enke’s suicide on that cool autumn evening brought together people who were close to him and people who had never heard his name before in that state where you feel raw inside, as if you’ve been torn apart. In the days that followed, the sympathy often bordered on hysteria: the London Times devoted half of its front page to Robert Enke; in China, state television included him in the main news; the news agencies announced that the number of guests at his funeral was a record (‘more than at any funeral in Germany since Chancellor Konrad Adenauer’s’). That Robert’s passing had assumed such dimensions could only be explained by the fact that these days everything, even death, becomes an event.

  But beyond the headlines, deep down, there was real pain, a profound paralysis. Robert’s death reminded most of us how little we understand about the illness that is depression. The rest of us, in shockingly large numbers, were reminded of how difficult it is to speak about depression. Just like Robert, we had always thought we had to keep our illness or the illnesses of our families a secret.

  The facts are regularly in the newspapers: more people die every day of depression-related suicide than in road accidents. But such figures don’t give us anything more than a vague idea that sadness is too hard for some people to bear. And if the headlines were bigger when celebrities like Marilyn Monroe or Ernest Hemingway killed themselves, that seemed somehow – even if people didn’t say it out loud – to have its own logic; artists do that kind of thing. Because isn’t melancholy, the dark side, an inevitable part of art?

  But Robert Enke was Germany’s number one goalkeeper. The last bulwark, calm and cool in the tensest situations, able to control his stress and anxieties at the most extreme moments. Every weekend professional sportsmen like him play out the dream that everything is achievable; more than most footballers Robert gave the public the illusion that every obstacle could be overcome. At the age of twenty-nine he’d made it into the national side, having been unemployed after a first depression four years earlier and then stranded in the second division in Spain; after Lara’s death in 2006 he and Teresa had managed to find a life in parallel to their pain. And at a time when, outwardly at least, he seemed finally to have rediscovered happiness – a family with a daughter, as well as the prospect of being in goal for his country at the World Cup in South Africa – early in August 2009 the depression returned, worse than ever.

  What power must this illness have if it can draw a man like Robert Enke to the mistaken conclusion that death is the only solution? What darkness must have surrounded this sensitive person if he could no longer recognise what pain he would be inflicting on his loved ones with his death, and on the driver whose train he threw himself under that November evening?

  How do people live with depression, or even just with the knowledge that it could envelop them at any time? With the fear of fear?

  Robert wanted to provide those answers himself.

  It was he who wanted to write this book, not me.

  We had known each other since 2002. I’d reported on him sometimes for newspapers; then all of a sudden we were living in the same city, Barcelona. We met more and more often. I had the feeling that we thought the same things in life were important: politeness, peace, goalkeeping gloves. At some point he said, ‘I read a book of yours, I thought it was great!’ I blushed at the praise and gave a panicky answer, just something cheeky to put the conversation on a different course, ‘One day we’ll write one about you together.’ My bashfulness grew when I realised he’d taken my banter as a serious suggestion. After that he reminded me repeatedly about our project. ‘I’ve taken some notes so that I don’t forget anything.’

  Today I know why the biography was so close to his heart. When his goalkeeping career was over, he would finally be able to talk about his illness. In our achievement-oriented society a goalkeeper, the last bastion in defence, can’t be a depressive. So Robert summoned up a huge amount of strength to keep his depression secret. He locked himself away in his illness.

  So I will now have to tell his story without him.

  It’s hard to imagine ever coming across such unreservedly open interviewees as I did on my journey through Robert’s life. Friends of his suddenly started talking about their own dark thoughts. His goalkeeping rivals, who were supposed to wear the mask of invulnerability in interviews in accordance with the law of professional sport, suddenly started airing their doubts and anxieties.

  In most of us, the death of someone we love prompts the urge to be honest, to do good, to want to change things. But a public death brings one thing to the fore above all: our helplessness as human beings.

  We didn’t even know how to mourn him appropriately. Debates raged cruelly across Germany about whether the funeral celebration in Hanover was reverent or part of an event. Robert’s mother was bothered by the fact that the coffin was laid out in the stadium. ‘I thought to myself, for heaven’s sake, he’s not Lenin!’, Gisela Enke said to me as we sat in her kitchen in Jena. Robert, sportily elegant with a velvety blue V-neck sweater under his grey suit jacket, has his arm tightly around her in one of the many photographs above the dining-table. This energetic, cordial woman gave us all a lesson in humility. She has understood that it’s ridiculous to argue about how successful a funeral was. She has found her peace in the knowledge that everyone involved in the funeral service wanted the best; that even when we’re inspired to do good we get lots of things wrong.

  Lots of people misunderstood Robert’s death. They thought he killed himself because he could no longer bear his life. There were copycat suicides, committed by people who had succumbed to the lunatic notion that then they would be like him, then they would be close to him. What a tragic misunderstanding. Most depressives who attempt suicide don’t want to die, they just want the darkness that defines their thoughts to disappear once and for all. Robert was almost certainly no different. ‘If you could just have my head for half an hour, you’d know why I go mad,’ he once told Teresa.

  But it didn’t matter how many such explanations I found, the questions, the recurring, revolving questions, wouldn’t be stopped by any answer. Had something happened in his childhood that made him susceptible to depression? What was going on in his head that Tuesday in November when he spent eight hours driving around in his car before stepping out on to the railway tracks? Such questions return remorselessly, even the day after Teresa’s thirty-fourth birthday, which is also her first – the first without him.

  We’re sitting in the kitchen in Empede. Leila is playing that game so beloved of one-year-old children: clearing out the kitchen cupboards. The previous day had been bearable. (Those are Teresa’s new units of measurement – bearable or unbearable.) Lots of neighbours called in with their children and brought home-made ca
kes, flowers, best wishes, even though Teresa hadn’t said anything, no one had. A dozen friends gathered in the kitchen. I’d rather read the birthday cards later, said Teresa. And silence fell for a moment. How hollow some words can sometimes sound; birthday cards …

  Now, the next morning, the emptiness in the house is tangible once more, and Teresa can’t help thinking about her thirty-third birthday, which will in a sense always be her last. When Robert gave her the poem.

  Teresa still believed in the power of poetry in the late summer of 2009. ‘Write me another poem,’ she said to him on the phone at the beginning of September, when he was lying in a hotel room in Cologne, at a training-camp with the national team, and the fear of the new day – the fear that someone would expect something from him – wouldn’t allow him to get out of bed. In the evening he put a chair on the balcony of his hotel room and, with Cologne Cathedral glowing in the background, wrote another poem on his mobile.

  Sitting on the balcony,

  My head is a balloon.

  Heavy as lead and stone.

  It can’t be this way.

  He no longer felt the joy that beautiful words can prompt, the contentment that comes from writing down one’s thoughts. His poem simply didn’t matter to him.

  In the diary he kept during his depressive periods the entries also get more concise the more violently the illness afflicts him. On the last page there’s a single sentence in huge letters. It was presumably supposed to be a reminder to himself, but today his sentence reads like a challenge to us all:

  ‘Don’t forget these days.’

  ONE

  A Child of Fortune

  ONE SUNDAY AFTERNOON in December 1995 Robert Enke went to the Western Station in Jena and started waiting. The long-distance train from Nuremberg pulled in, passengers got out, and he showed no sign of disappointment when they all walked past him and left the platform. He carried on waiting. Two hours later the early evening train from the south arrived. Again he let all the passengers drift by as if nothing was the matter. It was not the best time of year to be spending half your Sunday waiting for trains in a draughty station so he decided to go to the cinema until the next train came in. He had turned eighteen four months earlier – an age that excuses almost every kind of wilful behaviour and at which, in your opinion, it’s other people who are behaving weirdly.