A Life Too Short: The Tragedy of Robert Enke

by Reng, Ronald

  Four children were waiting impatiently for the arrival of the Christ child when Teresa and Robert turned up at Axel and Susanne’s in Sant Cugat. The hard core of the German expats had been invited for a Christmas party. The presents for the grown-ups were to be funny rather than expensive, they had agreed. Chance decided who received which gift. Teresa drew a man-size pair of turquoise boxer-shorts with Snoopy on the front. She put them on over her jeans. Robert was suddenly sitting on the couch apart from the others. In his hands he held a pile of papers and was going through them with great concentration. Then he got to his feet.

  ‘I’ve written Teresa a poem for Christmas, and I’d like to read it to her and to you, because I know what you’ve been through with me over the past few months. I’d like to thank you for that.’

  He told them about the dwarf.

  But now let’s turn to positive things,

  Loud the Christmas bell does ring!

  The dwarf looks forward to the feast –

  A test for him, he knows at least.

  A dog for his dwarf-wife, maybe?

  Her little smile is fine to see.

  Or else a cuddly pussy-cat –

  Her little face lights up at that.

  What if it’s not a pet at all?

  Why then, the she-dwarf’s face will fall.

  And what if she is filled with wrath

  Against her loving little dwarf?

  When he had finished, silence fell. At last one of the friends remembered that the author was present and started clapping, and the others quickly joined in. Their applause grew louder, the noise driving the shimmer from their eyes.

  It’s two o’clock in the morning. Teresa is already in bed, and outside the window the golf course of Sant Cugat is just a black wall. Robert sits at his desk and lowers his notes. The pages lie in front of him. The scrawly handwriting with the skewed letters curving from left to right at the top leaves no doubt. He wrote that.

  He can’t believe he is the same person who wrote that diary over the last five months.

  It’s January 2004, a new year, and he has just read through his notebooks for the first time. Does that old human dream really exist? You take down the old calendar, you draw a line under everything, and it all starts over?

  It almost seems that way.

  Most people who are prone only suffer from depression once, and it usually lasts between three and six months. He wouldn’t go so far as to say: I belong to that group, it’s all behind me. What he feels is that those months already seem incredibly far away. He sees his alien self as a blur, in outline, a person who had nothing to do with him but who for some inexplicable reason slipped into his skin.

  He is filled with a quiet urge to act. He will play football again, even if he doesn’t yet know where. The offer from Manchester City fell through, and he doesn’t know whether he will ever reach the level of Lisbon again, but it doesn’t matter much. He has a very concrete idea of how to achieve happiness. He will stand in some goal somewhere, he will save a shot and he will feel how that makes other people – the fans, his team-mates – happy. He will go for a walk with Teresa and the dogs; on the forest path she will let the dogs off the lead; the dogs will run; he will put his arm around Teresa and sense her smile without looking.

  Teresa is pregnant. They’ve known for nine days. It must have happened during those euphoric Advent days in Cologne. Teresa was shocked by the news: after Robert’s depression she would have liked a bit of peace. But he was pleased; she is pleased now.

  If it’s a girl, they already have a name: Lara.

  Under his desk-lamp he looks for a pen, a sheet of paper. He has to finish something.

  16.01.2004, 02.00 a.m. At the moment I am happy + content. We had a really lovely New Year’s Eve in the Café Delgado. I laughed and danced – incredible!

  He looks for a file for his depri-documents. Those are his words: depri-documents, depri-file. He finds a pocket file, bright red, puts his notes in it, along with the dwarf poem, and closes it.

  THIRTEEN

  The Holiday Island

  IN THE AFTERNOON he had time to take a look at life. He walked to Santa Cruz harbour. After he had stood around idly for a while, he discovered a wall and swung himself up on top of it. From there you could see over the cruise-ship quay and up to the cranes and containers of the freight-yard. Beyond that the jagged mountains of Tenerife grew right out of the Atlantic.

  Robert sat on the wall and didn’t move. He watched the people in the harbour. ‘How contented they are,’ he thought to himself, and felt he was one of them again.

  On the last day of the winter transfer window he had switched to Deportivo Tenerife. The offers he had on the table told him something about his reputation in professional football: AC Ancona, bottom of the league in Italy; FC Kärnten, bottom of the league in Austria: and ADO Den Haag, second from bottom in the Netherlands. He chose to go to Tenerife, in the Spanish Second Division.

  Which meant that he ceased to exist for the German football scene. Only people who knew him personally looked for signs of life from him in the small-print foreign results in Kicker. Peter Greiber, Cologne’s goalkeeping coach, sent him a text when he read about a 1–0 win for Tenerife: ‘Well done, clean sheet.’ Robert wrote back: ‘Thanks. Unfortunately I wasn’t in goal.’ Even in the Segunda División he was only a substitute goalkeeper. He wasn’t trusted, since he had resigned in Istanbul after only one game and hadn’t played a match for six months.

  In Cologne, Jörg wondered: substitute goalkeeper in a second division – is this the end? He phoned Robert. ‘Come on, man, you’ve got to put the pressure on the number one keeper!’

  Robert replied, calm down, it’ll happen.

  He sat by the harbour every day and saw things differently from Jörg, from the football scene. ‘Football turns you into someone who always wants more, who’s never content,’ he said. Over the past few months he’d learned to be grateful for what he had.

  From the harbour he often went to the pedestrian precinct for a milk-shake. He knew the best ice-cream parlour in town, he said. His pride was impossible to ignore. He alone had explored Santa Cruz, and now he was conducting a guided tour of the town.

  Teresa had stayed in Barcelona. She was pregnant, she had the dogs, they thought it wasn’t worth moving, he would only be in Tenerife for half a season, until he found something better – with any luck. It was the same situation as the Turkish experiment. But in Istanbul he had felt lost without Teresa. In Santa Cruz he felt inspired.

  He was living in a rented four-room flat near García Sanabria Park. The flat was completely furnished, but it still looked empty. Apart from a satellite dish, still unpacked, on the floor, he had brought no personal belongings, and he had changed nothing: he had even left the paintings, still-lifes of oranges and bananas, hanging on the walls. It wasn’t worth settling in for those few months, he said. On the bed was a thriller by Henning Mankell. In the dishrack, hand-rinsed, were a plate and a glass.

  ‘It was like being a student for him,’ says Teresa.

  Every morning he bought two sports newspapers from the kiosk outside his flat. One day as he let his eye slip over the pages he spotted a familiar photograph. It was on the front page, in the top right-hand corner. He wondered why they had used that particular one – the picture was over six months old. He hardly recognised himself in it.

  It was the photo of his presentation at Fenerbahçe – his face red, his mouth open, his expression harassed. ‘Look at that picture,’ he said. ‘I’m not even myself.’ He pulled the page out to keep it. He didn’t want to forget what he had felt like during his depression.

  He set the newspapers down on the passenger seat. He had to go to training. The club had put a sports car at his disposal – he had had a clause saying as much added to his contract. On the first day the sporting director Francisco Carrasco had come to him and handed him a car-key. His team-mates laughed. ‘What’s up?’ asked Robert. Carrasco had had to p
ass his staff car on to him, because it was the only one they had. It crossed his mind that professional football in the Segunda División was only superficially the same job as the one he had been doing for ages. His salary was a tenth of what he had been earning with Barça but he was one of the best-paid professionals in Tenerife’s team.

  When his first month’s salary from Tenerife came in, he looked at his statement for a long time. After seven months, another credit in his account. ‘That feeling that money was only ever going out was frightening.’ He hesitated. ‘As a footballer you don’t dare say it, because other people are hit much harder. But the feeling of being out of work is no less bad for a professional footballer than it is for an electrician. You feel worthless.’

  Another clause in his contract stated that the club would provide Teresa with tickets for three flights from Barcelona. When he realised how cheap the flight was the first time she came, he was ashamed. A hundred and sixty euros return, and he had made Jörg fight for that stipulation. What must they think of him at the club? CD Tenerife had been fighting for years to be able to pay its professionals a half-decent salary, and he, who was receiving a decent wage, was causing difficulties over less than five hundred euros. After training, when one of his team-mates had to go on some errand, Robert often said ‘Here, take it’ and threw him the key to his car.

  February 2004 passed, then March, and he was still substitute goalkeeper. Jörg phoned him. ‘This isn’t good, you’ve got to talk to Carrasco. He brought you in as number one!’

  Be patient, Robert replied. He would play eventually.

  He never said it out loud, because he thought it was unseemly, but he thought he was better than the number one, Álvaro Iglesias. There were some objective arguments in his favour: his fine saves, his jumping, his anticipation – the difference was apparent every day in training. But he also saw that Álvaro played blamelessly in the matches. Perhaps Álvaro was so convincing precisely because he had a stronger competitor breathing down his neck. A goalkeeper who played his part without any mistakes deserved, in Robert’s opinion, to stay on stage. That was true even though he himself was the victim of the situation.

  But to do his duty, to be able to say to Jörg ‘You see, I’ve done it’, he went to see the sporting director.

  The situation was more embarrassing for Carrasco than it was for him. Carrasco had brought him to Tenerife. ‘Robert was my personal bet’, and now the coach wasn’t playing the goalkeeper. At the age of forty-five, Carrasco looked less like a former footballer than an active long-distance runner – slim, tall, ascetic. They both knew what they had to say, and that neither of them could do anything to change the situation.

  ‘You told me you would take me on as number one.’

  ‘I know, but I can’t tell the coach which players to play.’

  Relieved at having put this behind them, they turned to other subjects.

  ‘Above all I could tell how much in love he was with Teresa,’ Carrasco says six years later in the Madrid suburb of Aravaca, where he lives today, still slim and elegant, wearing a suit as he takes his morning coffee. Love doesn’t seem like the most obvious of topics when a sporting director and his goalkeeper meet for crisis talks. ‘At the time he was about to become a father. I was in my mid-forties, I was already a father, I knew a bit about this – you notice how much in love someone is.’ Carrasco played for Barça for eleven years, his hair grey already, which was why they called him ‘Lobo’ – the Wolf. He won three European Cups, he reached the European Championship with Spain in 1984, and after that he taught himself journalism. After Barça’s 1–0 in Bruges it was he who wrote in El Mundo Deportivo, ‘Enke’s performance was a message to van Gaal.’

  What stayed in Carrasco’s memory about the sportsman was ‘the elegance with which Robert endured his difficult situation as a substitute. He was always businesslike with me. He never complained in the press.’

  Robert gave Álvaro Iglesias, the goalkeeper he was supposed to be putting pressure on, and whom he had to get out of the way if he was to play again, eight pairs of gloves. He got tailor-made models from his sponsor, gloves that Álvaro, who had long served as a goalkeeper in the lower divisions, couldn’t get hold of ‘Absolutgrip and Aquasoft, the best latex surfaces from Uhlsport,’ Iglesias remembers enthusiastically today, just as other people reel off the names of their children. Robert also gave eight pairs to the third-choice goalkeeper, Adolfo Baines. But Baines didn’t wear them to training. The gloves were so posh, he told Robert, that he would save them for special days.

  There were now two Robert Enkes at training in the Heliodoro Rodríguez Stadium, according to the personalised Velcro fasteners of the gloves of both goalkeepers. But the original was always easy to spot.

  The coach organised a little game, attack versus defence. The striker was through, alone in front of the goalkeeper, and Robert was waiting, one knee bent inwards so that the attacker couldn’t shoot through his legs, his torso ramrod straight, his arms outstretched to look wider. The striker went for a shot with the inside of his foot, attempting to curve it round the keeper. Robert pushed himself off the ground with a considerable leap, but what was truly magnificent was the explosiveness of his move. He darted to the left at lightning speed. The pensioners on the terraces clapped when he tipped the ball, which seemed to be on the way into the goal, around the post. ‘That was what I missed most,’ he said, ‘that feeling that what you do is important for somebody.’

  Of course the questions still troubled him, that afternoon over the best chocolate milk-shake on the island. What if he had never left Benfica? What was someone like him doing on the subs bench in the Spanish Second Division? ‘And then I thought to myself: there must be some point to Enke taking a knock.’ And he had already found that meaning: he was enjoying the simple things of life again. ‘Belonging to a team, and knowing there’s training at ten o’ clock. Being needed again.’

  It was only another nine and a half hours until the next training session. He sat in the living-room, so full of joy he couldn’t sleep. On the shelves, where books and figurines ought to have been, were two dozen pairs of gloves and shin-guards. He was wearing jeans and a T-shirt, and on each hand he had a different model of glove, one Absolutgrip and one Aquasoft.

  He fastened the Velcro. He clenched his fists, stretched his fingers, rubbed the gloves together, and stood in the room, concentrating hard. As if he were listening to the gloves on his fingers.

  There is no lovelier feeling for a goalkeeper than slipping into his gloves and fastening the Velcro. Then he feels safe and secure, often invulnerable. For that reason most goalkeepers prefer a solid pair – armour for their soul. Robert, on the other hand, wore unusually light gloves. He wanted to restrict the mobility of his fingers as little as possible; he had to feel the ball when he caught it, not only in the foam of the gloves but all the way to his fingertips.

  His sponsor wanted him to play with the latest model every year. ‘With Robert, it always took us about eight attempts until we found the right glove for him,’ says Lothar Bisinger, who looks after professional goalkeepers at Uhlsport. Eight attempts meant that after trying them on for the first time, Robert might say the glove was too tight on the right thumb, and then the glove had to be made again with the thumb a millimetre wider. Then he might notice that with the broad thumb the other fingers now felt too tight. The tailor widened the fingers. ‘So we made our way forward, millimetre by millimetre,’ says Bisinger. In Tenerife, the Velcro seemed too tight for Robert when he bent his wrist.

  The seam on his gloves was always on the outside of the thumb; on the fingers he insisted on having it inside. Without an outside seam the ball sank better into the foam, while at the thumb he felt the seam on his skin when it was on the inside, and that was irritating. ‘He also had latex inside the glove,’ says José Moreira, who had naturally tried out Robert’s gloves during their time together in Lisbon. ‘It was something I didn’t know before, it didn’t exist in Port
ugal before him. I immediately ordered some from my manufacturer.’

  The foam on Robert’s catching surfaces was seven millimetres thick: four millimetres of foam, three millimetres of lining. You can’t buy gloves like that. The foam layer in mass-produced gloves is six millimetres thick. When Robert put on normal goalkeeping gloves he noticed the single millimetre’s difference straight away.

  What exactly the difference was between the natural rubber padding in Absolutgrip and Aquasoft even Bisinger couldn’t tell him. There are only three rubber suppliers for goalkeeping gloves in the whole world. ‘The recipes are as secret as the recipe for Coca-Cola,’ says Bisinger. ‘Only the manufacturers know whether the temperature was changed by three degrees in the baking of the rubber dough, or a new chemical was added to produce a new layer with improved clingability.’

  Robert needed to test the differences between Absolutgrip and Aquasoft.

  Throughout his career he had always worn Absolutgrip, but now, in his living-room, he was trying out Aquasoft. It was after midnight in Santa Cruz. I threw the ball, he caught it, until he was laughing too much to go on.

  He hadn’t yet decided, he said, suddenly serious, which glove he would wear in his first game for Tenerife. His doubtful words rang with an inexplicable but absolute certainty: eventually, soon, he would have his first game.

  His quiet joy made Teresa happy, and at the same time reminded her of her own sadness. She was pregnant and alone in Barcelona. One night she woke up, her whole body shivering. She felt nauseous and she was on her way to the bathroom to drink from the tap when she suddenly felt dizzy. She didn’t dare go back to the bedroom, downstairs. She lay down on a towel on the bathroom floor and waited for the dizzy spell to pass. While she was there, she had too much time to think.

  Normally a pregnancy wasn’t like this. Normally your husband holds your head in such situations.

  It was just a few months, such he told her on the phone.