A Life Too Short: The Tragedy of Robert Enke (34 page)

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.

The national coach rang him. Eight months after Robert had been sitting on the subs bench in the Spanish Second Division J
ü
rgen Klinsmann invited him on a tour of Asia with the national team. Robert declined. He didn’t confer with anyone, not even Teresa, he simply told Klinsmann on the phone that sadly he couldn’t do it, he couldn’t go away for ten days, he had to stay with his daughter. ‘I was touched that he didn’t even ask me,’ says Teresa. ‘That he was so serious about being with his daughter.’

Robert felt loved and acknowledged. That made it easier to give love back, even to forgive himself his own mistakes.

But boundless understanding was something else entirely. Where Jacques was concerned, they were finding it more and more difficult to be generous. They felt increasingly that they weren’t at home in their own house. They still hadn’t been able to move their own furniture in. According to the contract, Jacques had to move out by 1 October at the latest; it was now mid-December. He hadn’t even started looking for a new place to live.

‘Oh what’s all this about contracts? I thought we were friends!’ cried the artist when they finally told him one evening that it was really time to move out. Jacques’s poet friend had gone, but now his daughter from his first marriage was visiting.

‘But Jacques, don’t you understand that we can’t live together in the long term? And you haven’t even started thinking about moving out.’

‘OK, then I’ll start!’ He leapt to his feet and started pulling his crockery out of the kitchen cupboards. ‘Look, I’m packing!’

‘Jacques, please.’

‘I give everything up to live with you and all these animals here, and then you throw something like this at me – if I’d known!’

Teresa was beside herself. Robert, who normally stayed calm when other people got worked up, fought in vain against his rising fury. He couldn’t defuse the situation.

Jacques’s daughter did that, sixteen years old. ‘He’s just like that, don’t despair,’ she said to Teresa and Robert. ‘Papa, come on, let’s you and me go upstairs now and start packing your things.’

Jacques actually did move out, to a friend’s at first – where was he supposed to go at the drop of a hat? But he had one last surprise for them by way of farewell. Teresa’s mother called them from Bad Windsheim. ‘It’s great that there’s going to be a vernissage at your house. Are you making the canapés?’

Jacques had sent out invitations to a private Christmas viewing of his paintings. If he sold a lot of them he wouldn’t have to take so many away with him. Teresa’s mother had been invited because she knew Jacques from her visits to Empede. She was taken with his art and was on his distribution list. Jacques hadn’t mentioned the event to Teresa and Robert, which was taking place in his studio, beside their house.

The next evening Teresa and Robert sat in their kitchen watching in silence as a crowd of strangers walked quite matter-of-factly through their house and asked them where the toilet was.

‘What is this?’ Robert asked Teresa. ‘A bad film? Or the normal madness of our life?’

They decided to laugh. It summed up their early days in Hanover, says Teresa. ‘It was a lovely time, but a really terrible one.’

IN A ROOM
for two hundred people, they were the only guests. Red plastic chairs stood at plain wooden tables; a few pot plants between the rows of tables testified to a vain attempt to make the hall more appealing. Teresa and Robert spent Christmas in the hospital canteen. There are some details you never forget: on the menu was salmon with green tagliatelle.

Without intending to, their acquaintances had hurt them over the past few days with simple questions.

‘So, where are you going for the Christmas holidays?’

To hospital.

It was raining outside. But the loneliness of the canteen soon gave way to a feeling that they were celebrating a special Christmas. They had Lara, now sleeping peacefully in Ward 68b. They had each other. Teresa took pictures of the canteen food – their curious Christmas dinner.

Robert spent some of his holiday on the phone. His conversations with Marco provided a bit of distraction. Since Lara’s birth Teresa was regularly phoning the Villas, who had just had a daughter themselves, Chiara. And while Marco talked to Robert about very different concerns, he thought he understood why it was that his friend played such great football in Hanover. ‘He felt more valuable because he was looking after Lara. That feeling of self-worth gave him an incredible amount of strength and pride.’

Experiencing the serenity with which Robert was coping with a difficult situation wasn’t just a source of joy for Marco. He was also slightly hurt by it. Because he automatically asked why he couldn’t cope with the pressure of professional sport
in
a similar way. He was only being used every now and then at Arezzo; in the winter break he was going to switch to Ferrara, also in the Italian Third Division. From the very first day Marco had always felt a bit like Robert’s protector. Were they switching roles?

When Marco visited them in Empede, Robert said, ‘Come with me.’ He led his friend to his office. Shelves reached to the ceiling; boxes full of photographs stood next to Spanish textbooks and files marked Business Tax. Robert picked up one of these tomes. ‘Here, look. My depri-file.’ He showed Marco his diaries, the poem about the dwarf. He thought he could look back over them with a smile.