A Life Too Short: The Tragedy of Robert Enke

by Reng, Ronald

  What his new colleagues sensed, without being able to put their fingers on it, was an unusual feeling of naturalness that surrounded him like an aura: it was in the matter-of-fact way he went about his job, without drama or pushiness. For the obligatory team photograph at the start of the season the goalkeeper always sits in the middle of the front row, framed by his two substitutes. It’s a power ritual: the king on the throne, his subjects at his sides. Robert and the substitute goalkeeper Frank Juric decided to let twenty-one-year-old Daniel Haas, the third-choice goalkeeper, the apprentice, sit on the throne. Robert continued to make such gestures throughout his years with Hannover.

  But all this couldn’t prevent him from thinking one particular thought when the referee blew the whistle for the start of the 2004–05 season: was he still good enough for this level? It was almost two and a half years since he had last played regularly in a top division.

  Hannover 96 were playing Bayer Leverkusen away. The Leverkusen fans remembered who Robert was: the goalkeeper who let in eight goals six years earlier in Mönchengladbach. To the tune of the French children’s song ‘Frère Jacques’ they sang, ‘Robert Enke, Robert Enke/Hi there, mate! Hi there, mate!/Do you still remember? Do you still remember?/Two – eight, two – eight.’

  He couldn’t help laughing. He applauded the fans.

  He caught crosses as if it was the most natural thing in the world. He made the fans sigh in amazement when he parried two good shots by Dimitar Berbatov. For the first attempt Berbatov appeared right in front of him but the keeper, with his arms outstretched and his torso straight and his knee bent inwards, suddenly looked like a giant to Berbatov. Hannover lost 2–1 in the last minute but Kicker named Robert Enke man of the match. The sportswriters who had in no uncertain terms declared his career over in Istanbul found themselves wondering whether he might find his way back into the Germany squad.

  After home games the coach invited the team to dinner at the stadium. One of the cooks who had been serving the guests in the boxes during the game would do the food. Sometimes using knife and fork as pointers, the coach would spend a quarter of an hour analysing the game – ten minutes in German, three in Spanish, two in English – then wish them bon appétit. Lienen also organised a visit to the zoo with wives and children. He believed that a team that felt like a family was a better team.

  The person Robert immediately took to was one of the assistants. Tommy Westphal had to make sure that the play report form was properly filled out for the referee, that there was soup with and without celery for lunch at the hotel, that the new players had a kindergarten and a mobile phone … just name it, Tommy Westphal did it, a hundred things in one day, never forgetting one, while drinking five coffees in an hour and a half – perhaps the one had something to do with the other. ‘We immediately found a level because we were both Ossis,’ Tommy says with the sort of humour that softens serious subjects. ‘We’re like the Yugos or the Africans in professional football: we immediately form a clan to defend ourselves.’ Tommy noted how much of a presence Robert was within the team from the first match onwards: his easy manner made for a pleasant working environment. Only Robert himself had the feeling that he wasn’t putting enough into it, that he wasn’t completely fulfilling Lienen’s hope of creating a family atmosphere. He had a false self-image of his role in the team because he always disappeared when the others went to lunch after training, and because in general he didn’t live professional football as intensely as he’d had in the past.

  Because Lara had been born on the last day of August.

  Immediately after her birth she had had open-heart surgery. So that her tiny body had a chance of surviving the stress of the operation, she was put into an artificial coma. Her ribcage was opened up as her heart needed room for the swelling to go down. She lay with her arms thrown back in the intensive care ward. The only thing Robert and Teresa could do was hold her little hands and watch her heart beating in her open chest. Lara’s pulse rate was 210.

  The absolute will to do all they could for their daughter and the throbbing fear of losing her kept Robert and Teresa in a permanent state of high tension. ‘When we made the decision to bring Lara into the world we thought we were prepared,’ says Teresa. ‘Don’t misunderstand me, even today I would always decide in favour of Lara, even today – I’m absolutely convinced of it. But I also know that no one can be prepared for life with a sick child. Fear consumes you.’

  After four days Lara’s ribcage was sewn up again. Progress was being made, she was getting better, they happily said to themselves. The next morning the nurse told them unfortunately her chest had to be opened up again.

  When Robert set off for training at about nine in the morning, Teresa went to the clinic at the University Hospital. During training he would give his mobile phone to Tommy Westphal, in case a call came in from the clinic. After training he’d go straight to Lara and Teresa. The two parents would have lunch in the clinic canteen, then stay until the end of visiting time at eight p.m., every day. Often the door to the intensive care ward was locked and they’d have to stay in the waiting-room with the other parents. Two or three hours might pass, none of them knowing which of the four children currently in the ward was fighting for its life.

  Robert thought: ‘The one who’s really suffering is Teresa. She hasn’t got a football match to immerse herself in for ninety minutes.’ He recognised how even the most irritating thing about football – the hours on the coach to away games – was becoming a welcome distraction for him. He still didn’t have a portable music-player or a laptop to watch films. He was the only one on the bus who listened to the coach radio. 1Live became his favourite station, a mixture of programmes like Space and Time and Cultcomplex and music, which he couldn’t define precisely, it was just different. The coach-driver cursed him affectionately when he had to look for the frequency again every sixty or seventy kilometres.

  Meanwhile Teresa was learning all about oxygen saturation. A sensor measured the oxygen saturation in Lara’s blood. If it fell below 60 per cent things became critical and the sensor beeped. Teresa couldn’t get that beeping sound out of her ears. She even heard it when she was in bed in Empede. Saturation became her fixation, the yardstick of her fear for Lara. In the middle of the night, when she was pumping out breast-milk for Lara in the kitchen, she couldn’t help phoning the hospital to find out the percentage of her oxygen saturation.

  She had stood by her husband during his five-month depression, now she spent all day in an intensive care ward sitting beside her daughter, unable even to pick her up.

  ‘Please, go home, have a rest, I’ll stay with Lara,’ Robert said to her.

  But she couldn’t go. She had to stay with her daughter and watch the saturation indicator.

  20. Robert and Teresa with their families at Lara’s christening.

  Every morning they undertook not to let the situation rob them of their happiness. On some days they managed to laugh, even in the waiting-room at the intensive care ward. They discovered cheerfulness where there was none – for example when Robert imitated the sober standard answer doctors gave to the question ‘How is Lara?’ ‘We aren’t entirely dissatisfied.’ And of course on several occasions during those same days they wondered why the doctors couldn’t say something optimistic about the state of Lara’s health at least once.

  Immersed in his own world, their house-mate had problems understanding the burden they were living under. Jacques had told his assistant to come and start work every day at 8.30. The young man arrived on time and, equally dependably, Jacques went on sleeping. The half-hour she had over breakfast with Robert had become very valuable to Teresa, almost the only moment of the day that they had to themselves. ‘But I’m not the kind of person who can just pretend the assistant isn’t there. So I asked him if he would like a coffee too.’ And that was the end of her beloved moments alone with Robert.

  Jacques would appear at about nine. ‘That noise! That coffee machine is driving me round the
bend! What’s with all this stress, Teresa?’

  They had reached an agreement: he would live on the top floor, they would live below. But the communal spaces – the kitchen, the hall, the living-room, access to the garden – were on the ground floor. Effectively the three of them were living on the ground floor. In September a poet friend of Jacques’s came for a visit and headquartered himself in the living-room. Once, Teresa and Robert came home from the clinic to find four female violinists standing in the hall. They were setting a verse by Jacques’s poet friend to music.

  That’s just the way Jacques was, Robert tried to bear in mind. When he managed it, he found his artist highly entertaining. But in the evening he generally escaped to watch a football match on television – an excuse not to have to speak, just to have a bit of peace and quiet. Teresa would sit with Jacques in the kitchen. She read biographies of artists – Monet, Picasso, Michelangelo – so their conversations in the kitchen in the evening sometimes began with the great masters. Often they ended with Jacques’s views on the world. He was twice divorced, he had become a father at twenty-five, his first wife was a dressage rider, she was the first to show him how to approach art collectors and gallery owners, and he thought he had it all – wife, daughter, dressage horses, house, success – but eventually he found that he didn’t dare go into a restaurant, into an aeroplane, that everything he possessed closed him in, oppressed him. Now he had nothing, and he was happy, he tried to convince Teresa and himself.

  Jacques considered his hosts in terms of his own story. ‘They were a close, good couple. But what was missing from their lives was the tenderness of the everyday.’ Isn’t that all too understandable when your child is in an intensive care ward? Well, yes, Jacques says bashfully, he hadn’t really seen it that way – but anyway: ‘I would have said I was exactly the right person for those two. I pulled them out of their five-kilos-of-potatoes, two-kilos-of-rice-and-what-else-do-we-need everyday life.’

  Jacques had no interest in football when he met Robert. Later he went regularly to the stadium with Teresa. ‘I was interested in Robert. He had a sobriety that was never crude, but always obstinate, alert, curious.’ The artist wanted to see him playing, to know whether a game could turn someone into a different person. ‘In goal there was something all-encompassing about him. Almost Schwarzenegger-like. He didn’t make a fuss, but startled the strikers with his coolness. But when he hugged me to say hello, you felt through his massive body, steely from all that daily training, an amazing warmth and gentleness.’

  Jacques gave Robert a portrait for his birthday – a head drawn with quick black lines, and beneath it powerful hands holding something round and pink. At first glance it looks like a ripped-out heart, but it’s a football. ‘There is Robert, There is No Goal’ was the title Jacques gave to the picture. Our friendship isn’t about football, it meant. Over the weeks, though, the title became ambiguous: there was Robert, there were astonishingly few goals scored against Hannover.

  In a mediocre team, Robert Enke looked almost weirdly good. He was once again the sort of goalkeeper you could imagine in a top team. After their illness, depressives often carry on with their careers as if nothing had happened.

  Jörg Neblung paid a visit, and they used the opportunity to go out for the first time since Lara’s birth, to the Heimweh. A few of the players often mentioned the bar. It was 20 September. Lara was almost three weeks old. They had something to say to Jörg: they wanted him to be Lara’s godfather. They just couldn’t say when the christening was going to take place.

  They were back in Empede by eleven, no longer used to staying out late. They had just gone to sleep when Teresa’s phone rang. It was the clinic. Lara had had a cardiac arrest.

  They ran off. Jacques’s poet friend, sleeping in the living-room, called out, ‘What’s going on? Oh my God, what’s going on?’

  By the time they arrived at the clinic the doctors had been trying to bring Lara back to life for an hour. ‘If she dies, we’ll leave Hanover,’ Teresa said. Robert nodded. They stood like that in the intensive care ward until five o’clock in the morning. The doctors had tried over and over again for five hours. Then, suddenly, Lara was alive again.

  Robert lay rather than sat on a chair and said blankly, ‘What are we actually doing here?’ The next day he was supposed to be travelling to Cottbus with Hannover 96 for a German Cup game.

  ‘Robbi, go. Why would you stay here? Lara came through it. We mustn’t let fear define our lives.’

  In Cottbus the final score was 2–2. It went to penalties. Penalties are football’s great duel: the taker’s long journey from the halfway line to the penalty spot, the goalkeeper waiting for him. For a moment, in a packed stadium, only those two people exist, the taker and the keeper.

  In Lisbon, according to the Record, he had been Super-Enke because in the first few months he had parried four out of seven penalties, but since then he had only occasionally saved one. In Cottbus, too, the first four players scored against him. When he saw the fifth, Laurentiu Reghecampf, approaching from the halfway line he suddenly knew he would save his attempt. Every goalkeeper knows that saving a penalty is rarely an art and usually a failure on the part of the taker. But saving a penalty is a keeper’s only opportunity to become a hero the way strikers do every Saturday. One single successful action makes everything that has gone before irrelevant. Robert did save Reghecampf’s shot. When Thomas Christiansen put the next spot-kick in the back of the net and they had won the game, Robert ran to Christiansen as quickly as he could and hoisted the goal-scorer into the air. That way no one could carry him shoulder high. He didn’t feel like having his picture taken as a conquering hero.

  Jacques Gassmann, who had decided that he had to bring some life into the life of the Enkes, was a constant source of surprise. He took them to the marksmen’s festival at Empede. He didn’t want them to end up like him, Jacques explained. He had failed to integrate himself in the village.

  In Empede there is no village shop, just a pub, the Ole Deele. For elections it doubles as a polling station. The few houses in the village are made of clinker bricks, the country roads are lanes. In the spring, rape blossoms in the fields. When Robert’s dogs were mentioned in passing in a newspaper article about him, the public order office, unrequested, sent him the requisite dog-tags, along with a bill.

  In his early days in Empede Jacques had hung pieces of paper from street-lights – Open Studio, Glass of Wine – ‘but not a single bastard came’. Jacques felt insulted. At the festival, the artist noted, not without some satisfaction, ‘And now they’re all staring. What? Here’s that lunatic Gassmann with the football star?’

  Soon it was sadly too late to integrate any further with the village. It was just before nine in the evening but they seemed to have been partying, and particularly drinking, for ages; the guests who were still capable of coherent speech were now the minority. A sober man among drunks soon learns the meaning of loneliness. Faced with the choice of getting similarly drunk or retreating, they stayed there politely for another hour and then left. They would go earlier next year, Teresa said.

  Jacques, who thought his hosts should live more euphorically, more loudly, was now surprised that they didn’t think the rough marksmen’s festival was all that bad. ‘They always stood up for Empede. “It’s nice here,” they said,’ Jacques grumbles – perhaps he’s only pretending. ‘But Empede is a dump. When I left, I would have liked to put a sign up in the village: Life just makes you restless.’

  * * *

  Autumn came, and they learned that even emergencies can become a normal part of everyday life. In theory, Lara should only have been in the intensive care ward for three weeks. In fact it was six weeks before she was brought out of her artificial coma, which was when her parents learned for the first time how her eyes and mouth moved. The fear didn’t leave them, even when Lara’s monitor showed a high level of oxygen saturation, when the doctor said he wasn’t entirely dissatisfied. There was always at least
one child in the ward to remind them of the fragility of life. One morning the cot next to Lara’s was empty. ‘Where’s Sandra?’ asked Teresa, and didn’t get an answer. She can’t remember how often she experienced the death of another child – three times, four times? But they still managed to wrest a few beautiful moments from the difficulties of daily life. After three months they went on their first outing with their daughter: they pushed Lara in her buggy on to the balcony of the intensive care ward. The buggy was weighed down with oxygen tanks and heart-rate monitors, there was a feeding tube in Lara’s nose, and the saturation indicator beeped – only 64 per cent. ‘Is that OK?’ Teresa asked the nurse. They were allowed to go out on to the balcony and back again just once. That was happiness, says Teresa, pure happiness.

  A few weeks later Lara was able to go back to the cardiac ward, Ward 68b, where they found a picture of a stripy duck, drawn by a child, stuck to the door.

  Robert noticed how Lara changed him as a goalkeeper: ‘I still get annoyed about bad games but I have no time to go dragging thoughts around with me for weeks.’ After a 3–0 win over Bochum he went straight to the clinic; after a 1–0 defeat at the hands of Hertha BSC he hurried straight to Ward 68b. ‘The questions are the same, victory or defeat: what are the oxygen levels like, how’s her heart-rate?’ He had learned something, from the depression, from Markser, from Tenerife, from Lara: ‘I know now that mistakes are part of being a goalkeeper. For a long time I couldn’t accept that.’ Now that he could tolerate mistakes, he hardly ever made any.

  Hannover ended the first half of the season a startling seventh in the table; they had been as high as fourth. The coach had created a team that expressed its good mood on the pitch, and their goalkeeper became a symbol of this. The Bundesliga players elected Robert Enke over Oliver Kahn as the best goalkeeper of the first half of the season. It was a reward for his dependability, even though such elections aren’t always entirely impartial. His colleagues wanted to grant success to Enke, who made no great show of his virtues, over the tooth-baring Kahn.