by Reng, Ronald
Still, the virus remained a strange thing. The coaches asked the advice of Hans-Dieter Hermann, the Germany team’s sports psychologist. He spoke with Robert. With the symptoms he was showing, exhaustion and sleeplessness without an infection, one would have to wonder whether he wasn’t suffering from depression, Hermann said to the goalkeeper. Depression, for heaven’s sake? He’d just become a father! He was happy, Robert replied convivially. He couldn’t detect anything particularly unusual, Hermann told the coaches.
And that was that as far as the coaches were concerned. Robert Enke was just unlucky.
A chauffeur drove him back to Empede. He hadn’t shaved – he had neither the strength nor the desire. He looked down at himself. He had dropped out. He had failed.
‘Robbi, you’ve got to promise me something,’ said Teresa when they were alone in the house.
He looked at her reluctantly.
‘I know depression is making everything look black at the moment, but you’ve got to fight against that. We’re all fighting with you here. You can’t just stand on a balcony and jump.’
‘Everything’s pointless anyway.’
‘Robbi, promise me you won’t kill yourself!’
‘I promise.’
She looked him in the eye, and he held her gaze. ‘If you could just have my head for half an hour, you’d know why I go mad,’ he said. It sounded like an offer of reconciliation.
A death-wish, to a greater or lesser degree, is part of the illness. For Robert it had never been as intense as it was that Saturday night in Cologne. He had assumed that by stepping down from the game in Hanover he would free himself from one source of pressure. But the fact that he had stepped down exerted an even greater pressure on him. He had failed.
Jörg Neblung interrupted his holiday in Majorca to go and see Robert and Teresa. They sat, as they’d done many times before, on the orange chairs in the kitchen, and ran through Robert’s options. Should he feign an injury and secretly undergo a course of therapy? Should he make his illness public and go to a clinic for treatment? For every possible solution Robert saw a reason why it would never work. Seeing only pointlessness was also in the nature of the illness. And Teresa and Jörg found it hard to contradict him. Every possible solution only seemed to raise new problems.
When he had resigned from Fenerbahçe six years ago he was a half-forgotten talent; he could disappear for days and no one asked what he was up to. Now he was number one in the country of goalkeepers. If he took a break for a course of therapy or went to a clinic he wouldn’t be able to keep it quiet. Then the World Cup would be out of the question. And what would happen after the therapy, after the clinic? Would he be strong enough to stage a comeback as the Depressive in the full glare of the media? Would he grow bitter if he had to give up football entirely?
At the end of the conversation they seemed to have come back to the beginning: the best option was that Robert should go on playing hide and seek and continue with his treatment with Dr Stroscher. The anti-depressants would have to kick in eventually!
Once they’d seen Robert off to bed, Jörg and Teresa stopped in the hall for a moment.
‘What are you doing?’ asked Teresa.
Jörg was putting a large porcelain candlestick in front of the bedroom door.
‘In case he wants to run off and do something silly tonight. He’ll trip over the candlestick and we’ll hear him.’
Valentin Markser had told them that suicidal thoughts on their own weren’t grounds for panic, but they would have to be alert, and at the same time make sure they didn’t control him too tightly. Otherwise he would feel helpless, which would only drive him more deeply into depression.
On the second morning the porcelain candlestick got broken. Teresa had forgotten it was there and had fallen over it.
Valentin Markser was used to being lied to. Depressives often tended to play down their illness, in a kind of false self-protection. Robert Enke had been no exception that Saturday evening in Cologne. That very fact had enabled Markser to recognise the seriousness of the illness. But Robert was being treated by a colleague, so he couldn’t get involved. He could only warn him.
When Marco Villa spoke on the phone to Markser, as he did every Monday evening, he thought he heard between the lines that something urgently needed to be done. Marco rang Jörg.
‘Jörg, we can’t let things go on like this. If football is such a burden for Robbi, we’ve got to take him out of it.’
‘Teresa and I have already talked to him about that several times. But he really doesn’t want to go to a clinic because he doesn’t want to lose football.’
‘If he has to give up being a footballer he’ll get over it. He’ll find something else. He’ll go into hotel management or I don’t know what. The important thing now isn’t his career, it’s about finding his way out of the depression.’
‘But if he drops out of football, that’s going to make him really ill.’
Robert’s best friends were arguing over him for the first time.
Marco was in Italy, and he wasn’t to call Robert because it would only wind him up. Jörg had left his wife alone in Cologne with their little daughter and moved in to the house in Empede to support Teresa. But the despair that Marco and Jörg felt at that moment was the same. They were neither competent nor authorised to make decisions about Robert’s life. Yet that was precisely what the situation seemed to require from them and Teresa.
He was sitting in the garden, crying.
Teresa ran over to him. ‘Robbi, what’s up?’
‘I don’t want to die. I want to go back to Lisbon.’
LISBOA! he wrote in his black book that evening.
One afternoon Jörg asked him to come to the laundry room. Jörg turned the light off. The room had no windows, so it was dark. ‘This is your condition at the moment,’ said Jörg. ‘Now try to feel your way along the walls to the door. That’s the path you’ve got to take. We’ll build the walls for you, but you have to walk by yourself.’ If Robert found the door and opened it he would see the light – that had been Jörg’s intention. Dr Stroscher thought it was an excellent idea when Jörg told him about it later. However, Robert walked not to the door but to the light switch. He clicked it on and shouted like a ghost: ‘Boo!’ Then he walked to the door, opened it and said, ‘And what do I see behind the door? My office. That’s what really makes me depressed.’
For brief periods, sometimes for hours in the evening, he seemed to be freed from the illness for no discernible reason. Then just as abruptly he fell back into the darkness.
He even managed some light training on his own. By now Germany had beaten Azerbaijan, 4–0, and the Bundesliga season had resumed. Every day reporters stood at the Hannover training-ground meticulously jotting down which players were missing. And the players who were missing had to have a good reason, like a torn cruciate ligament. Robert may have turned up but there was still no explanation, no justification, for his withdrawal from the national side. In the papers the ‘general infection’ had turned into a ‘puzzling viral illness’, and finally into a ‘mysterious virus’. There was now a new pressure on Robert: when would he finally be able to explain what was going on?
He had told Tim Meyer that he would have himself checked by a doctor in Hanover. That meant he would have to be able to show that he had undergone some medical tests, otherwise he would lose credibility. And it wasn’t impossible that he was actually carrying a virus. Fatigue in the summer had troubled him before the depression had settled in. Perhaps one had influenced the other; perhaps his physical exhaustion had weakened him so much that his psychological weakness was able to return.
Hannover’s team doctor sent him for a heart examination at the stadium’s sports centre. The examiner was surprised to find that Robert’s heartbeat reacted to stress with a slight hesitation. That wasn’t normal. The doctor didn’t know that Robert was taking psychotropic drugs for his depression, which delayed his reactions.
He was
referred to a cardiac specialist at the Agnes Karll Hospital. Jörg went with him. The specialist said that he wanted to give him a urine and a blood test. But what if they found traces of the drugs he was taking in his blood? When the specialist went off to see another patient for a moment, Robert turned to Jörg and said, ‘We’ve got to get out of here.’
When the cardiac specialist returned, Jörg told him that Robert wasn’t going to have another blood test, they kept tapping his blood at every hospital he went to, he couldn’t lose that much blood, he was an athlete, they were going now. The specialist watched them leave with a bemused expression on his face.
‘Mystery surrounds Enke’ the papers wrote. There was still no explanation for his strange viral illness.
Without being aware of it, Robert had allowed the dynamics of events to propel him into his next vicious circle. He absolutely had to show evidence of a virus that possibly didn’t exist.
‘I’m not going along with this any more!’ he yelled at home. When Teresa asked him cautiously if it mightn’t be better to make his illness public and undergo a course of therapy, he shouted: ‘I’m not going to the clinic!’
Instead he went to see a tick-bite specialist in Langenhagen and visited the Institute of Tropical Medicine in Hamburg. Again some blood was taken, for the fourth time in ten days. And the doctors actually found something: he was suffering from a campylobacter infection of the intestine, the club doctor told him. The bacteria weakened the body and caused diarrhoea. It wasn’t the sort of infection that made a footballer take a break of several weeks, but he hoped no one would ask too many questions.
Jörg was as pleased about the bacteria as he would have been about a Bundesliga victory for Hannover 96. At last Robert had a reason to disappear from the public eye for a period of time without destroying his World Cup dream once and for all.
On 18 September, the papers reported: ‘Enke out of the qualifiers!’ The goalkeeper who was always so unlucky was now having to take a break of at least two weeks because of an intestinal infection that had just been diagnosed. In the remaining qualifiers René Adler would play in goal, and was therefore a clear favourite for the job in the World Cup.
Over the past few weeks it had all been too much for Robert, what with stepping down from the World Cup qualifier in Hanover and the anniversary of Lara’s death, Jörg told Hannover 96’s sporting director Jörg Schmadtke. Robert needed a break. ‘If it helps, he can even go to Portugal for a few weeks,’ Schmadtke replied.
That same day, Robert travelled to Cologne with Jörg. He wanted to be treated by Valentin Markser again. He was hoping everything would work out as it had in 2003.
That evening he watched the Friday Bundesliga game on television with Markser and Jörg, Schalke v. Wolfsburg. They ate pizza and drank beer. Couldn’t enjoy it, Robert wrote in his black book.
He went to see Markser every day. He told him to go jogging, it was good for the head. Robert went running and told himself that he hated it. Jörg came up with a programme to occupy him – fetching the papers and bread in the morning, going to the woods with Milla in the afternoon. On the way up the hill he made Robert push the buggy so that he would have to make an effort, so that he would finally have the feeling of having achieved something.
Around this time I suddenly got a text from Robert. He normally replied to texts almost compulsively, but over the past few weeks he hadn’t even managed that. Now he apologised for his silence and wrote about his illness: ‘I should say this’ll be another good chapter for our book. All the best, Robinho.’
Ronninho and Robinho we called ourselves if we were in a good mood, in memory of the time we spent together in Barcelona, after Barça’s idol Ronaldinho. Where, in the middle of a depression, had the good mood come from, the detachment to think of his illness as a chapter of a book? He and Jörg had cut the hedge in the garden. After that I felt a bit better, it says in the black book.
But there was no getting over the fact that this depression had a different power from the one in 2003. After a week in Cologne he absolutely had to get back to Empede, to Teresa. ‘In Cologne I always have to walk around in a baseball cap. I don’t want to have to hide any more.’ After a day in Empede he thought the same thing as he had in Cologne: he couldn’t stay there. He really didn’t want to be anywhere.
24 September 2009. Decided to go back to Cologne. Madness!
Four days later he drove back to Empede. He wanted to train again, he had to play football again. He got upsurges like that quite often. Suddenly his fighting spirit returned, all of a sudden he wanted to make up in seconds for what he thought he had missed in months. But on this occasion his vigour didn’t fade after a few minutes the way it usually did.
Valentin Markser had changed his anti-depressants.
Robert arranged with the psychiatrist to continue the conversation therapy on the phone from Empede, at a higher frequency – three times a day.
On 29 September, a Tuesday, he went back into training with Hannover 96. Hanno Balitsch hugged him, Tommy Westphal said, great that you’re back. And he no longer felt the fear. The fear of being found out, of not being good enough as a goalkeeper, of having to have a perfectly ordinary conversation with his colleagues.
‘I think I’m a bit better,’ he said to Teresa when he got home.
The next morning he woke up, got out of bed and paused. Was it really that easy now, just getting out of bed? How had he managed that?
When he got home from training he phoned Andreas Köpke. He was training again, he just wanted to say. He still didn’t feel a hundred per cent, of course, and it would be a while before he was back in goal, he didn’t know how long, but he was back. That was all he wanted to say. Then he went to the nursery and played with Leila. The next morning he brought Teresa coffee in bed.
30 September 2009. It’s lightening up! Joining in with life again.
He had done it. They had done it. Teresa couldn’t quite believe it, but she was ecstatic. She had had to live with his gloominess for two months, all the moods and injustices of a depressive. She had made an effort to react patiently to his endless complaints, even when she thought her patience was exhausted. Scientific studies showed that divorce rates in marriages with a depressed partner were nine times as high as non-depressive marriages. And they were about to survive again.
On the third day after returning to training he was still well. On the fourth he came back from training with three roses. Before he gave her the flowers, he recited a poem he had written himself. It was about the two Robbis: one Robbi loved her very much, the other one could no longer show it.
The act of buying the roses had reminded him, however, that the illness was still slumbering within him. When the florist had asked him how many roses he wanted he hadn’t been able to answer. Three or six? It hammered away in his head. Three or six? He didn’t know how long it was before he said in a panic, ‘Three, please.’
On the morning of the fifth day he didn’t feel like training. He had an appointment with the fitness trainer in the gym. The team were at the hotel; they were playing SC Freiburg that afternoon. He called Edward Kowalzuk and said he would rather skip training today, he wasn’t feeling so good. Not a problem, said the fitness trainer. You didn’t contradict Robert Enke at Hannover.
It’s a test, Robert said to himself, to see how he was if he didn’t compulsively structure his day from start to finish.
That afternoon, on the way to the stadium, he wondered, why didn’t I go to training? How am I ever supposed to be a good goalkeeper again if I don’t train? It’s too late – I haven’t trained now and I’ll never be able to catch up.
At the stadium he went to the changing-room to wish the team luck. He also looked in on the treatment room. Something had changed. His photograph on the wall had disappeared. One of the physiotherapists had stuck a poster of the substitute goalkeeper Florian Fromlowitz over it – just a small gesture, to give the young man a boost before the difficult task that lay ah
ead of him. Robert said nothing and left the room.
He sat down in the terraces. It was a while before kick-off and he didn’t want anyone to talk to him, so he picked up the match programme to use it as a shield. He flicked through it and stopped at the cartoon. Fromlowitz was shown as a human brick wall standing in front of a goal.
What was this? Had they totally written him off here? Did everyone suddenly think Fromlowitz was the number one goalkeeper?
Hannover won 5–2. Fromlowitz played decently, and Robert took the cheers of the fans as an insult to him. Did no one need him here any more? Had they already forgotten him? Was he a face from history that you could just stick a different face over?
In Empede, Teresa tried to catch him out with logic. It was understandable enough that the physios should try to build up the substitute goalkeeper: it wasn’t aimed at Robert. And it wouldn’t occur to anyone that Fromlowitz was a rival. As soon as he came back he would be playing again.
‘You’re right,’ he said, but the abrupt movement with which he turned away told Teresa that she could no longer reach him with logic.
She hoped things would be better the following morning. Maybe it had just been a bad day.
In the past, when she woke up on a Sunday morning Teresa had often experienced a feeling of dread in the second or so it took her to get her bearings: ‘What happened yesterday, did they win or lose?’ She knew the answer would determine how nice Sunday was. Now that same dread ran through her again, but with a slightly different question: what mood would Robert be in when he woke up?
He didn’t feel bad, but he didn’t feel good either.
Over the next few days he didn’t want to get up again in the morning. Teresa would lie just to get him out of bed: ‘I have such stomach pains, could you please look after Leila for ten minutes?’
He fought his way through the days, but a fear had returned, the original fear: the fear that all fears would return.
