A Life Too Short: The Tragedy of Robert Enke Read online

  That summer she was cheered by thirty-seven thousand people. Teresa had taken her along to the stadium on the day Hannover beat 1 FC Cologne 1–0 and moved up to seventh place in the Bundesliga. Robert took her with him on his lap of honour. He carried her in his goalkeeping gloves.

  ‘That sight brought me a kind of fulfilment,’ says Teresa. ‘We’d done it: we’d survived both the depression and Lara’s heart operations, in terms of sport he was back on top, and we were still happy as a couple. I wish I could have frozen that moment.’

  The fairy-tale summer, the Germans called it. The World Cup and the sun were both in the country. Robert was fourth goalkeeper in line for the World Cup squad. As they say in the jargon, he was on stand-by duty. If anything happened to one of the three nominated keepers, he would be called up as an emergency replacement. It was extremely unlikely. Not being able to play but still having to stay at the ready – other people saw it as a humiliation. Schalke’s attacker Kevin Kurányi said nobody needed to call him, he was going on holiday. Robert stayed in his garden, proud of his pseudo-nomination, and couldn’t get the parasol to go up.

  Lara was sitting on my lap in the garden. When Teresa went into the house for a moment, Robert said to me, ‘If you think Lara’s hands are cold, please don’t tell Teresa. She gets so worried about her cold hands.’

  Lara had been given a PEG probe. She could now be fed directly through the stomach wall rather than through a tube in her nose. Her parents no longer had to check with a stethoscope to see whether the milk had reached her stomach, instead of inadvertently going into her lungs.

  Without the tube in her face she suddenly looked healthier. Her parents packed a suitcase as if they were going off on an expedition – milk, injections, tablets, pulse oximeter – and took her to the zoo. They put Lara in a sling and took her into the fields with the dogs. For several moments they forgot the clock that was constantly ticking in their heads – probe in an hour, bedtime in an hour and a half. One evening they let Lara stay up longer than scheduled. It was only half an hour, but to them it also seemed like a fairy-tale summer.

  Robert’s phone rang. It was Jörg Neblung, about extending his contract with Hannover, which would run out in a year. Hannover wanted to confirm as quickly as possible that he was staying on. There were temptations. Hamburg SV were possibly interested. Bayer Leverkusen had even sent their chief scout, Norbert Ziegler, to watch him in training. Leverkusen’s goalkeeper Hans Jörg Butt was thirty-two and the club’s directors were talking about whether they should acquire a successor, even though they were training up an exciting junior international as a substitute, René Adler. But you could never tell, of course, if talents would reach their full potential. ‘Of course I could switch to a bigger club, if I applied myself,’ Robert said in the garden. ‘But if Hannover get the money together I can easily imagine staying.’ He didn’t want to forget once again that ever further, ever higher wasn’t always the right direction to go in. ‘I know what I’ve got here – playing in the Bundesliga, getting good reviews on Monday.’

  Lara sat in the grass and watched one of the dogs.

  Outside the front door stood a handicapped man from the village, as he did almost every day, waiting for a word or a gesture from his idol. Robert excused himself, he would have to have a serious word with the chap, he couldn’t hang around outside the door for hours on end, every day. Robert went outside and then chatted good-naturedly with the man.

  Later we went into the house because a World Cup match was about to start. Italy versus the USA. He wanted to study the great Buffon. ‘But you never see anything, because he never gets to do anything.’

  ‘He watches all the World Cup matches,’ Teresa called out to me.

  ‘Nonsense. I didn’t watch South Korea versus Togo.’

  In the house, apart from some cheerful colour photographs, they had hung some black paintings. By Jacques Gassmann.

  Ever since Jacques had stopped being their squatter Robert had felt a growing affection for the artist who was, somehow, his very own artist. ‘I had to revise my image of him,’ says Jacques. When he was living with the Enkes he had often spent a long time sitting alone with Teresa at the kitchen table because Robert had clearly had enough of him. Now Robert collected Jacques’s post. The police wrote to Jacques more than once: he’d had an altercation with a man at the car-wash, or he’d been caught by a speed trap on the A7 near Fulda. The revenue office had to remind him from time to time that there was such a thing as a tax declaration. Jacques lived some of the time in Hanover and some of the time in Poland, but his post still went to Empede.

  ‘If you go carrying his letters after him, he’ll never learn that there are some things in life that you have to do for yourself,’ Teresa said to Robert.

  22. Robert and Teresa with Lara during the fairy-tale summer of 2006.

  But he had resolved to help his artist get his life in order. Sometimes he rang Jacques; they had to meet so that he could give him his mail. Once he sent the artist a text from Saudi Arabia, where he was playing with the national team. He just wanted to remind him that he had a parking ticket to pay, sixty euros, it had to be paid by Monday, the reference number was … He always began his texts to Jacques with the words ‘Great Master!’

  ‘In a way I thought his commitment was a bit skewed,’ says Jacques. ‘Wouldn’t it have been easier to pay the sixty euros for my bad parking rather than send texts from Arabia?’

  The goalkeeper brushed aside Jacques’s insistence that he really didn’t need to worry about his mail so conscientiously. ‘Jacques, you’re a scatterbrain, if you do it yourself it isn’t going to work.’ Then Jacques seemed to understand what Robert’s real concern was. ‘The parking-tickets were an umbilical link to me. He always needed an excuse, a pretext, to make contact. And then off he would go with his chattering.’

  There was nothing to connect the two of them except for five shared, often painful months under one roof. Now, when they met to hand over the mail, Jacques talked to him about goalkeepers, a topic he hadn’t a notion about, and Robert asked about art, which he knew nothing about. Jacques bought a television especially to watch Robert playing. Robert went to the Apocalypse exhibition in the St Johannis Kirche in Bemerode. It was precisely because Jacques was so different that he liked seeing him – as long as it wasn’t too often. The artist felt much the same. That’s why Jacques is vexed that he never told Robert what might have been the most important thing. His own story.

  When he got a grant from the Sprengel Museum, the media reported that a new star had risen in the artistic firmament. ‘People said, now he’s got everything. I thought all I had was pressure.’ Eventually he started feeling a pain in his chest, and he was convinced it was lung cancer. What he had was a pulled muscle from wind-surfing. ‘Happiness does not consist in being right at the top,’ Jacques states.

  What is happiness, then?

  ‘Happiness is recognising how much pressure you can take. Happiness means freeing yourself from the people who revere you for something you aren’t. Not trying to please those people. Not constantly being preoccupied with making it all look effortless.’

  Jacques Gassmann now lives in Würzburg. The Catholic Church has become his major employer. Later that evening he’s meeting the cathedral priest. ‘He rocks,’ says Jacques. His blue trousers are sprinkled with little white dabs of paint; anyone who didn’t know what he does for a living might think it was an expensive piece of design. ‘That was the other thing I thought was interesting about Robert. Outwardly he was becoming more and more of a classic footballer.’ In Hanover he started to wear his shirts wide open, he bought belts with patterns of studs, and for the first time in his life he drove a showy car, a big Mercedes. ‘But deep down he had less and less to do with that cliché.’ Once, Jacques received a ‘very touching letter’. A shame they’d missed each other so often recently, from Teresa and Robert. ‘Thanks for the lovely letter,’ Jacques said the next time he spoke to Teresa on the
phone.

  ‘What letter?’

  Robert had written it all by himself.

  The Goethe Institute in Lisbon invited Robert and Teresa to an event being staged to coincide with the World Cup. It was the first time they had been back to Portugal in four years. When they saw the city from the plane, Teresa started crying.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘I’m so happy,’ she said, and thought of a sentence she thought she had forgotten long ago, his first Portuguese words. É bom estar aquí. It’s good to be here.

  He wanted to go straight to the sea at Cascais, to La Villa in Estoril, to the Palácio Fronteira, to the Blues Café. ‘It was lovely to walk beside him and notice that he was at home here,’ says Paulo Azevedo, who organised the event. They often had to stop because passers-by kept talking to Robert. They wanted to tell him to come back. ‘And the amazing thing was, it didn’t matter whether they were fans from Benfica or their great rivals Sporting and Porto. Everybody said, “Hey, come back.” If they were Sporting fans, they added, “But come to us this time.” That gives you an idea of the impression he made here.’

  Events at the Goethe Institute that attract more than fifty people are few and far between. Eight hundred people turned up to see the interview with Robert Enke. A Portuguese television channel broadcast it live.

  Lisbon had been great, he realised without a twinge of pain. Life in Hanover had reconciled him to his subsequent path.

  Even though Lara had already been with them in Empede for a year and a half, they still felt at home in the clinic at the University Hospital. They had to go there too often for checkups. This time the doctors had some news for them: Lara was deaf. But everything suggested that her acoustic nerve still worked, which made cochlea implants a possibility. Even with a hearing aid it would be a long time before she learned to hear, but it was possible. Teresa and Robert postponed the operation until September so that Lara could celebrate her birthday at home on 31 August.

  23. Robert and his new friend Paulo Azevedo at the World Cup event in Lisbon.

  The 2006–07 Bundesliga season, Robert’s third with Hannover 96, was already under way. The previous season they had finished twelfth, but Robert didn’t want to admit that the sacking of his mentor Lienen had had a positive effect on the team. ‘Our results would have improved with Ewald Lienen as well,’ he said defiantly. Where his successor, Peter Neururer, was concerned, he remained sceptical. ‘It would be nice if we trained for something other than corners.’ After years in the Bundesliga, Neururer had enjoyed some short-lived success with well-practised corners and a halfway decent defence, but in the longer term his plan of action was too limited and his luck soon deserted him. After only three games into the new season he was fired. The team was bottom of the league with three defeats.

  The first game with the new coach, Dieter Hecking, coincided with the day of Lara’s ear operation. Yet again Robert’s focus had to be on two places at once, the football pitch and the operating theatre. But this time the clinic didn’t dominate his thoughts, mainly because in comparison with the three heart operations the ear surgery would be less complicated, less frightening. Also, a difficult test awaited them in the stadium. If they didn’t win straight away with the new coach they could easily get stuck in the relegation battle.

  He was staying in the hotel with the team preparing for the match at VfL Wolfsburg. Teresa was in the waiting-room at the clinic. Lara was on the operating table. Doctors were checking her heartbeat, pulse, oxygen saturation levels; Lara’s condition under general anaesthetic was stable, they could operate. After putting in the first cochlea implant they had to decide whether operating on the other ear would be too much for Lara.

  In Wolfsburg the new coach announced the team line-up. Thomas Brdaric´, capped eight times by his country, and Altin Lala, the captain, were returning to the side. As a result of one of those conflicts so typical of professional football, the kind whose origins no one can ever actually remember, Neururer had left those two out during his last weeks at the club.

  Everything’s fine, the doctor told Teresa early that evening; both operations had been successful and the little one’s circulation was stable. They brought Lara out of the operating theatre. She had a bandage around her head. Visiting hours at the intensive care ward were over, so Teresa drove home.

  In Wolfsburg, Robert’s game began.

  It soon transpired that a coach who articulates his thoughts clearly can change a team in a week. Nothing is harder in football than simplicity, but when Dieter Hecking explained his ideas on defence everything that had seemed like a failure for weeks was suddenly clear and simple. Hannover 96 controlled the game in Wolfsburg. Brdaric´ put them 1–0 ahead, but Wolfsburg equalised straight away. Teresa had turned on the television at home, and when the other team scored she automatically caught her breath. There was nothing Robert could have done, she persuaded herself as she watched the replay. Brdaric´ scored again. Hannover had won their first game of the new season. Teresa went to sleep easily that night.

  At eight o’clock the next morning Robert went to the clinic. Lara had thrown up a bit but everything was under control, everything was fine, the nurse said. They wanted to keep turns watching over Lara, Teresa in the afternoon, Robert at night. Lara slept, still exhausted from the anaesthetic. Robert read the papers. ‘No one in Hanover’s interested in Neururer any more,’ said the double goal-scorer Brdaric´ in the Hannoverische Allgemeine. Robert wasn’t mentioned. It had been the best game for a goalkeeper; he hadn’t had much to do all night. Teresa went jogging in the fields. In the afternoon she took over from Robert. He drove to Empede and watched the football. Bayern were actually losing in Bielefeld, Hamburg were also about to be defeated again in Dortmund – what they really lacked was an outstanding goalkeeper. By the winter break he would decide whether he would go or stay in Hanover.

  ‘Everything’s fine,’ Teresa said to him when he arrived for his night-watch session, ‘but try to give her a bit more food. I didn’t get much fluid into her.’ Lara was already eating small things like a spoonful of porridge. Solid food like a bit of bread she generally just put in her mouth and then spat out again – she didn’t yet know that you could swallow things like that. Sometimes her parents gave her a red lollipop and she sucked away on that for ages. This time Lara only sucked on the lollipop twice before giving it back to Teresa. Was that a sign that her recovery from the operation wasn’t going well? Or was it just the normal moods of a child?

  That evening in Empede Teresa made herself a pizza. She thought: good, we’ve got the implants out of the way. What would it be like when Lara could finally talk to them?

  In the clinic Robert tried to give her food artificially via the probe, but Lara wasn’t ingesting much of it. He wasn’t too worried. At least she’d eaten something.

  At about ten o’clock Teresa called him. Everything’s fine, said Robert. Lara was asleep.

  He was allowed to spend the night in his daughter’s room. After an hour or so he heard Lara tossing and turning. He put his hand on her to calm her down. Her body was cold. To busy himself, just to do something, he tried to give her some food via the probe again.

  At midnight he called night duty. She might be in pain from the operation, the duty doctor said, and gave her a painkiller. Both she and Robert fell asleep. At about five he woke up. A nurse was standing next to Lara’s bed fiddling with the pulse oximeter. The gauge was at zero. Presumably the sensor was broken, the nurse said. Her movements were urgent yet calm. They changed the sensor. The new one couldn’t find a heartbeat either. The nurse frantically tried to revive Lara. She called the duty doctor. The duty doctor called for the senior physician in charge of the intensive care ward. ‘Who is it?’ the senior physician asked. Lara Enke. She was perplexed. Lara had been stable that afternoon. The nurse sent Robert on to the balcony. He tried to call Teresa. She had left the phone in the kitchen and didn’t hear it ringing in her sleep. He dialled the housekeeper’s nu
mber and told her, please, drive to Teresa quickly and wake her up. It was a quarter past five in the morning on 17 September 2006. ‘Lara’s gone,’ Robert said repeatedly into the phone, ‘Lara’s gone.’ Then everything went black.

  At six, Teresa was about to enter the clinic by the back entrance so that she could get to Lara’s room more quickly. She found Robert outside Lara’s door, lying on the pavement.

  ‘On the way back from the clinic we immediately said to each other: life goes on. That was our slogan,’ says Teresa. That was their attempt.

  The car radio was already broadcasting the news: Robert Enke’s daughter dies. The cause of death seemed to be sudden heart failure. They called family and friends. Everyone said how composed Robert and Teresa sounded. They told everyone, please, don’t come to Empede. They wanted to be alone together.

  They laid out Lara at home. The children of the village came to visit her one last time. In the silence one little girl said, ‘What will happen to all her lovely toys?’ Teresa was pulled up short by the innocent cruelty of childhood. It was so easy for children, they just carried on playing. Robert stood next to her as if under anaesthetic, as if he were no longer there.

  At the funeral service the day after Lara’s death, for which they asked everyone to wear white, Teresa noticed that something was gnawing away at him.

  ‘So, training tomorrow – better not?’ he asked, his voice still too fragile to form a whole sentence.

  ‘Of course, Robbi!’

  ‘You think?’

  ‘Of course, if it helps. Football is part of our life. Make sure you go back to everyday life.’

  ‘And the weekend?’

  ‘Play.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Robbi, whether you play this Saturday or next, it doesn’t change anything. It’ll be harder for you to come back the longer you wait.’