by Reng, Ronald
On Sunday 8 November at three in the afternoon the floodlights were already on in preparation for the coming darkness. Since the rebuild for the 2006 World Cup the corridor in front of the dressing rooms looked more like a conference centre than a sports ground; the white walls were freshly painted and halogen ceiling lights gleamed above sparkling linoleum floors. Most of the players were already in position when Robert came out of the dressing room. As he walked past he gave two of his team-mates, Steve Cherundolo and Sérgio Pinto, a slap on the back. Out of the corner of his eye he spotted Hamburg’s Piotr Trochowski, a colleague from the national team. Trochowski was about to greet him with a handshake and was surprised by Robert’s hug. As if he hadn’t seen Trochowski for ages, or wasn’t going to see him for ages, he briefly rested his cheek on the other man’s shoulder. As in his first Bundesliga game ten years earlier, he was wearing a black jersey, the favourite colour of the great goalkeepers.
It was a derby, and the game was sold out. Forty-nine thousand people filled the stadium; a sea of flags rose from the terraces. When the teams came out, Teresa was shocked. Robert had shaved his hair down to a few millimetres. He must have done it in the dressing room before the game. As if this game needed a fighting haircut.
‘White or yellow?’ asked the referee. Again Robert won the toss, again he looked frantically behind him. His eye lingered for a few moments on the Hamburg end, as if to estimate how many opponents were there. Then he remembered what was to be done. As always when he had the choice, he played with the Hannover fans behind him in the second half.
The game had a different quality from the Cologne match. Hamburg worked together quickly and imaginatively, and fifteen minutes in they scored after a one-two in the penalty box. Robert threw himself at Marcel Jansen’s shot, already aware that no goalkeeper would have had a chance.
At home in Nuremberg, Andreas Köpke sat in front of the television watching the game. Robert struck him as astonishingly listless. As far as he could tell he wasn’t talking to his defenders. Whatever happened on the pitch, his face was emotionless, even when against the flow of play Hannover equalised.
The evening before the game Robert had once again taken psychotropic drugs to calm him down.
The referee whistled for a free kick for Hamburg twenty-five yards out, inside left, and Hannover’s players knew this was dangerous: Trochowski could give a free kick a wicked swerve. Trochowski took up his position. Robert was four yards in front of goal – the perfect position; Hannover’s wall was eight yards in front of goal, as rehearsed. Trochowski clipped the ball straight into the no-man’s-land between keeper and defence. Robert was supposed to run forward, the Hamburg players were already running towards him, he only had a quarter of a second to react. Robert didn’t move and Eljero Elia headed into the net.
For a moment Robert irritably waved his hand through the air, and then his face was motionless again. Hanno Balitsch thought to himself, ‘I hope that goal isn’t going to throw him completely now.’
Teresa tried to keep her calm, or what was left of it, but just ten minutes into the second half she couldn’t bear it any more. ‘I’m going out,’ she said to Jörg. Outside the main stand she walked up and down blowing out cigarette smoke violently. There was no one outside the stadium apart from her. She sensed a great silence. The noises forcing their way out of the stadium seemed to be coming from a long way away. But she couldn’t convince herself that they had nothing to do with her.
You know what’s happening in a football match when you’re standing outside just by listening to the reactions of the crowd: the whistles when the opposition pass back into defence, the surge of outrage when a home team player is fouled, the roaring that suddenly dies when the goalkeeper saves a shot, the silence when a striker is standing over the penalty spot. Teresa didn’t hear the distinctive noise that would have told her Robert had let in a third goal.
Just before the game was over, by her calculation, she went back into the stadium. A hostess gave her a smile as if she understood exactly what Teresa was going through. They were still playing. A new shout rose up, rage and joy mingling. Penalty for Hannover. Jiři Stajner scored to make it 2–2, and soon after that the game was over.
Jörg hugged Teresa, and it was a long time before he let her go. Robert had executed two decent reflex saves in the second half.
‘That Trochowski free kick was the most difficult ball for a goalkeeper so don’t make a big deal about it – the rest was very good,’ said Jörg when they met later in the stadium lounge.
‘Yeah, sure.’ Robert looked in the other direction.
In the stadium car park he said goodbye to Jörg with a quick hug – his face didn’t show any particular emotion – and a short ‘Good luck’.
On the way home to Cologne – two hours on the Autobahn – Jörg thought ‘it was another step forward’. But it was more of a reflex thought than a genuine hope. The past few months hadn’t just left Robert exhausted, they’d worn everyone else out too.
Robert got into Uli Wilke’s car with Jürgen and Teresa. They all felt that they’d had enough for one day.
‘Let’s get a few pizzas rather than cook anything.’
The dogs started barking when they walked through the gate. Sabine and Ines had been looking after Leila; Sabine’s children were doing their homework at the long dining-table. They opened the cardboard boxes, and the smell of hot cheese filled their nostrils. There was no hotter topic than the game but it was hard to talk about it because they had to be careful not to mention the second Hamburg goal.
Robert made no attempt to conceal the fact that he wasn’t following the conversation. ‘What?’ he snapped every time anyone spoke to him.
They didn’t want to stay too long anyway, Sabine said, because of the children. When they took their leave, Robert hugged the women. Then he took the children’s faces in his hands and kissed them on the forehead.
Titanic was on television.
‘Aren’t you going to bed?’ Teresa asked with surprise.
‘I’ll just watch this for a bit,’ he said.
He had stretched out on the leather sofa with a cushion under his head. He looked relaxed. He had often lain on the sofa like that in the past, when he came home after a hard day’s training, filled with the sort of exhaustion that makes you happy.
Outside, the gate closed gently, with a click. ‘Did you see that?’ Sabine said to her husband as soon as they were on the road. ‘The way Robbi kissed the children? He never does that! And the way he hugged me? Much more intense than usual.’
‘Maybe he wanted to say thanks for your help.’
Titanic was over three hours long. He watched the whole film. He hadn’t watched a film right to the end for months. It was nearly one when he went to sleep. Lately he had often gone to bed at ten.
The next morning Teresa decided to let him drive to training on his own. There were no rules when it came to striking a balance between control and independence; she had to trust her feelings. Over the past week she had driven him to training almost every day, but yesterday he had got through a game so today seemed like a good day to let him drive on his own. To win back another bit of normality.
The players did some light running that day. As they ran around the Maschsee he and Hanno Balitsch fell a long way behind the others. For the first few minutes Hanno made a few remarks about the previous day’s game. The answers he got were sparse, which he took as a hint: Robert didn’t feel like talking. Hanno thought this indifference might be a sign of progress. At least there was no expression of self-doubt.
After training Robert said goodbye to the players curtly and impersonally; no one expected anything else. Constant Djakba from the Ivory Coast had been at the club for six months and had taken Michael Tarnat’s place next to Robert in the dressing room. He could only assume that the goalkeeper never talked as he had never known him any different.
It had started to rain by the time Robert arrived home. As the raindrops r
attled against the window-panes, Teresa started worrying. How could she get through the afternoon with him in this weather?
‘Come on, let’s go into town,’ she said. Even if they just went to Ikea, she thought.
They took Leila with them. Teresa actually did set off in the direction of Ikea as they still weren’t sure exactly what they wanted to do. The windscreen wipers flicked incessantly back and forth. When they had almost reached Ikea Teresa spotted the posters near the old Expo 2000 grounds.
‘Or shall we go to the exhibition?’
Real Bodies, it said on the posters. Last few days. Next to the inscription was a picture of a corpse. Teresa had read about the exhibition in the British Pavilion. Preserved corpses in glass cases, bringing humanity, or perhaps human decay, closer to people.
Before Teresa could stop in front of the pavilion Robert said, ‘It’s closed.’
‘You don’t know that.’
‘Museums are shut on Mondays.’
‘Please, just go and look.’
He sprinted through the rain and came back again. ‘It’s open. But I’ve got no cash on me.’
‘Then let’s go to the hole in the wall.’
She wasn’t surprised that he was using every trick in the book to avoid going to the exhibition. In his depression he tried to stonewall every kind of initiative.
A visitor coming out of the pavilion recognised Robert and gave him a spare ticket.
Inside it was cold. The walls and windows were hung with black fabric. The only light came from the glass display cases. Teresa had chosen the exhibition without any ulterior motive. She simply wanted to do something, and art had seemed a better bet than Ikea. She’d entertained no hopes that the horror of the decaying body might distract Robert from suicidal thoughts. Over the past two or three days he’d seemed relatively stable, indifferent rather than desperate.
He walked alone along the glass cases – a smoker’s lung, a head and neck with the jugular vein revealed.
Teresa had soon had enough. But she didn’t want to drive home with these disturbing impressions in their heads. ‘Let’s go to Café Kreipe.’
In all the cities they had lived in they’d had their places: La Villa in Estoril, the Blues Café in Lisbon, the Reitstall in Sant Cugat. Those places had a magical power for them: as soon as they stepped inside it was as if they were slipping into a warm bath. Café Kreipe was their place in Hanover. Its name had long since been changed to Coffee Time, but for them it had stayed Café Kreipe. On the upper storey there were plain wooden tables on a grey carpet, and a big window afforded a view of the opera house.
Robert ordered a plum strudel with vanilla sauce, she noted happily. He was allowing himself to enjoy something, no longer punishing himself. Take it in small steps. If things continued to go as they had today, he would come back out of it.
Teresa took a photograph of him and Leila. He snapped on his smile as if it cost him nothing.
‘How long have we actually known Café Kreipe?’ he asked, looking round, as if calling up lots of memories.
They were home before seven. With the lights on the rain now seemed to beat pleasantly, reassuringly on the windows. He offered to put Leila to bed. Teresa turned the television on and watched The Farmer Wants a Wife. He came and joined her. ‘Please don’t tell anyone I like The Farmer Wants a Wife,’ he had once said to her. Teresa snuggled up to him, and he let her. As he did every day, at nine o’clock he phoned Valentin Markser, his doctor, for the second session of the day.
‘Terri, I love you,’ he said before they went to sleep.
‘I love you too, and we’ll get through this.’
* * *
The next day – Tuesday, 10 November 2009 – Teresa went to the doctor’s in the afternoon. On the way back she bought fillet steak and figs, which he was always so fond of. He was due back from training around half-past six. On his own initiative he had set up two sessions, even though the team had the day off. He wanted to catch up. Wasn’t that a sign that he was motivating himself again?
She called him, wanting to know if he was already on the way home. His mobile phone was switched off. ‘Christ, Robbi, don’t keep doing this to me!’ she called out, alone in the house.
Don’t get worked up, she thought, he’ll be back soon.
Her phone rang. She quickly answered it. It was Jörg. He wanted to talk to Robert about something but his mobile was switched off.
‘He isn’t home yet. I spoke to him on the phone earlier this afternoon but I’m starting to get worried now.’
‘It drives me mad when he goes off on his own. Terri, we can’t let him drive alone any more!’
‘For now the important thing is to get him home.’
Jörg’s nervousness had magnified her own. As soon as she hung up, she called him back.
‘Jörg, please give me Colt’s phone number, I’d like to find out what’s going on.’
It was just after half-past six when she phoned Jörg Sievers, whom they called Colt.
‘Teresa?’ the goalkeeping coach asked in surprise.
‘Robbi isn’t home yet, so I wanted to hear how you parted after training, and to find out when I can expect him.’
The line fell silent. At last Sievers said, carefully, ‘There was no training today.’
After he had hung up, Sievers immediately rang Robert’s number. After twenty years in professional football he could think of only one reason for Robert’s lie: he was with another woman. Sievers wanted to warn him. It went straight to voicemail.
* * *
Teresa had Jörg on the phone again.
‘Search his room right now, see if you can find a goodbye note.’
She ran up the stairs to the bedroom. The picture book the dog had chewed was on the bedside table, along with some magazines and a thriller. It was the first place she looked. She swept the magazines from the table, and a white sheet fell out.
‘Dear Terri, I’m sorry that—’
She read no further. Jörg was still on the phone. He yelled, ‘I’m calling the police!’
In the days leading up to their attempted suicides, depressives are often in a better mood. They’re relieved that they’ve finally decided to take what is, in their distorted perception, the only way out. At the same time their improved mood is the façade behind which they hide their plans for death from their loved ones.
That Tuesday, Robert had spent eight hours driving around near Empede. In the afternoon he remembered that there was something else he had to do. At a petrol station he changed the oil in his car. Then he drove to the nearest railway crossing, in Eilvese. Sometimes he travelled by train to his training sessions. An international goalkeeper on public transport? Why not, he thought, the connection was good. He knew the timetable off by heart. He knew, for instance, that the regional express from Bremen came speeding through Eilvese at 6.15 p.m.
EPILOGUE
The View of the Palace
In the kitchen in Empede there’s a new photograph on the wall beside the fridge. The colours in the background are slightly blurred, but in the foreground Robert’s smile is clear. It’s somewhat cautious, but he looks blissfully happy. Leila is sitting on his lap.
It’s the last photograph taken of him.
And so this beautiful photograph is also a disturbing piece of evidence, of the power that he developed to hide his illness behind an innocent face. When he posed with a smile for Teresa’s camera in Café Kreipe on Monday 9 November, it would appear that he had already decided to kill himself the following day.
A goalkeeper is trained all his life to give no sign of despair, disappointment or fear. That ability always to appear in control of things helped Robert to live on when depression took hold of him. And that gift became his fate when the illness led him to seek his own death: he concealed his intentions so well that no one could help him any longer.
Afterwards, lots of newspapers mistakenly used the German word Freitod – literally, ‘free death’. The death
of a depressive is never a free decision. The illness narrows perception to the extent that the sufferer no longer knows what it means to die. He thinks it just means getting rid of the illness.
How exactly depression comes about has still not been definitively investigated. The illness is rarely triggered by a single clear cause; sometimes the reason for its arrival remains unexplained. Some people become depressed every winter; many people, like Robert Enke, are affected only occasionally, for brief phases of their lives.
Ewald Lienen, who was closer to Robert than most people in the world of football, rang Jörg Neblung after his death and asked, bewildered, ‘Why did I never notice anything?’ The simple answer is: because when he was working with Lienen on a daily basis Robert was free of the symptoms of the illness. He suffered from depression twice in his life, in 2003 and 2009. At all other times he was just as we saw him, a warmhearted person who believed that humility isn’t a bad character trait, even for a goalkeeper.
His death hit home to so many people not least because they felt that the values he believed in, such as solidarity and consideration for others, were often denied him in the world of professional football. Robert suffered from this, as do many other footballers who notice that certain coaches – and even more than the coaches, the public – see concern or empathy as a weakness in a footballer. ‘I’m not like that, and I don’t want to be like that,’ shouted Robert when he was wound up once again by the idea that his style of play went unacknowledged because he wasn’t a fierce goalkeeper who trod a solitary and reckless path. Clearly too few people were willing to grasp that Robert was something better: a goalkeeper with a powerful jump and uncommon reflexes who didn’t make a spectacle of his virtues and who firmly believed that ambition could be realised politely and respectfully.
As so often in November in Empede, the colours of nature looked faded when he was buried. The brownness of the fields and the bare trees looked flat under the grey sky. When the funeral in the little monastery church of Mariensee was over, it started raining. Standing in the cemetery, without a jacket, without an umbrella, dressed only in Benfica’s thin club suit, was José Moreira. Rain dripped from his black hair, and turned his light-coloured suit dark grey. The sight of him was a reminder of how unprepared all of us had been, in every respect, for Robert’s death.
