A Life Too Short: The Tragedy of Robert Enke

by Reng, Ronald

  Six years later Robert raised his right hand to greet the fans in Mönchengladbach at Uwe Kamps’s testimonial. The mood was solemnly relaxed – an idol was leaving. A lot of fans whistled at Robert’s friendly wave. After that he didn’t care whether his friends noticed anything. After six years he released his fury over his treatment by the fans. ‘It always rains in Mönchengladbach,’ was his curt reply whenever Marco wanted to talk about Borussia again.

  ‘Of course the hostility in Mönchengladbach was deep in his bones,’ says Jörg Neblung. ‘Here was a man who had been radically misunderstood. He thought he was being fair to the club by saying in good time, “I’m leaving at the end of the season, I’ll give you enough time to find a successor.” He wanted to do the right thing, and all he got in return was hatred.’

  The contract with Benfica was still to be signed. On the plane to Lisbon he sat with a Portuguese language book in his lap and cobbled together his first sentence in the foreign language.

  É bom estar aquí.

  He wanted to surprise the reporters with that at his presentation.

  It’s good to be here.

  The signing of the contract was planned for the afternoon of 4 June, immediately after his arrival; the official presentation would be carried out the next day at a press conference in the Stadium of Light.

  A car was waiting for them at the Aeroporto da Portela. Jörg Neblung wore a light summer suit like Pierce Brosnan in The Tailor of Panama. Flippi had said, you do it, and had stayed at home. Robert had chosen a blue shirt with a grey suit, no tie – he was a sportsman, after all. When they set off from the underground car park, Teresa noticed a photographer hiding behind a pillar.

  ‘Look over there,’ she said, too surprised to think.

  Robert turned his head, and a flash blinded him. He looked furiously at Teresa, as if she’d pressed the button.

  ‘Sorry, how should I know a paparazzo would be lying in wait for us?’

  They reached the office of Benfica’s president João Vale e Azevedo. Friendly, nervous words were exchanged, then Robert was sitting on a chair with a velvet cushion, the contract in front of him.

  He turned around. ‘Shall I sign?’

  Teresa swallowed. She looked him in the eye and tried to sound relaxed. ‘Sign it.’

  Hands were shaken. Vale e Azevedo’s was fleshy. In profile, the president’s face looked like that of a youthful intellectual; from the front, with the gleam of his high forehead and his laughing eyes, he looked like a local politician trying a bit too hard to appear clever.

  They stepped outside the door, where the photographers were already waiting. Vale e Azevedo put his arm around Robert, the photographers flashed away, and the next morning the picture was on the front page of the sports newspaper the Record. ‘Enke signs’ read the headline in capital letters.

  In the picture Robert looks happy.

  An hour after the signing Robert, Teresa and Jörg returned to their hotel rooms on the Praça Marques da Pombal for a quick rest. Jörg was lying on his bed in his summer suit, his arms folded behind his head, when there was a knock at the door. It was Teresa.

  ‘Jörg, Robbi’s not staying in Lisbon.’

  FOUR

  Fear

  JÖRG DIDN’T MOVE. He lay motionless on the bed, pillows piled all around him, silver and bronze with a pattern of flowers. As always in high-class hotels there were far too many pillows: Jörg never knew what to do with them. He slowly processed the words he had just heard.

  ‘What do you mean Robbi isn’t staying in Lisbon?’

  ‘He wants to go back straight away.’

  Jörg sat up. He hid his confusion with a smile. His silence challenged Teresa to tell him about that far-off world into which Robert had suddenly plunged after the signing of the contract.

  Outside the president’s office, immediately after the signing of the contract, Robert hears Teresa saying, ‘Let’s go to the Expo site and do a spot of shopping.’

  The cars on the Avenida da Liberdade are driving slowly in the evening rush-hour. Palms, taller than houses, line the boulevard. The fine cobblestones under his feet are white and smooth, polished by millions of shoes. The summer light in the south, more intense, more brilliant, is still reflected in the shop windows. A few pedestrians look at him out of the corners of their eyes, without slowing their pace; they don’t want to look curious, but they’d like to know why the photographers are here. The blackness of their hair is like the sunlight: more intense and brilliant than he knows. He can’t say exactly what it is that gives him the feeling of being an outsider.

  They take a taxi.

  The pavilions of the old World Exposition are now an entertainment district with boutiques and restaurants. There might be a shoe shop, Teresa says playfully to Robert, and looks at him.

  He’s holding his head tilted.

  He had held his head tilted exactly like that during his first winter in Mönchengladbach, when he was suddenly overwhelmed by fear. He sat at the dining table in the Loosenweg, he said miserably that he didn’t want to go to training, then he fell silent, with his head on one side as if to rest it on his shoulder, and he stayed in that posture for minutes at a time. Now all of a sudden he’s doing it again, and she can see tears welling up in his eyes.

  He feels Teresa’s gaze on him. ‘I’m going to the toilet for a minute,’ he says and turns around abruptly, as if wresting himself free.

  ‘What’s up?’ asks Jörg.

  ‘I don’t think Robbi’s feeling very well.’

  ‘Oh, really?’

  It’s an unusually long time before he comes back from the toilet.

  ‘Shall we go back to the hotel?’ Teresa asks immediately, to build a bridge for him.

  He tells Jörg he has a headache. Jörg looks at him and doesn’t think Robert looks at all unwell.

  In the taxi Teresa talks to cover up the fact that Robert isn’t saying anything. Jörg is sitting in the front. He can’t see Robert sitting motionless, looking out of the window, with his head on one side.

  ‘We’ll rest for an hour or so and see how it goes after that,’ Teresa says as the lift in the fifteen-storey hotel delivers them to their floor with its wonderful view. ‘See you later, Jörg.’

  Once she’s closed the door he throws himself down on the bed, buries his head in the pillow and weeps so despairingly that it sounds as if he’s going to choke on his tears. She strokes the back of his neck to calm him down.

  ‘Robbi.’

  ‘I can’t stay here. It’s not working.’

  ‘But you signed a contract an hour ago.’

  ‘What am I doing here, in a foreign country?’

  At least he’s no longer speaking into the pillow.

  His weeping subsides.

  ‘OK,’ she says at last. ‘You stay here, and I’ll go and tell Jörg. We’ve got to tell him.’

  There’s a knock on the door to Jörg’s room. As Teresa comes in, there’s still a smile on his lips, as if he’s just been having a lovely dream.

  Jörg followed Teresa along the deep grey carpet of the hotel corridor, still not quite having shaken off the high of the trouble-free signing of the contract. When they got to his room, Robert was lying on the bed, exactly as he had been before. The earlier dialogue repeated itself.

  I can’t stay here.

  But you signed a contract an hour ago.

  This isn’t working.

  For a moment Jörg could empathise. After his season at Mönchengladbach he had had a clear image of Robert Enke in his head – an extraordinarily unstressed, philosophical, sensible young man. Suddenly, as he looked at Robert, he saw himself, at home at the age of sixteen, when his parents, both teachers, asked him if he wanted to go to the United States as an exchange student for a year. A vague feeling of fear and loneliness had risen up in him. ‘America? Oh God, that’s far away.’ And Jörg had immediately turned down his parents’ offer. He thought he could understand Robert’s fear. ‘He was only twenty-
one, a boy going into the unknown, and overwhelmed by foreignness in a foreign country.’

  But that insight didn’t help him out of this jam.

  Why didn’t he sleep on it for a night? It might just be nerves – understandable, of course.

  Robert shook his head violently. He had to get out of here, he was going to leave. There were red patches on his cheeks.

  Jörg rang Flippi. After all, he was just an agency employee, he couldn’t make big decisions without consulting his boss. Flippi had an unambiguous piece of advice: ‘Give him a slap.’

  Jörg understood: he would have to sort out the situation all by himself.

  The invitation to Robert Enke’s presentation the next morning at the Stadium of Light had already been sent to the media.

  Teresa sat on the bed with Robert, and Jörg sat down in a grey armchair. There was a bunch of white roses on the desk.

  ‘What if we say Teresa isn’t well and we have to leave at short notice?’

  Teresa said she would play along.

  Jörg looked at Robert.

  Robert waited for them to do something.

  ‘Then I’ll sort it out,’ said Jörg. But he would have to tell Benfica’s coach the truth, at least. Robert owed his contract to Jupp Heynckes, and for that reason alone they should be honest with him. Whatever happened next.

  Jörg stepped out into the street. He found difficult conversations easier when he was moving. He marched along Rua Castilho. The traffic roared as he told the office of the Benfica president that they would have to postpone the presentation, the goalkeeper’s wife wasn’t well, they’d be flying back on the first plane tomorrow – yes, sadly. What a relief that decency requires secretaries not to ask tricky questions.

  Jörg turned round and walked back down Rua Castilho, past Sotheby’s and the Ritz, which he didn’t even notice. The walk took him slightly uphill, which was good, as the greater his physical effort the less he noticed his nervous tension.

  Heynckes answered the telephone in a friendly voice.

  Jörg wanted to get everything off his chest as quickly as possible and rattled away without giving the coach a chance to interrupt him. Robert was ill, afraid of being abroad all of a sudden, a young guy; in short, they had to leave straight away, no other possibility; everything else they would sort out later but to be honest Robert’s switch to Benfica was doubtful.

  ‘Mr Neblung, you are incredibly arrogant.’

  ‘Yes, I’m sorry about that too. But it’s the only way.’

  He hung up and stopped walking.

  ‘Given the customs of professional football, Heynckes must of course have thought that we’d suddenly found a better offer for Robert and wanted to use excuses to get him out of the Benfica contract. So I could understand the coach assuming the worst at that moment. Agents are partly there to take the blows and spare the player. So it was quite right for me to have to take insults from Heynckes.’

  They stayed in the hotel that evening. Jörg changed the booking for the return flights to the following day. Robert went to bed early.

  The next morning at the airport Jörg bought Robert a copy of the Record with its headline ‘Enke signs’. Robert saw how happily he was smiling on the front-page picture. Now he had only one goal: to get away from Lisbon. He was too exhausted with fear to appreciate that someone who flies away has to arrive somewhere and keep going.

  He and Teresa went on holiday. The dunes of southern Holland with their windswept scrub began just behind the kilometre-long beach at Domburg. The clouds were so low they seemed to have settled on the sand hills. Robert watched the dogs as they ran around.

  Neither of them mentioned their evening in Lisbon, but there was nothing tense about their silence on the subject. It simply didn’t seem to matter here.

  We have four weeks until training starts at Benfica, Teresa thought. All kinds of things can happen in four weeks.

  Meanwhile, at Norbert Pflipsen’s agency they were planning the future. Flippi made a call, to Edgar Geenen, the sporting director at 1860 Munich. Would they still be interested in signing Robert? But the prospect of plunging into a legal dispute about a player who hadn’t wanted to join them a few weeks earlier and who had now signed for another club didn’t strike Geenen as very enticing.

  The only way out was to persuade Robert to go to Lisbon after all.

  Flippi phoned Jupp Heynckes.

  ‘My dear friend, all this can’t be true!’ cried the coach.

  ‘Tell me about it! Jupp, I understand you, I’m on your side. The boy’s just a bit rattled. The paparazzi in Lisbon intimidated him, the reception was too much for him.’

  ‘Can you actually still see the reality? He’s got an excellent contract, because I stood up for him!’

  ‘I know that, Jupp, and I’ll tell the boy that too. We’ll try and sort it out. Give him a bit of time.’

  He had no time, he had a season to plan. Heynckes’s tone was close to that of a coach speaking to his team in the changing-room at half-time when they were 4–0 down.

  A short time later a report came from Portugal: Heynckes had signed another new goalkeeper. Jörg entered the new man’s name in a search engine on the internet, which was then in its infancy. Carlos Bossio. Four years older than Robert, silver medal winner in the 1996 Olympic Games with Argentina, 146 games in the Argentinian top flight for Estudiantes. The accompanying photographs said the rest. ‘A huge guy, 1.94 metres, and a chin like Sylvester Stallone,’ Jörg recalls. ‘That was a goalkeeper with a top-class profile.’ Benfica were no longer counting on Robert, no longer trusted him to turn up after his hasty departure. That was the message carried by the report from Portugal.

  Jörg told Robert about it as if it couldn’t have gone better for them. ‘Now you have no pressure in Lisbon – they’ve fetched a goalkeeper over from Argentina. He might play at the beginning, but that mightn’t be all that bad. You can calmly settle in.’

  With his skin tanned a deep bronze and his fair hair shining after his summer holiday, Robert said of course he understood that he had to go back to Lisbon, he’d signed a contract.

  Teresa organised their move out of Gierath. The day before they set off for Lisbon they watched the removal men carrying the boxes out of the attic flat; the cases and bags for the flight were kept separate, in the kitchen. After the removal van had driven off, Teresa checked the empty flat one last time in case she’d forgotten anything. It was Saturday; the weekend silence of the village matched the emptiness of the flat.

  Robert came over and stood in front of Teresa. ‘I’m not coming.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’m not coming. Where’s the car key?’

  Teresa was too perplexed even to think, let alone do anything.

  Once he’d gone, she rang his mobile. He’d turned it off. She called his parents. ‘If your son rings, try and come up with some way of calming him down. He’s just cleared off.’

  She drove to Rheydt to see Jörg and Dörthe. Not far from Grandma Frida’s old farm she could see Jörg disappearing into the forest in his tracksuit. Let him run, she thought, let him enjoy his exercise before I shock him with the news.

  With the pleasant feeling of exhaustion that you get after doing a bit of exercise, Jörg came back three-quarters of an hour later. He greeted Teresa and asked casually, ‘Where’s Robbi?’

  ‘He’s cleared off.’

  ‘Nonsense.’

  ‘No, really. He’s cleared off.’

  Teresa, Dörthe and Jörg were aware that laughter was totally inappropriate, so it was the only thing they could do: they laughed.

  They rang his mobile every few mintues. The phone remained switched off. They sent him text messages. All they could do was go on waiting.

  Darkness gently ousted the glorious day, and soon it was nine o’clock. He’d been missing for seven hours when the doorbell rang. Teresa ran to the door, opened it and saw him standing at the foot of the steep steps. He glanced up then looked away again, as
if nothing in this world had anything to do with him.

  ‘God, Robbi, where have you been?’

  ‘Away.’

  Teresa never got a concrete answer. Neither did she insist on one. She had the feeling that his inner equilibrium had only just re-established itself, and that she must on no account disturb that fine balance.

  ‘We’re off to Lisbon today,’ she said the next morning, struggling to ensure that it didn’t sound like a question, or an order.

  He nodded. It was impossible to tell what he felt.

  FIVE

  The City of Light

  THEY TOOK A hotel room at the airport, where people stay when they want to get away again quickly. The little park near the hotel was called Valley of Silence. From there it was only five minutes to the old Expo site, the only familiar place from which they could begin to explore this strange city.

  The mild evening air after the hot July day settled around them as Teresa looked down on the Tagus from a restaurant terrace at the Expo site. There was a gentle breeze. The lights of Lisbon sparkled on the river, the flags of all nations fluttered on the flagpoles at the foot of the Vasco da Gama Bridge.

  ‘It’s beautiful here, isn’t it, Robbi?’

  He went on cutting at his steak. ‘All I can hear is the creaking of the flagpoles,’ he said.

  Teresa can’t be sure he was holding his head at an angle, she can’t remember actually dropping her cutlery without a word, but that’s how she recalls the scene today.

  She went with him to his first daily training at Benfica as if taking him to hospital. She dropped Robert off at the Stadium of Light and went for a coffee in the shopping centre on the other side of the street – a relative waiting outside the operating theatre and trying not to drum her fingers on the table.

  An eagle awaited Robert at the entrance to the stadium. He dashed past Benfica’s stone emblem and into the changing-room. He couldn’t understand what the other players were saying but he understood their laughter: it was the same as the laughter in Mönchengladbach when Marco played his pranks.

  9. Robert in 2000 overlooking the City of Light.