A Life Too Short: The Tragedy of Robert Enke (6 page)

They were happy in their new-found independence, in all the experiences of that stage of life that may seem slightly embarrassing later on, like the limitless loafing or using the clothes horse as a substitute wardrobe. But love and a sense of the freedom of life could only mask their unease; they couldn’t eradicate it. ‘We were two nineteen-year-olds who should have been in a shared apartment with others, who had been part of a group in Jena only months before,’ says Teresa. ‘And suddenly we’d been thrown into this little town without a student scene, where we had no friends and didn’t make new ones very easily.’ Sometimes she wondered: is this what adult life is like?

Every sixth Friday Teresa or Robert cleaned the stairwell; the other five groups of tenants in the block had decided to save the twenty marks needed for a cleaning woman. One Friday Teresa came home early from her lectures. Robert was away at a match with Borussia’s reserve team. She would clean the stairs on Saturday, Teresa thought.

On Friday evening the doorbell rang. Corinna, a neat and tidy neighbour of theirs, stood in front of Teresa.

‘The stairs haven’t been cleaned!’

‘I know. Robbi’s not here, and I’m a bit tired after university. I’ll do it tomorrow, first thing.’

‘The stairs must be cleaned on Friday!’

Corinna began to ring the doorbell more often. The stairs hadn’t been cleaned properly at the edges. Someone had walked up the stairs in dirty shoes while the floor tiles were still wet. Robert tried hard to go on meeting the woman as he had done before, with shy politeness. For a few weeks, an intimidated Teresa took her shoes off down in the hall and walked up to the third floor in her stockinged feet.

Marco Villa sometimes visited them at Loosenweg. Robert and he had known each other now for three years – they had played together for the national youth team – without knowing anything substantial about each other. Marco came from Neuss, Robert from Jena. Their first coach on the national youth team, Dixie Dörner, had encouraged people to think in terms of East and West. Even when they were warming up there had been an eastern group and a western group.

Once Marco came to lunch. Robert was sitting in a red leather armchair reading a book. Marco glanced at the title:
100 Jobs with a Future
, by Claudia Schumacher and Stefan Schwartz.

‘What’s that you’re reading? Are you looking for a new job, or what?’

‘I just wanted to see what you can do apart from football.’

‘Are you off your trolley? You’re a professional, in the Bundesliga!’

‘It’s different for you, Marco. You play, you score your goals. But I’m not even a substitute at the matches. I do my training, and I sit at home or in the terraces. I’m useless.’

‘You’re nineteen, Robbi! It’s still your first year here. You’ll be playing in a few years. Don’t drive yourself mad.’

They left it there. Years later, when Marco reminded Robert of that scene, Robert said, ‘What are you on about? I can’t remember ever owning a book like that.’ But even today the book
is
still in his office in Empede, a European Championship silver medal dangling next to it. Teresa’s father had given him the book. ‘Take a look at it,’ he had said, ‘you might find you’re interested in a different profession.’ If football’s really as bad as that.

He didn’t want to go to training any more. It was winter, January 1997, dark at half-past four, and he was sitting in a building where the garden gnomes were treated more kindly than the tenants, in a little town with which he had no connections. And all that to be a third-choice goalkeeper; to play in front of 120 spectators for the reserve team; to put up with the exertion of training every day.

The mood in the changing-rooms was irritable. Every Saturday coach Bernd Krauss had been an hour and a half away from being sacked, and in December 1996 it had happened. The cup-winning team, having been cranked up for an attack on the top spots in the Bundesliga, was wallowing around mid-table.

In a training match against the Second Bundesliga team Fortuna Köln, Robert was allowed to play for the first eleven. Again he felt that hot, hectic thumping inside him. The fear that he had felt on the Under-18 team, the fear that he might disappoint the grown-ups, was back. He was frightened that he might never be like Uwe Kamps, always applying pressure, always putting up with the pressure. He couldn’t shake the feeling that no one was interested in what the number three goalkeeper did, that he was invisible – and at the same time he was afraid that in that tense situation he might attract the fury of the senior players. It was a contradiction, but that kind of anxiety is one great paradox.

This was a new Robbi as far as Teresa was concerned. She was confused. Where did this anxiety come from? She didn’t know him when he was like this. At the same time she too was feeling disappointed with her anonymous life at university; perhaps he was just as troubled as she was by longing for their carefree life with their friends in Jena. Or else he was just having a bad day or two.

A week passed, and every morning started the same way.

‘I don’t want to go to training.’

‘Robbi, it’s not as bad as that.’

‘I don’t want to go, do you understand? I just don’t want to.’

‘Marco will be there. You’ll see, once you’re there, it’ll be fine.’

When he was out of the door, she called his father.

Dirk Enke came to visit the following weekend. He knew all about anxiety from his patients. ‘But you see,’ he says, ‘as a therapist I’m simply not responsible – a father can’t do that.’ He could only say to his son: give your day a fixed structure. While he was there he threw Robert out of bed at seven in the morning, so that the day would get going straight away, and made sure there were solid goals on the horizon, things his son could do, even if that just meant going for a walk. Things that would make him feel that he’d achieved something.

‘And go and see a doctor,’ his father advised as he left.

Borussia were about to begin their winter training-camp. Anxiety turned to panic. Robert thought there was no way he could go, spend a whole week exclusively as a part of this football team where he thought he wasn’t respected, and where he feared his every mistake during training would be precisely recorded.

He went to see Herbert Ditzel, the team doctor.

Medical staff at professional football teams are always under huge pressure from the coaches. Week after week they’re urged to send injured players into battle with painkillers, often against their better judgement. But this time the doctor thought only of the person in front of him, not of the club. Ditzel liked this shy young man. He signed him off with a flu virus so that he wouldn’t have to go to training-camp.

When the team returned he was given a new nickname. Robert’s colleagues now called him Cyrus, after Cyrus the Virus, a character from the movie
Con Air
. No one doubted that he was suffering from a flu virus, and he was able to have a good laugh about his new nickname. The anxiety had faded away after a few weeks.

He made a great effort to study Kamps. If the older man needed to see him as a rival in order to motivate himself, he would secretly learn from him. He watched the veteran keeper out of the corner of his eye during training. He started to jump early,
even
a split second before the striker hit the ball, speculating where the shot would fly to, and punched away crosses he might have been able to catch. Robert said later, almost shamefacedly, ‘I copied Uwe’s style a bit.’

After a successful diving save, some German goalkeepers like Kamps would do a double roll on the pitch, to the roar of the crowd, taking their example from eighties idol Toni Schumacher. If the striker advanced on his own, they threw themselves in front of him with all their might. If they tipped the ball over the crossbar, they drew their knees up when jumping, so that even the slowest fan could grasp the drama of the situation. German goalkeepers were the best in the world, the Germans thought.

In the late nineties no German fan was bothered by the fact that even excellent goalkeepers like Andreas Köpke, Stefan Klos and a young man from Karlsruhe called Oliver Kahn played deep in their own box, close to the goal-line, while in Argentina, Spain or the Netherlands the goalkeeper became a substitute sweeper. Advancing far up the pitch, he made it impossible for his oppenent to hit long balls behind the defence. Also he became an extra option for his defenders to pass to, and hence break up the opponent’s pressing game. One of the most radical prophets of the new goalkeeper play was Edwin van der Sar of Ajax Amsterdam. Robert watched van der Sar on television, he watched Kamps in training, he compared the two and he took his bearings from the German model of saving spectacularly rather than acting in anticipation.

After nine months in Mönchengladbach he received his first praise. ‘Borussia can consider itself lucky to have this young man,’ the new coach Hannes Bongartz told the
Rheinische Post
. ‘He’s the man of the future.’ In his first months with Borussia, Robert had learned that football is not a game but a battle, that footballers achieve their aims by applying and taking pressure. But he felt far more inspired by Bongartz’s praise than by any such pressure.

At the end-of-season party, at which Borussia wasn’t so much celebrating its eleventh-place finish as the fact that the
campaign
was somehow over, he wanted to go home at around midnight. Teresa wanted to stay. She was curious about this Bundesliga world, and at last here was a party of the kind she’d been hoping for at university. They were sitting in a greenhouse. A garden centre had been rearranged for the party.

‘Then you stay, I’m going home,’ Robert said, and walked off.

The last handful of players were still hanging on at the party when Stefan Effenberg called out into the night, ‘So, where are we going now?’

‘We could always go to ours,’ said Teresa, as she would have said at university.

‘No, let’s not,’ said Effenberg’s wife. It was clearly out of the question.

When Teresa told Robert about that the next morning, he replied, ‘If you’d come here I’d have thrown them out. And you too.’ She was startled by the serious note in his voice. She found it hard to understand why he usually grew quiet when other people were partying noisily but resolved to think, ‘Today I’m proud of him for having such a firm character and saying “I don’t like partying, so I’m not going to a party or a disco even if everyone else urges me to.”’

Robert liked Effenberg, for the solicitous, big-brother way he treated the young players. If someone like Marco Villa played inspiringly at the age of eighteen, Effenberg didn’t just show him respect, he also offered him protection. But unlike Marco, Robert wasn’t interested in exploring the world of the Effenbergs and the Kamps away from the Bökelberg. He had an image in his head of nights in neon light with all sorts of cocky behaviour, and he felt he didn’t fit in with that.

Robert continued to have the occasional holiday from his anonymous everyday life as the substitute for the substitute goalkeeper. He was still called up as number one for the Under-21 national team. In Belfast he played against Northern Ireland, and shared a room with Marco. They knew about the habit junior national coach Hannes Löhr had of coming into
their
rooms the evening before to get them in the mood for the game. After a year they also knew Löhr’s catch-phrases.

5. Robert in the shirt of the Under-21 national side
.

Tomorrow we really have to win. It’s a very important game.

‘I don’t feel like it today,’ said Robert. Marco had an idea. They pushed the television right up against the bedroom door.

As expected, at about half-past eight there was a knock on the door.

‘Who’s there?’

‘The coach.’

‘Oh, Coach. Just a moment, it’s not a good time right now. Careful! Oh no – Coach, please, wait a moment!’

‘What’s going on with you two?’

‘The television’s right up against the door, we’ve got to move it, I don’t know if we can, damn that’s heavy!’ shouted Marco, who was sitting contentedly on a chair.

‘OK, guys, leave it for now, it was nothing important.’ And Löhr went away.

To the players, it looked as if Marco was messing around
and
Robert just happened to be there. Robert felt that he and Marco were playing pranks together.

‘Teresa often said, you two together are unbearably silly,’ Marco says. ‘But the times when we were laughing – that was Robbi at his happiest.’

For a professional footballer who was used to everything in life being secondary to sport, in the summer of 1997 Robert received a piece of bad news. He had to do his military service.

He had wanted to do civilian service. But his realism, and to a certain extent his sense of comfort, were stronger than his conviction that he never wanted to serve with the armed forces. Civilian service would have lasted thirteen months; in the army, as a professional sportsman he would have to go through the three-month basic training programme during the summer break but would then be exempted de facto from the remaining seven months of military service, as a member of the Bundeswehr sports promotion section.