A Life Too Short: The Tragedy of Robert Enke (2 page)

What power must this illness have if it can draw a man like Robert Enke to the mistaken conclusion that death is the only solution? What darkness must have surrounded this sensitive person if he could no longer recognise what pain he would be inflicting on his loved ones with his death, and on the driver whose train he threw himself under that November evening?

How do people live with depression, or even just with the knowledge that it could envelop them at any time? With the fear of fear?

Robert wanted to provide those answers himself.

It was he who wanted to write this book, not me.

We had known each other since 2002. I’d reported on him sometimes for newspapers; then all of a sudden we were living
in
the same city, Barcelona. We met more and more often. I had the feeling that we thought the same things in life were important: politeness, peace, goalkeeping gloves. At some point he said, ‘I read a book of yours, I thought it was great!’ I blushed at the praise and gave a panicky answer, just something cheeky to put the conversation on a different course, ‘One day we’ll write one about you together.’ My bashfulness grew when I realised he’d taken my banter as a serious suggestion. After that he reminded me repeatedly about our project. ‘I’ve taken some notes so that I don’t forget anything.’

Today I know why the biography was so close to his heart. When his goalkeeping career was over, he would finally be able to talk about his illness. In our achievement-oriented society a goalkeeper, the last bastion in defence, can’t be a depressive. So Robert summoned up a huge amount of strength to keep his depression secret. He locked himself away in his illness.

So I will now have to tell his story without him.

It’s hard to imagine ever coming across such unreservedly open interviewees as I did on my journey through Robert’s life. Friends of his suddenly started talking about their own dark thoughts. His goalkeeping rivals, who were supposed to wear the mask of invulnerability in interviews in accordance with the law of professional sport, suddenly started airing their doubts and anxieties.

In most of us, the death of someone we love prompts the urge to be honest, to do good, to want to change things. But a public death brings one thing to the fore above all: our helplessness as human beings.

We didn’t even know how to mourn him appropriately. Debates raged cruelly across Germany about whether the funeral celebration in Hanover was reverent or part of an event. Robert’s mother was bothered by the fact that the coffin was laid out in the stadium. ‘I thought to myself, for heaven’s sake, he’s not Lenin!’, Gisela Enke said to me as we sat in her kitchen in Jena. Robert, sportily elegant with a velvety blue V-neck sweater under his grey suit jacket, has his arm tightly around her in one of the
many
photographs above the dining-table. This energetic, cordial woman gave us all a lesson in humility. She has understood that it’s ridiculous to argue about how successful a funeral was. She has found her peace in the knowledge that everyone involved in the funeral service wanted the best; that even when we’re inspired to do good we get lots of things wrong.

Lots of people misunderstood Robert’s death. They thought he killed himself because he could no longer bear his life. There were copycat suicides, committed by people who had succumbed to the lunatic notion that then they would be like him, then they would be close to him. What a tragic misunderstanding. Most depressives who attempt suicide don’t want to die, they just want the darkness that defines their thoughts to disappear once and for all. Robert was almost certainly no different. ‘If you could just have my head for half an hour, you’d know why I go mad,’ he once told Teresa.

But it didn’t matter how many such explanations I found, the questions, the recurring, revolving questions, wouldn’t be stopped by any answer. Had something happened in his childhood that made him susceptible to depression? What was going on in his head that Tuesday in November when he spent eight hours driving around in his car before stepping out on to the railway tracks? Such questions return remorselessly, even the day after Teresa’s thirty-fourth birthday, which is also her first – the first without him.

We’re sitting in the kitchen in Empede. Leila is playing that game so beloved of one-year-old children: clearing out the kitchen cupboards. The previous day had been bearable. (Those are Teresa’s new units of measurement – bearable or unbearable.) Lots of neighbours called in with their children and brought home-made cakes, flowers, best wishes, even though Teresa hadn’t said anything, no one had. A dozen friends gathered in the kitchen. I’d rather read the birthday cards later, said Teresa. And silence fell for a moment. How hollow some words can sometimes sound; birthday cards …

Now, the next morning, the emptiness in the house is tangible once more, and Teresa can’t help thinking about her thirty-third
birthday
, which will in a sense always be her last. When Robert gave her the poem.

Teresa still believed in the power of poetry in the late summer of 2009. ‘Write me another poem,’ she said to him on the phone at the beginning of September, when he was lying in a hotel room in Cologne, at a training-camp with the national team, and the fear of the new day – the fear that someone would expect something from him – wouldn’t allow him to get out of bed. In the evening he put a chair on the balcony of his hotel room and, with Cologne Cathedral glowing in the background, wrote another poem on his mobile.

Sitting on the balcony,

My head is a balloon.

Heavy as lead and stone.

It can’t be this way.

He no longer felt the joy that beautiful words can prompt, the contentment that comes from writing down one’s thoughts. His poem simply didn’t matter to him.

In the diary he kept during his depressive periods the entries also get more concise the more violently the illness afflicts him. On the last page there’s a single sentence in huge letters. It was presumably supposed to be a reminder to himself, but today his sentence reads like a challenge to us all:

‘Don’t forget these days.’

ONE SUNDAY AFTERNOON
in December 1995 Robert Enke went to the Western Station in Jena and started waiting. The long-distance train from Nuremberg pulled in, passengers got out, and he showed no sign of disappointment when they all walked past him and left the platform. He carried on waiting. Two hours later the early evening train from the south arrived. Again he let all the passengers drift by as if nothing was the matter. It was not the best time of year to be spending half your Sunday waiting for trains in a draughty station so he decided to go to the cinema until the next train came in. He had turned eighteen four months earlier – an age that excuses almost every kind of wilful behaviour and at which, in your opinion, it’s other people who are behaving weirdly.

On Sunday, Teresa always came back to the high school sports college on the last train from Bad Windsheim. Even in her second year in Jena she still went to see her parents almost every weekend.

She was hurrying out of the icy station when she spotted him on the bench. She sat next to Robert at school. When she, a Bavarian outsider, had arrived in Year 12 at the East German sports college a year and a half earlier there had only been two seats free, one on its own at the back and one next to Robert. They got on well, she thought, though if she was him she’d give the haircut a bit of thought. He had already started training with the professional footballers of Carl Zeiss Jena and wore his fair hair the way they did, short at the sides, long at the top – ‘like a bird’s nest on his head’.

1. Robert with Teresa and his family after a game between Jena sports college and a Thuringian team
.

‘Hi, what are you doing here?’ she asked him. It was after ten o’clock at night.

‘I’m waiting for somebody.’

‘Oh, OK. Well, have a nice evening.’

She smiled at him briefly and hurried on.

‘Hey!’ he cried after her. ‘You’re the one I’m waiting for, obviously!’

And he’d been waiting for more than five hours, he told her a bit later, when they were having a drink in a bar called the French Pub.

He was still living with his mother in the flats on Liselotte Herrmann Strasse, but he hadn’t told her or anyone that he was going to go and wait for Teresa at the station. He kept his feelings, his important decisions, all to himself. For weeks afterwards, while he and Teresa were getting closer, he didn’t tell his friends a thing. But they weren’t surprised when the two of them became a couple – that Robert Enke could achieve that, too. ‘We still often talk about it,’ says one of his former school friends, Torsten Ziegner, ‘about how Robert was this
kid
with a really sunny nature who managed to do whatever he put his mind to, who couldn’t be thrown off track, who was always in a good mood.’ Torsten turns his glass of water around in front of him to keep the short silence from getting too big. And for a moment everyone there in the living-room of Andy Meyer, another friend from those days, thinks the same thing: how strange that sounds today, thinking of Robert as a kid with a sunny nature. ‘Although,’ Andy says at last, speaking bravely into the silence, ‘actually I still think that, in spite of everything, Enkus was a child of joy.’

The daylight, reflected by the snow and given a glaring quality, falls through the window of the single-family house in Zwätzen, an area of newly built houses just outside Jena. It’s one in the afternoon and Andy has just got up. There’s still a hint of tiredness in his eyes. He’s a nurse and was on night-shift. Torsten’s jeans fit loosely; the Gallagher brothers would like his jacket with its little diamonds and its stand-up collar. He’s a professional footballer, a slender, wiry athlete, and at thirty-two he’s back with FC Carl Zeiss Jena in the Third Liga. You see Andy and Torsten, in their early thirties, and you immediately sense the warmth, the humour, of those youthful times. ‘We realised immediately that we had the same interests – or rather, the same
dis
interests,’ says Torsten.

‘More than anything else,’ adds Andy, ‘we laughed.’

It was always the four of them in those days: Torsten Ziegner, Andy Meyer, Mario Kanopa, who went off to be a teacher on the Dutch border, and Robert Enke, who they called Enkus – who they go on calling Enkus because as far as they’re concerned he’s still the person he used to be.

Robert grew up among clothes lines. He and his friends met in the courtyards of the flats in the afternoon. ‘Over the Line’ was the name of the game on the estate. He would stand in goal between two clothes props and lob the ball over to his partner who would then volley the ball at the goal.

From a distance his home, the satellite town of Lobeda, is still the first thing you see of Jena. Some forty thousand people used to live there, more than a third of the inhabitants of Jena;
about
seventeen thousand remain. On the side-streets between the fifteen-storey industrialised blocks on the Communist boulevards there are a few lower blocks no different from the ones you might see in a West German suburb like Frankfurt-Schwanheim or Dortmund-Nordstadt. While the two German states were constantly reminding each other of their differences, in the eighties such apartment blocks made boys’ lives pretty similar in East and West. Washing props ruled the world, from Jena-Lobeda to Frankfurt-Schwanheim. They only learned about adult concerns, Andy Meyer says, after the collapse of East Germany, though perhaps as children they’d just found them boring and hence ignored them: that Andy’s father couldn’t become a teacher because he wasn’t in the Party; that Robert’s father, a 400-metre hurdler, was thrown out of high-performance sports promotion because he received postcards from a brother who had escaped to the West.

They would only interrupt their courtyard games for a special reason – when they had to go to football training. Andy Meyer, who lived a few blocks away, had been spotted by the city’s big club, FC Carl Zeiss, early on. He was seven at the time, and he got used to winning with Carl Zeiss. So Andy has a particularly clear memory of one defeat. On the uneven pitch in Am Jenzig, at the foot of Jena’s Hausberg mountain, FC Carl Zeiss lost 3–1 to SV Jenapharm. Big clubs have their ways of dealing with such defeats, even in children’s teams: Helmut M
ü
ller, Carl Zeiss’s coach, immediately walked over to the parents of Jenapharm’s striker, who had scored all three goals, and told them their son should join Carl Zeiss straight away.

It was Robert Enke.

In every sportsman’s biography there’s a moment when some people say, ‘What luck!’ And others, ‘So that’s what they call fate.’ Muhammad Ali’s Schwinn bicycle was stolen when he was twelve, and the policeman who took his statement advised him to stop crying and become a boxer. Robert was a decent attacking player in the Under-10 youth team at FC Carl Zeiss Jena when the father of Thomas, the goalkeeper, was moved to Moscow for professional reasons. The side needed a new goalkeeper. ‘The
coach
had no idea,’ says Andy Meyer, ‘so everyone had to have a go in goal. The whole business was sorted out quickly. Our lucky kid saved two shots and from that point on he was number one.’