by Reng, Ronald
Robert made it clear that Jörg no longer had to take too much trouble over the negotiations. He wanted only one thing: to get out of Istanbul.
The contract was dissolved the same day. Fenerbahçe undertook to pay Robert’s hotel expenses and his return flight. He didn’t ask for another cent.
Fifteen days after he had arrived in Istanbul in his summer shirt, Robert set off for home. Fenerbahçe published a statement: the contract had been dissolved by mutual agreement. Robert told journalists about ‘a feeling’, and couldn’t explain his decision in the first person: ‘If something is simply wrong in a new milieu, and you don’t feel right, you can’t perform properly. And before you head towards an even unhappier situation, it’s better to draw a line under it.’ Daum commented, ‘He was handicapped, but he only told me after the game.’ The journalists concluded that Enke had gone into the game with an injury and had therefore damaged himself with ‘his exaggerated ambition’.
Talking openly about his anxieties didn’t seem like an option.
In the world of football, most people shook their heads anyway. A professional didn’t resign. That expectation was encapsulated in the word ‘professional’. Being professional means repressing emotions, carrying on. And if things aren’t working out on the pitch, then a professional just sits on the subs bench, secretly starts to look for a new club and takes his salary in the meantime. ‘Lots of people said Enke has lost his marbles, and fair enough, if you look at it soberly, you could see it like that,’ said Robert.
Only Jupp Heynckes, his coach in Lisbon, saw something else. ‘For the first time in four years I remembered that at Benfica he’d also wanted to go home straight away. Then it occurred to me that he might have a more serious problem.’
According to FIFA regulations a player couldn’t change clubs twice in one transfer window. Robert would indeed be unemployed for at least five months. Was he a lost soul, or was he free? When he thought about it at Ataturk airport, he thought you could be both at the same time, lost and free, defeated and relieved.
In his eagerness to leave Istanbul behind he had arrived at the airport five hours before the flight to Barcelona.
TWELVE
No Light, Not Even in the Fridge
WHEN THOUGHTS BECAME overwhelming at night, Robert went to the loo. He sat on the toilet and waited in vain for weariness to return. Eventually he crept back through the dark house, hoping none of the dogs would start barking. Teresa was breathing evenly in the bedroom. He lay down beside her and closed his eyes, wanting to force sleep to come.
Why did I sign up with Fenerbahçe against my better judgement? And what if I could have stuck it out in Istanbul just a couple of weeks longer, like everybody said? I will never get out of this hole again …
When he woke up again one or two hours later, he felt as if he hadn’t gone to sleep at all.
How deep can it really go? I pulled my tail in between my legs in Istanbul, and now I’m being punished. But what sort of punishment? Where is it all going to end?
At ten to eight he woke from his non-sleep. He kissed Teresa good morning, told her he was going on the long circuit with the dogs. But even when he was talking there was a heavy silence between them. He could hear it beyond his words. There were so many things he wanted to say to her; he had to tell her how he was. Four times in the night he had tried to flee his thoughts by going to the loo. He noted everything meticulously in his diary, treating himself quite ruthlessly. The worst night I can remember, he wrote. But whenever he started talking, the words sounded false, the sentences hollow.
He got dressed in silence, and said once again, just to break the silence, that he was going out with the dogs. He wanted to say something else. So many thoughts raged inside him, but at the same time not a single one came to mind; it was as if he was blocked up. He could still form sentences inside his head – Terri, I know I’m being impossible; please, I don’t want to lose you – but the words caught in his throat, they couldn’t find their way out. He still had precise ideas of how he wanted to behave, but watched, paralysed, as he got everything wrong.
How was Teresa to go on loving the man he had turned into?
He fled outside. Right behind the house was the nature reserve of Collserola; it was forest all the way to Barcelona. The mild September weather made him feel guilty. On such glorious days you should be happy. On days like this, a Monday in a normal working week during the football season, you shouldn’t have time to go walking through the Collserola.
He knew he was sick. Dr Geldschläger had explained it to him. It had nothing to do with the fact that he was letting himself go, that he had to pull himself together. At the moment his brain wasn’t sufficiently capable of processing stress. Only negative stimuli registered with his nervous system – fear, anger, despair. Had doctors opened up his head they would have discovered among other things, that the prefrontal cortex – in which, to put it simply, the human impulse arises – was under-active, and that was why he felt so limp. So there was a medical explanation for every facet of the behaviour he was unable to understand.
He suffered from depression.
Depressives are no longer capable of seeing things realistically. They see everything in a black, pessimistic, negative way.
But what good were all the explanations of his current state? Of what use was the fact that the illness reduced many other people around the world, regardless of intelligence or experience of life, to desperate wrecks? What he lacked was an explanation for how he was ever to find his way back out of the darkness.
I can’t stand it much longer. Then I just lie there in bed in the morning.
Later, beside him at the breakfast table, separated from him by a thick wall of silence, Teresa was thinking the same thing – I can’t stand it much longer – in a quite different way.
The states of anxiety and melancholy that had tormented Robert time and again over the course of the years were indications that he was susceptible to depression. But lots of people were afraid of disappointing themselves and others: Immel, Valdés and other goalkeepers even used that fear to remain concentrated, to tease from their bodies reactions only a person in danger is capable of. Being sad and desperate after shattering experiences, as he had been after Novelda, wasn’t depression, it was simply human.
Nothing had prepared him and Teresa for what depressions really are.
He got up before eight every morning. He had to give the day a structure, do things, give his thoughts no chance to go round in circles, Dr Geldschläger had once impressed on him, but yet again his thoughts were starting to go round in circles. Why hadn’t he taken the sessions with Dr Geldschläger seriously enough after Novelda? Could he have stopped the depressions then? He wanted to deal with the illness the way other people fought against cancer. But a person suffering from cancer still at least had his reason and, in the best cases, his courage and his will. He had nothing in his head but an oppressive heaviness. Almost every entry in his diary began with the same thought: I have the feeling it’s getting worse every day.
The important thing wasn’t to do anything extraordinary, it was just to do something. Every morning he swooped on the dogs to begin the day in a structured way. Teresa asked him, ‘Are you coming with me to the riding-stables?’ He sat on the terrace with his head tilted – that tilted head still drove her mad – and he thought, he thought back and forth. There were so many reasons to go to the riding-stables, and so many not to, how was he ever to make his mind up?
‘I don’t know,’ he replied.
For the first days she said, ‘Come with me.’ But the weeks passed, his head stayed tilted, and Teresa’s strength drained away. It plainly didn’t make any difference whether or not she spurred him on. Perhaps it was better just to leave him to his own devices for a while. Thrown back on his own resources he might manage at least to make a few decisions.
Dr Geldschläger also asked Teresa along to a session. Life for the relatives of depressives, he said, was a
t least as difficult as it was for the patients themselves. You have your well-meant, optimistic, rational views, but depressives always know precisely why everything you suggest to them can only go wrong. Bear up, said Dr Geldschläger.
Teresa said to herself: the man by your side is not your Robbi, he’s a sick man. It’s the sickness that’s responsible for all the difficult behaviour. You’ve got to help him. But patience is a limited resource when your husband’s a bundle of neuroses, when he’s lost his strength, when everything makes him angry.
‘The dogs are driving me nuts!’
‘When you came back from Istanbul you said you’d missed me and the dogs terribly.’
‘But they’re running wild around the flat all the time!’
He needed anti-depressants; he couldn’t go on with just one-on-one therapy and muscle relaxation. A doctor friend from the Bundesliga, not a specialist in the field, prescribed some tablets for him. He still felt that he had to keep his sickness secret, without wondering why. He didn’t know whether he ever wanted to be a professional footballer again. The only thing that was certain, in his opinion, was that he had already made too many mistakes in a single life ever to make things better, ever to go on living as the word ‘life’ deserved.
After some toing and froing FC Barcelona allowed him to train again with the other two ‘outcasts’, Roberto Bonano and Dani García. He had to sign a contract saying that he wouldn’t claim any salary. He also committed himself to using the training-grounds only when the professional team wasn’t present, when no one could see him. He could not miss the message between the contract’s lines. He would never be a part of the club again.
Once he got his training times muddled. All of a sudden Victor Valdés was standing in front of him in the catacombs of the stadium, on the way to train with the Barça squad. Victor nodded slightly. He couldn’t tell whether Robert returned the greeting. Because they were both staring at the ground. ‘I didn’t dare speak to him,’ says Victor. ‘I thought the simple question “How are you?” might cause him pain.’
Robert panicked. He couldn’t go training when the first team was present. He fled to the physio suite and got some treatment. His foot was sore, he said. Then he drove home. Should he take the tunnel with the toll or the country road? He was still thinking about this, wondering how he was supposed to decide, when he reached the toll-booth and there was no other option but the tunnel.
At home he didn’t want to get out of the car.
I don’t dare to go home, because then I’ll have to face Terri and I won’t be able to pull myself together.
He took his anti-depressant, and in the evening his mouth felt dry, however much water he drank. At least the side-effects of the medicine were working well, he said to himself. He didn’t know where that irony had suddenly flown in from – his old, quiet sense of humour.
That evening Teresa forced him out to have dinner near the monastery in Sant Cugat. Children frolicked in the square in front of the ancient building. Elderly people sat contentedly on the benches, chewing sunflower seeds; the sinking sun gave the plaza one last tinge of gold. Their friends Susanne and Axel came along, and their presence broke the silence. Even Robert could suddenly talk again – about the taste of apricot ice-cream, about Dickens, even about Barça. But he didn’t feel the relaxation he was emanating. Within him there was a double-thick pane of glass that screened him off from the life around him, and only let the conversation, the evening sun and the frolicking children reach him in a muted form.
He and Teresa were in bed by nine.
The question was: why? Why did he suffer from depression? That his ice-cold explusion from Barça had sparked the illness seemed obvious – the feeling of being worthless mixed with despair at having no other choice but Istanbul, where the fans didn’t want him and he didn’t want to be. Did he have an inherited predisposition to depression? Would he also have fallen ill as a teacher, sports reporter or businessman? Or was it just the extreme experiences of high-performance sport that affected him?
His father is still asking himself that one-word question. The engine of his Volkswagen grumbles as he drives up the mountain to Cospeda. Thick forest surrounds the rural road before a clearing reveals a view of Jena, just a dot in the valley below. The Enkes’ dacha is on the left-hand side of a field. They used to come here a lot when the working week was over, when there was something to celebrate. Dirk wants to drive around the places that remind him of Robert: the sports college, Breite Strasse where Grandma Käthe lived – the third grandma. At the dacha he turns the engine off. The car shudders briefly before falling silent.
‘Robert had this way of thinking, that if I’m not the best, I must be the worst. And that’s a fundamental aberration. That’s the thought of someone who’s learned I’m only loved for my achievement not because I simply exist.’
The car window mists up from inside. As the windscreen turns milky, the far-away meadows can still be made out as a greenish-brown background. The silence seems absolute.
‘That connection must have existed in Robert: if I’m not good, I’m not loved.’
And then, if at one point he really wasn’t good as a young goalkeeper, he couldn’t cope with it, the self-reproaches went spinning out of control, his brain functions altered, grim brooding took over and he became susceptible to depression?
Robert’s father nods, but in his thoughts he’s already further on, somewhere else. Perhaps he’s even talking to someone else. ‘I thought, Robert, you must surely have noticed that we loved you because you existed and not because you were a good goalkeeper.’
Scenarios arise: the father who left his family, who tries to go to every match his son plays so as not to lose the bond. The son who says anxiously, Papa, you’d still like me if I gave up football, wouldn’t you?
‘I’m more than willing to think about it critically: what did we do wrong? Of course we supported him with his sport, but we certainly didn’t drive him into it as some over-ambitious parents do. I think I just said cautiously after every game: what do you think, Robert, did you do well in goal today?’ His father would have liked to attend every game, even when his son was a professional. ‘I’ve heard that that turned into a problem for Robert. I asked about tickets so often.’
Without asking a question, Robert’s father expects an answer – please, tell me it wasn’t a problem. It’s time to tell him something else: when someone suffering from depression kills himself, no one else is to blame.
Robert’s father wants to move on. He bends down as if the turning of the ignition key requires all his concentration.
One afternoon in Barcelona Robert came home from outlaw training and noticed one of their cats staring at him from the balcony. He stared back and saw only his own failure: that morning he had forgotten to close a window. You can’t even do that, he rebuked himself.
‘If the cat’s got out,’ Teresa said, suppressing her impatience, ‘then just let it back in again.’
He went on staring at the balcony.
He had the feeling that he was being put to the test. Only the bottom third of the fridge worked these days. The television in the bedroom went on strike. The dishwasher had to be collected four days later. Wherever he looked, challenges awaited him – things that needed to be done, things that were too much for him. All day he thought about fridges, televisions, dishwashers that needed to be fixed, and couldn’t get round to calling a repair man.
He treated his life like the fridge. He thought all day about how to fix it but couldn’t find any answers because he immediately saw negative consequences. Should he spend a few months in a clinic in Germany? Then he would lose Teresa, if he left her alone. Should he stay in Barcelona and go on placing his hope in Dr Geldschläger and the tablets? Then he would lose Teresa, because he’d get on her nerves. Should he try really hard to find a new club in the winter transfer period? Then he would only fail again. Should he give up football? Then what was he supposed to do?
Af
ter lunch I always get tired, I just want to go to bed, but lying down like that only makes things worse.
That was the only logic his brain allowed: in the morning he had no desire to do anything that day, and in the evening he hated himself for not having accomplished anything.
When he went off to training one day, he thought: no one’s waiting for you, no one’s interested in what you do. Then he simply turned round. At about midday Teresa came back from her work at the animal shelter. The blinds on their house were lowered. He had gone to bed and withdrawn from the world. ‘Get up!’ said Teresa. ‘Robbi, get up!’ She had learned that staying in bed is the greatest longing yet at the same time the worst thing for depressives; she knew it was right to drive him out of bed. Yet it was unbearable shouting at him, treating him like that.
He sat down in the sitting-room and looked at old photographs, of Lisbon, of happiness. He found one in which Teresa, he, Jörg and Jörg’s new girlfriend were toasting each other with glasses of sparkling wine. They were celebrating his departure from Benfica. He was free, they had believed at the time: he could, without a transfer fee, move to another club – further and higher. He stared at his face in the photograph. How had he ever thought it would be a great idea to leave Lisbon?
When I see that picture, I want to thump myself.
On 14 October 2003, exactly two months to the day since he had left Istanbul, he wrote only four and a half lines in his diary. He started with About to go mad and ended with Often think about …
He couldn’t bring himself to write the word ‘suicide’.
The next day he decided with Teresa and Jörg that that was enough. He would move in with Jörg in Cologne and go into treatment there.
