A Life Too Short: The Tragedy of Robert Enke

by Reng, Ronald

  The national coach rang him. Eight months after Robert had been sitting on the subs bench in the Spanish Second Division Jürgen Klinsmann invited him on a tour of Asia with the national team. Robert declined. He didn’t confer with anyone, not even Teresa, he simply told Klinsmann on the phone that sadly he couldn’t do it, he couldn’t go away for ten days, he had to stay with his daughter. ‘I was touched that he didn’t even ask me,’ says Teresa. ‘That he was so serious about being with his daughter.’

  Robert felt loved and acknowledged. That made it easier to give love back, even to forgive himself his own mistakes.

  But boundless understanding was something else entirely. Where Jacques was concerned, they were finding it more and more difficult to be generous. They felt increasingly that they weren’t at home in their own house. They still hadn’t been able to move their own furniture in. According to the contract, Jacques had to move out by 1 October at the latest; it was now mid-December. He hadn’t even started looking for a new place to live.

  ‘Oh what’s all this about contracts? I thought we were friends!’ cried the artist when they finally told him one evening that it was really time to move out. Jacques’s poet friend had gone, but now his daughter from his first marriage was visiting.

  ‘But Jacques, don’t you understand that we can’t live together in the long term? And you haven’t even started thinking about moving out.’

  ‘OK, then I’ll start!’ He leapt to his feet and started pulling his crockery out of the kitchen cupboards. ‘Look, I’m packing!’

  ‘Jacques, please.’

  ‘I give everything up to live with you and all these animals here, and then you throw something like this at me – if I’d known!’

  Teresa was beside herself. Robert, who normally stayed calm when other people got worked up, fought in vain against his rising fury. He couldn’t defuse the situation.

  Jacques’s daughter did that, sixteen years old. ‘He’s just like that, don’t despair,’ she said to Teresa and Robert. ‘Papa, come on, let’s you and me go upstairs now and start packing your things.’

  Jacques actually did move out, to a friend’s at first – where was he supposed to go at the drop of a hat? But he had one last surprise for them by way of farewell. Teresa’s mother called them from Bad Windsheim. ‘It’s great that there’s going to be a vernissage at your house. Are you making the canapés?’

  Jacques had sent out invitations to a private Christmas viewing of his paintings. If he sold a lot of them he wouldn’t have to take so many away with him. Teresa’s mother had been invited because she knew Jacques from her visits to Empede. She was taken with his art and was on his distribution list. Jacques hadn’t mentioned the event to Teresa and Robert, which was taking place in his studio, beside their house.

  The next evening Teresa and Robert sat in their kitchen watching in silence as a crowd of strangers walked quite matter-of-factly through their house and asked them where the toilet was.

  ‘What is this?’ Robert asked Teresa. ‘A bad film? Or the normal madness of our life?’

  They decided to laugh. It summed up their early days in Hanover, says Teresa. ‘It was a lovely time, but a really terrible one.’

  FIFTEEN

  Lara

  IN A ROOM for two hundred people, they were the only guests. Red plastic chairs stood at plain wooden tables; a few pot plants between the rows of tables testified to a vain attempt to make the hall more appealing. Teresa and Robert spent Christmas in the hospital canteen. There are some details you never forget: on the menu was salmon with green tagliatelle.

  Without intending to, their acquaintances had hurt them over the past few days with simple questions.

  ‘So, where are you going for the Christmas holidays?’

  To hospital.

  It was raining outside. But the loneliness of the canteen soon gave way to a feeling that they were celebrating a special Christmas. They had Lara, now sleeping peacefully in Ward 68b. They had each other. Teresa took pictures of the canteen food – their curious Christmas dinner.

  Robert spent some of his holiday on the phone. His conversations with Marco provided a bit of distraction. Since Lara’s birth Teresa was regularly phoning the Villas, who had just had a daughter themselves, Chiara. And while Marco talked to Robert about very different concerns, he thought he understood why it was that his friend played such great football in Hanover. ‘He felt more valuable because he was looking after Lara. That feeling of self-worth gave him an incredible amount of strength and pride.’

  Experiencing the serenity with which Robert was coping with a difficult situation wasn’t just a source of joy for Marco. He was also slightly hurt by it. Because he automatically asked why he couldn’t cope with the pressure of professional sport in a similar way. He was only being used every now and then at Arezzo; in the winter break he was going to switch to Ferrara, also in the Italian Third Division. From the very first day Marco had always felt a bit like Robert’s protector. Were they switching roles?

  When Marco visited them in Empede, Robert said, ‘Come with me.’ He led his friend to his office. Shelves reached to the ceiling; boxes full of photographs stood next to Spanish textbooks and files marked Business Tax. Robert picked up one of these tomes. ‘Here, look. My depri-file.’ He showed Marco his diaries, the poem about the dwarf. He thought he could look back over them with a smile.

  On St Valentine’s Day 2005, Lara came home. Her parents had had a room decorated for her birth five and a half months earlier. Now they were holding in their hands a child with blue lips and had to get straight to work. Every three hours she received liquid nourishment through a tube in her nose. When the saturation indicator beeped, Robert or Teresa had to look at the monitor to check that the oxygen level hadn’t fallen below 60 per cent: if it had, Lara would have to go to the clinic straight away. In the first four days Robert didn’t sleep much and Teresa not at all. ‘I was glad that Lara was home, but my nerves were in pieces,’ says Teresa. ‘The responsibility, the fear of doing something wrong, drove me mad.’ Lara was about to have the last of her three heart operations.

  ‘She’s thrown up again!’ Teresa cried despairingly after giving Lara the food solution. Now she had to start all over again, and each feed took an hour and a half. Later she was sitting quietly in the kitchen at last when she heard the beep of the saturation sensor; but how could she tell if it was really beeping, or only in her head? She kept walking into Lara’s room to check. She had been a passionate sleeper, ‘cuddling up in bed at night, and reading had always been the loveliest thing’, but since Lara’s birth until today Teresa hasn’t slept through the night. ‘It’s embedded so deep within me that I still keep waking up.’

  After Robert’s death a one-sided impression was created of a man dependent on Teresa’s love and help. But more often than not he helped others, his wife included.

  ‘You don’t need to give her the full portion again, she didn’t throw everything up,’ he said, and led Teresa gently away from Lara’s bed.

  ‘I’ll go,’ he said when she felt compelled to check the oxygen saturation again. ‘It’s seventy per cent,’ he said, when the saturation level was 67 per cent.

  On the fourth night of life with Lara at home he said: perhaps there was a meaning to it all, a child with Lara’s problems ending up with them, a couple without financial worries. Let’s take on a nurse for the nights, even if the health service won’t cover the costs.

  The night-nurse came for the first time on 18 February. It was Teresa’s birthday.

  ‘And what are you doing today?’ Jörg asked on the phone, after saying happy birthday.

  ‘I’m going to sleep, at last I’m going to sleep. That’s my birthday party.’

  With Lara at home, nine months after their return to Germany they were beginning to see the country they had come back to. At the supermarket till in Neustadt, Robert could hardly keep up with the packing. The customer behind him was already giving him sour looks; sh
e couldn’t understand why he was smiling. The smile wasn’t meant for her, it was a product of his thoughts. He remembered the supermarket in Lisbon, where everyone had waited stoically in the queue until the customer at the front had finished her conversation with the cashier about her raspberry tart recipe.

  They hadn’t been globetrotters by choice; chance had led them through southern Europe for five years. Even so they felt torn, as people often do when they come home. They missed the light of Lisbon, the sound of the waves, and the feeling of being at home that they had experienced among their friends in Sant Cugat. Robert often read the Portuguese sports papers online for the latest news from Benfica and, although he was reluctant to admit it, El Mundo Deportivo for news about Barça. But their memories didn’t spoil their feeling of wellbeing in Empede. It was lovely there, with its expanse of fields and the peace of the forest. It would be lovely if you could take your baby for long walks, if you could drop by for a chat with the neighbours, if you could do what normal parents did.

  In their life between the intensive care ward and the training-ground they had got to know hardly anyone. Hannover’s striker Thomas Christiansen and his wife Nuria had once come to the clinic but Christiansen had left again a few minutes later. He couldn’t bear the sight of it.

  At training, Robert often spoke in Spanish to Christiansen, a Dane with a Spanish mother, out of sheer love of the language. On Wednesdays, when the team trained twice, a group of players stayed together after the end of the session. They had moved back into the stadium. The refurbishments for the World Cup were done, but the space behind their changing-room looked anything but world-class. Empty drinks crates were stacked in the corners, and the place smelled of shoe polish. It was Mille’s realm – Michael Gorgas, who managed the kit, looked after the boots, took care of sportswear in general. On Wednesdays after training he used to cook vacuum-packed bockwursts for the players in his room. In his fridge, he hoarded lemon-flavoured beer. The footballers called his room Cabin Two. This was where the club’s success was forged.

  Hannover 96 finished Robert’s first season back in the Bundesliga in tenth place, which was remarkable for a club that was unused to success. The keen-eyed coach had found the kind of players that made a team better: Robert Enke, Per Mertesacker, Michael Tarnat. He had organised the defence and choreographed the attacks. It wasn’t extraordinary football, just clear-headed. But the coach’s tactical know-how would have remained purely theoretical if Ewald Lienen hadn’t also triggered something with his group initiatives around the lunch table and at the zoo. The hard core of the team now sat in Cabin Two, wearing only towels after their sauna, clutching bockwurst and beer. Michael Tarnat, Frank Juric, Vinicius, Robert Enke and a few others, eight to ten of them – later on Hanno Balitsch, Szabolcs Husti and Arnold Bruggink too – enjoyed talking shop and acting the fool. And without anyone noticing, a team spirit was produced.

  ‘I bet you can’t eat fifteen bockwursts and rolls in half an hour, Mille,’ said one of the players.

  Mille started eating. The others fetched themselves another beer. After thirteen bockwursts Mille couldn’t go on.

  ‘Come on, let’s do some track-racing.’

  They put up rubbish-bins and crates of water as obstacles, and Mille steered his bicycle along the course. ‘Faster, Mille!’ the spectators called from behind the bins. He took some bad falls but he joined in with the footballers’ laughter. He felt that acting the fool was the most important task of a kit manager.

  ‘It’s nice to be successful, but it’s even nicer to be successful with friends,’ said Robert. ‘You don’t often find a team as cohesive as ours in professional football.’

  In the changing-room he sat next to Michael Tarnat. Tarnat was already thirty-six and had played with Bayern Munich and for Germany in the 1998 World Cup. His ideas on how a professional team should behave came from the far-off days of Stefan Effenberg. When twenty-year-old Jan Rosenthal lost the ball with a back-heel in a training match, Tarnat kicked him viciously a few minutes later. That would teach the lad a lesson. Robert took Rosenthal by the arm and gave him some words of encouragement when he found him, after one bad match, desperate and hyperventilating, bent over the basin in the toilet. Deep down he still found the tough style of the Effenberg generation suspect. But unlike in Mönchengladbach, he was no longer on the receiving end, he was on the side of the ones who set the pace. Tarnat was one of his closest colleagues on the team. His uncompromising and often witty way of addressing shortcomings helped the team, that much was clear to him now. But he also found an answer to a question he had asked himself nine years earlier, during his first weeks in Mönchengladbach: did he have to be like that too? He didn’t, and he would never want to be.

  In Cabin Two he discovered football. For a long time he hadn’t been interested in the game itself, only in the special task of the goalkeeper. Now he listened to Tarnat or Balitsch when they talked tactics. He started thinking about the game the way a coach would. Should one of the defensive midfield players switch to attack more often? Why didn’t they hit more cross-field passes from the right-back to the centre-forward to avoid their opponents’ pressing? Like almost everyone who becomes strategically aware about football, Robert suddenly felt enriched. At the same time he wondered what a waste it would have been only ever to see football from a superficial point of view.

  But football, which seems to divide the world quite clearly, every weekend, into winners and losers, often seduces the most intelligent observers into a simplistic view of the game. Robert was forced to acknowledge this as soon as his second season with Hannover began in August 2005. Hannover 96 soon found themselves clinging on to a mid-table position. Given the club’s potential, that was passable enough. But no one outside Cabin Two seemed to be assessing the team in terms of its possibilities; they were all judging it by its impressive tenth place the previous year. They had bought two internationals, Hanno Balitsch and Thomas Brdaric´; shouldn’t the team be playing even better this season? Instead they lost 4–1 in Bielefeld at the end of October, and a week later they were losing 2–0 to Mainz after sixty-five minutes. The fans shouted, ‘We want our money back!’ ‘Get rid of Lienen!’

  The men from Cabin Two knew that their team was going through one of those bad spells most mid-table teams suffer from every now and then. But they had a sense that the club’s sporting director Ilja Kaenzig was caught up in the public hysteria, trapped in his own idea that things had to go ever further, ever higher. If the team lost 2–0, the sporting director would sack the coach – their coach.

  Lienen, a sympathetic father-figure within the team but publicly thin-skinned, hadn’t exactly strengthened his position with some stroppy appearances in the media.

  Four minutes before the end of the game Brdaric´ scored to make it 2–1. In the last minute of play, which had already lasted 180 seconds, Tarnat got hold of the ball out of a mêlée and fired it into the back of the net. He was the first to run to the sideline, to Lienen. All the players threw themselves jubilantly at their coach. Robert was furthest away so he threw himself on top of the mountain of people. It was a demonstration of their feelings.

  Kaenzig vacillated.

  It takes a sporting director with strong nerves and an unshakeable belief in cold-blooded analysis, to ignore cries of ‘Sack the coach!’, when the team is close to relegation. There aren’t many around.

  Two days after the 2–2 draw against Mainz, Kaenzig spent three hours in a hotel with Lienen. Then he said, OK, let’s keep going.

  21. 13 May 2006: Robert with Lara after the victory over Bayer Leverkusen in Hanover.

  The next morning, Lienen got changed for training. He was already wearing his football boots and his navy-blue windcheater when Kaenzig came in. He was sorry, but he’d decided to dismiss him.

  The players were brought into a conference room. The rage that leads to mutiny was throbbing in some of them. ‘We don’t have a crisis situation, but we have observed a stagnation,’ said
the sporting director. The players sat in front of him with their arms folded, saying nothing. A professional footballer has to accept the decisions of his superiors without complaint; he needs to serve the club even in defiance of his own opinion. That’s an unwritten fundamental principle of football.

  All of a sudden a player stood up. Robert Enke spoke clearly. ‘As employees, we have to respect the club’s decision. But the way you threw the coach out is dishonourable. It’s very bad form.’

  He still found conflicts disagreeable. But strengthened after his depression, he felt ready to take on an argument calmly and matter-of-factly.

  In January 2006, at sixteen months old, Lara survived her third heart operation. ‘The life-threatening phase is over,’ said Robert. The parents watched their child with pride. She had her father’s fair hair, while the eyes took more after her mother. A few months later than usual, Lara learned to sit up. Eventually she picked a chair and tried to pull herself up on her wobbly legs. When her parents talked to her, she moved her mouth as if she wanted to speak. Not a word came out. ‘Lara will never be really well,’ said Robert, sounding sober, but at the same time like a happy father who thinks his child is capable of anything.

  What was striking was how often Lara laughed. When she looked at the dogs, when her father rolled his eyes for her, when her mother wore a baseball cap. Ela, their housekeeper, took it quite naturally that Lara couldn’t be fed from a jar or that she wasn’t able to walk. Ela treated her without reservations, unafraid that anything might happen to her. She took the little one with her when she went shopping, she took her to see other children. Ela was showing Lara’s parents something, without noticing: it was fine. Even for Lara there was such a thing as normality. Or at least an imitation of normality.