A Life Too Short: The Tragedy of Robert Enke

by Reng, Ronald

  He should have been annoyed about this simplistic way of looking at things. In fact he was glad that Hildebrand remembered him.

  When Barça played, he went to a hotel bar to watch the game on satellite TV. The television in the rental flat only received the handful of Spanish terrestrial channels. When she paid a visit, Teresa was pleased to note that he hardly ever watched football on television now. He was proud that he had discovered the hotel bar as a place to do so – a habit, more of a ritual, that he came up with all by himself. The word ‘routine’ has a bad sound to it, but for him it was vital. Something to cling on to.

  He watched Barça in a UEFA Cup match. They quickly took the lead, then made it 2–0. It got boring. He got fixated on the man in front of him, who was forever picking his nose. ‘Is that disgusting or what? Look!’ What did he feel when he watched Barça on television? ‘Nothing at all. I never had the feeling of being a part of it.’

  The distance between him and what he saw as real football assumed a new dimension in June 2004. Everywhere people were watching football, everywhere people were talking about football, and he went on playing football, without anyone noticing outside Tenerife. The European Championship in Portugal was beginning. Taking part in that tournament had been his all-surpassing dream only two years earlier, in Lisbon – in another life. Now, in parallel with the European Championship, he had to get through the rest of the Segunda División season.

  It didn’t occur to anyone to compare Kahn, Buffon and Casillas at the European Championship with Enke against Eibar, Cádiz and Gijón – the comparison sounds ludicrous. But the truth is that at this European Championship where there were no extraordinary goalkeeping achievements and few saves to match Robert’s against Eibar’s Saizar and Gijón’s Bilić.

  It would never have occurred to Robert to make the comparison either. As far as he was concerned, during the European Championship he was an excited holiday-maker in front of the television in Tenerife.

  Lobo Carrasco asked Robert to visit him at his office. He wanted to contract him to Tenerife for another season. ‘With Robert, the whole project had assumed a new orientation: upwards.’ Hannover 96 and Albacete Balompié – two top division teams, in Germany and Spain respectively – were also vying for him.

  He talked about football to Carrasco for less than ten minutes. They ended up talking about Lara. Teresa was in her seventh month.

  She couldn’t talk to Marco’s wife Christina any more. Christina often tried to ring: Teresa listened to the ringing of the phone and couldn’t pick it up. It was unbearable for her to talk to a friend who was having a good pregnancy.

  Robert thought the choice of a new club would have something to do with Lara: they should live in a place with good access to a prestigious paediatric cardiologist. But even though the birth was only six or seven weeks away, these big decisions seemed far in the future to him. He had the vague feeling that everything would sort itself out.

  * * *

  In Portugal the first big clash was about to kick off, the Czech Republic against the Netherlands, two casually elegant teams fielding two outstanding goalkeepers in Petr Cech and Edwin van der Sar. And Robert couldn’t watch the game. That evening he had to play himself, in an insignificant end-of-season game against Getafe in the Heliodoro Rodríguez Stadium. Tenerife were carefree. Twentieth in the table when Robert first played for them in mid-April, the team was now eighth. In their eight games with him they had not lost.

  Five days before the match, on the Monday, he got a phone-call. Did he remember him? the caller asked. He was the vice-president of Alavés; they’d been having negotiations two years ago when Robert opted for Barça, which was understandable.

  Robert assumed that the vice-president wanted to offer him a contract for the coming season. By now Alavés were in the Segunda División but still had a chance to go up on the last day of play. He tried to remember. He had liked the little town, Vitoria.

  He wanted to make him an offer, the vice-president said: he would pay Tenerife 100,000 euros if they beat Getafe.

  Alavés would only go up if Getafe lost.

  ‘The Hour of the Briefcases Full of Money’ is the name given to the last day of the season in the lower Spanish professional divisions. Some clubs fight desperately for promotion, or to avoid relegation; others are already in the comfort zone – the money-chests are supposed to help them with their motivation.

  A hundred thousand euros. That was a good five thousand per player – limpio, or clean, as after-tax money is called in Spain.

  On Tuesday, four days before the game against Getafe, Robert asked for a moment’s peace in the changing-room before training. He had received an interesting phone-call.

  Bonuses for victories like the one being offered by Alavés’s vice-president were tolerated in Spain. Too many professionals in the lower Spanish divisions aren’t paid for months by their chronically stingy clubs. Who would expect them not to have those maletas de dinero – briefcases full of money – in the backs of their minds during those final days of play? Robert was still waiting for half of his salary at Tenerife, and he assumed he wasn’t the only one.

  The same day, after training, Carrasco had a word with the captain of the team, Antonio Hidalgo. ‘I don’t know what’s going on,’ he said. ‘If Alavés have offered you a bonus to win, that’s fine. But there are rumours that we’re selling the game to Getafe. It’s your responsibility to see that the team doesn’t throw the game.’ If he heard anything he would step in, Hidalgo promised.

  Robert went to have a chocolate milk-shake in the pedestrian precinct, since these would probably be his last days on the island. He had met Ewald Lienen, the coach at Hannover 96, and felt he had found a coach who would not only treat him as a footballer, but as a human being. He drank the milk-shake with a sense of having earned a reward.

  On the Wednesday before training one of Robert’s closer acquaintances on the team spoke up. ‘If you don’t mention my name,’ this player tells me six years later, ‘I’ll tell you what happened.’

  On Tuesday he had had a phone-call. If he made a few inconspicuous mistakes guaranteeing a victory for Getafe, someone would pay him – he wouldn’t say who – twenty-five million pesetas. After the player had turned down the offer, the caller rang back a day later and offered forty million.

  Robert first had to convert that into euros – honestly, the Spaniards with their pesetas, three years after the change of currency. It was exactly 240,400 euros.

  ‘I told the caller, leave me out, I don’t do things like that,’ the player said in Tenerife’s changing-room before training on the Thursday. ‘If anyone else got a call like that, now’s the time to say.’

  No one spoke.

  Before the last training session of the season, Lobo Carrasco came down to the changing-room. The walls in the stadium catacombs were painted blue and white; you could see the outlines of the bare bricks under the paint. ‘If you get a bonus for a win from Alavés, that’s fine,’ he began calmly. ‘But a bonus for a defeat will always be a blot on your career and your conscience. You will never recover from that. If I find out, if I catch anyone, he’ll be out. And I will make sure that he never gets another contract anywhere – I’ll report him. Do you understand that?’

  Some players nodded, some looked at the floor. No one said anything.

  When the players in the Heliodoro Rodríguez Stadium looked up, they saw the mountains of Tenerife, soft and green, natural extensions of the terraces. Just after the start of play, Robert heard a murmuring up there. News was spreading from those fans with radios that the Netherlands were winning 2–0 against the Czech Republic after only nineteen minutes.

  ‘There was a holiday mood in the stadium,’ Carrasco recalls.

  Robert wanted to win at all costs. He wanted to leave Tenerife and be able to say: I never lost a game there. Half an hour later he lost his Spanish while yelling at his centre-halves Corona and César Belli. ‘I was so exasperated that I could only
shout in German.’ They heard and understood Robert’s curses on the subs bench, says Álvaro Iglesias, who can still repeat the words today, in flawless German: ‘Scheisse! Arschloch!’

  Tenerife were 3–0 down.

  Getafe had repeatedly looked for Pachón, their agile striker, ‘I felt as if our defenders were opening the way for him,’ Robert said. ‘Eventually two members of the opposing team were standing freely in front of me. “You’re completely crazy!” I roared at our defenders.’

  It turned into a rousing game. The eleven thousand fans thought it was the best sort of summer football. Freed from the pressure of having to win, Tenerife played enthusiastically but without concentration. If they lost it wouldn’t be so bad: the fans didn’t mind allowing Getafe their promotion – they were a team from the Madrid suburbs, the archetypal charming outsiders. Robert thought the Tenerife players were playing against each other. Nine men trying vehemently to win the game and Alavés’s briefcase full of money, and one, perhaps two players trying to lose, to fill their own coffers. Carrasco sat in the terraces and saw both versions, the innocent one seen by the crowd and the poisonous one suspected by the honest players. ‘I didn’t notice anything odd, but then what’s odd? Pachón flew, he was all energy, and in their minds our guys were already at the beach.’

  In Aveiro in north Portugal, the Czech Republic, in a game that no one would ever forget, turned their 2–0 deficit into a 3–2 victory over the Netherlands. In Santa Cruz, Pachón scored five goals. Getafe won 5–3 and were promoted to the Primera División, and a game that was never to be forgotten was recorded, even in the Spanish sports newspapers, with fifteen lines on page thirty-nine. Only one local Canary Islands newspaper, La Opinión, registered some doubts: ‘The extreme fragility was something very curious in a defence that was extremely solid until yesterday.’

  The lawn-sprinklers came on when Getafe’s team were still celebrating their promotion on the pitch. CD Tenerife were in a hurry to bring the season to a close.

  In the changing-room the mood was muted. ‘Of course we were pissed off,’ says Álvaro Iglesias. ‘We’ll never be able to prove it, but the feeling was that someone out of our own group had messed up our bonus from Alavés. Someone had filled their own pockets at our expense.’

  In December 2008 unambiguous evidence emerged that several games in Spanish professional football had been sold. Most of the papers reported the subject for a single day. The Spanish Football Association said they weren’t responsible, the Spanish judiciary said neither were they. And the games went on.

  Robert opened the roof of his car. He was driving a visitor to the airport, and soon he would be leaving himself. The sky over Tenerife was milky, hazy, a southern wind bringing sand across from Africa. For the German sportswriters it had been his low point, Enke in the Spanish Second Division, on a holiday island. For him it had been a high. None of the aggravation of the last game could spoil that. ‘I think I’ll have a hamburger today,’ he said, and turned up the radio. He hummed along with a song that he didn’t know.

  FOURTEEN

  There is Robert, There is No Goal

  FOR A MAN who urgently wanted to sell his converted farmhouse in Lower Saxony, Jacques Gassmann set an astonishing condition. For the first few months after the sale he would go on living there. He needed time to find a new place to live and he hadn’t started looking for one yet.

  He was an artist. That’s what artists are like, Robert thought; they saw the world from a different angle, which was how they produced great works.

  ‘Christ, that’s not how you buy a house, is it?’ Teresa wondered – looking at one and saying yes. They had only ever rented before.

  ‘Why not?’ asked Robert, and waited for her bright laughter, certain that it was already on the way.

  They’d been back in Germany for a week. Robert had already played his first pre-season match for Hannover 96, a day after the signature of the contract. He was immediately absorbed in the rhythm of professional sport again, training in the morning, warm-up matches, training in the afternoon. Teresa was very pregnant. The sooner they found a house the better.

  With sure taste and a love for detail, Jacques had redesigned the farmhouse; the stable had become a kitchen with a French tiled floor, in the hall a chandelier hung over a long farmer’s table. He hadn’t given much thought to the expense when converting the building; he thought an artist should live unmaterialistically. Now he had to sell the house. But he didn’t know where to put all his paintings.

  For all his strangeness he seemed to be a nice enough man, and Teresa and Robert bought the farmhouse along with the artist. Jacques was to be allowed to live with them for another three months while he looked for a new home.

  Through the big window of the little living-room Robert was able to watch the artist painting in the garden. Once he went outside. He crept over – you don’t disturb artists at their work – and stood still behind Jacques’s back. The artist’s grey hair fell to his shoulders. He gave a start when he suddenly became aware of Robert standing there.

  The goalkeeper had a few questions. Where did the darkness in Jacques’s paintings come from? Why was everything always black, blurred, overpainted? But how could he, as a footballer, ask these questions? He thought he should feel his way into it with normal questions, questions he was qualified to ask. He asked Jacques how the heating-oil deliveries for the house worked, whether he might be able to recommend a vet for them, since he had a cat, and how he had managed to raise six thousand euros a month in loans and expenses as an artist. If he was lucky, if things went as he hoped, the artist might tell him about his art later on.

  In the nineties, Gassmann’s cycle Apocalypse had created something of a stir. The work had travelled Europe from exhibition to exhibition; some critics detected an evolutionary line: Max Beckmann, Lukas Kramer, Jacques Gassmann. Then, in response to the second Gulf War he painted spiritually screaming, mentally exploding American bomber pilots. Supersonic was the name of that series, and he couldn’t stop. By the time that well had run dry he had created 160 paintings. ‘If I didn’t have art, I would explode, Robert,’ he said. ‘I have to vomit everything out with the paintbrush.’ Sentences, bold and heavy, you might expect from an artist. But he couldn’t give Robert the real answers. He hadn’t even found them for himself.

  Robert’s death led him to them. ‘What have I been painting? I’ve been painting abysses, people tearing themselves apart,’ Gassmann says three months after Robert’s death. ‘The end of time was a big subject in the nineties, and I went on painting abysses when the nineties were over. It never clicked that I was depicting my own mental state.’

  In the garden in Empede – Lake Steinhude starts just beyond the horse-track – Jacques laid his paintings on the lawn to dry.

  ‘Wait, Jacques, I’ll just shut Balu in the house so that he doesn’t ruin anything,’ said Teresa. Balu suffered from distemper, a virus that destroys the brain. He could no longer control himself.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ said Jacques, ‘he can stay out here with me. He’s an artist dog!’

  ‘I’d feel better if he wasn’t with you.’

  ‘Oh come on. We get on, don’t we, Balu, my artist dog?’

  Ten minutes later Teresa heard a shout from the garden. ‘That’s coming out of your insurance! Your dog walked over my paintings!’

  Robert went to training every day, feeling as if he was coming home. He was in a town he’d never wanted to live in at a club he’d never dreamed of playing for, but the very fact that he was living in Germany again persuaded him that he had finally arrived. For two years he had been at sea. With Hannover he would presumably end up in the bottom third of the Bundesliga, but that didn’t bother him; he would come to terms with it. Without any more solid a reason than a newly discovered joie de vivre he was sure he was ‘going to feel right here’.

  19. Robert with the dogs at his house in Empede.

  Because the Lower Saxony Stadium was being converted for
the 2006 World Cup, the team changed before training in the nearby sport hall. There was only one small changing-room, and the coach got the janitor’s office. His new colleagues were startled when Robert walked through the changing-room and introduced himself. He knew nearly all of them by name: ‘You must be Frankie – hi’; ‘Oh, you’re Per.’ He had searched for his new team-mates on the internet.

  Not everyone in Germany remembered him.

  ‘What number shall we put on his back, twenty-five or thirty?’ one of the two team assistants asked the coach.

  ‘Number one,’ Ewald Lienen replied.

  Lienen, who had as a young man marched with the peace movement for the banning of Pershing missiles and the closure of nuclear power stations, had a mind of his own. If the football scene saw Enke’s flight from Istanbul as unprofessional, as weak and cowardly, Lienen saw the step as a sign of strength from a courageous, sensitive man.

  No one knew the truth. Robert spoke publicly about his depression without anyone knowing what he was talking about. ‘That was a negative experience that had nothing to do with football and everything to do with wellbeing,’ he told the Neue Presse from Hanover in his first interview after coming home when asked what had happened in Istanbul.

  When he thought about depression, he was able to slip out of his own skin and look back with detachment and self-irony at ‘Robbi the nutjob’, as he called the person who wasn’t him. ‘Tenerife was my spa cure,’ he said. ‘But I know it could have gone the other way. I was a has-been. Apart from Lienen it wouldn’t have occurred to anyone to bring me back to the Bundesliga. I’m very grateful to him for that.’