A Life Too Short: The Tragedy of Robert Enke (33 page)

In the garden in Empede – Lake Steinhude starts just beyond the horse-track – Jacques laid his paintings on the lawn to dry.

‘Wait, Jacques, I’ll just shut Balu in the house so that he doesn’t ruin anything,’ said Teresa. Balu suffered from distemper, a virus that destroys the brain. He could no longer control himself.

‘Don’t worry,’ said Jacques, ‘he can stay out here with me. He’s an artist dog!’

‘I’d feel better if he wasn’t with you.’

‘Oh come on. We get on, don’t we, Balu, my artist dog?’

Ten minutes later Teresa heard a shout from the garden. ‘That’s coming out of your insurance! Your dog walked over my paintings!’

Robert went to training every day, feeling as if he was coming home. He was in a town he’d never wanted to live in at a club he’d never dreamed of playing for, but the very fact that he was living in Germany again persuaded him that he had finally arrived. For two years he had been at sea. With Hannover he would presumably end up in the bottom third of the Bundesliga, but that didn’t bother him; he would come to terms with it. Without any more solid a reason than a newly discovered joie de vivre he was sure he was ‘going to feel right here’.

19. Robert with the dogs at his house in Empede
.

Because the Lower Saxony Stadium was being converted for the 2006 World Cup, the team changed before training in the nearby sport hall. There was only one small changing-room, and the coach got the janitor’s office. His new colleagues were
startled
when Robert walked through the changing-room and introduced himself. He knew nearly all of them by name: ‘You must be Frankie – hi’; ‘Oh, you’re Per.’ He had searched for his new team-mates on the internet.

Not everyone in Germany remembered him.

‘What number shall we put on his back, twenty-five or thirty?’ one of the two team assistants asked the coach.

‘Number one,’ Ewald Lienen replied.

Lienen, who had as a young man marched with the peace movement for the banning of Pershing missiles and the closure of nuclear power stations, had a mind of his own. If the football scene saw Enke’s flight from Istanbul as unprofessional, as weak and cowardly, Lienen saw the step as a sign of strength from a courageous, sensitive man.

No one knew the truth. Robert spoke publicly about his depression without anyone knowing what he was talking about. ‘That was a negative experience that had nothing to do with football and everything to do with wellbeing,’ he told the
Neue Presse
from Hanover in his first interview after coming home when asked what had happened in Istanbul.

When he thought about depression, he was able to slip out of his own skin and look back with detachment and self-irony at ‘Robbi the nutjob’, as he called the person who wasn’t him. ‘Tenerife was my spa cure,’ he said. ‘But I know it could have gone the other way. I was a has-been. Apart from Lienen it wouldn’t have occurred to anyone to bring me back to the Bundesliga. I’m very grateful to him for that.’

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.