A Life Too Short: The Tragedy of Robert Enke Page 28

  On Tuesday, two days later, Robert turned up for training. He dragged a silence behind him: wherever he went conversations dropped away; a mute bubble formed around him. He didn’t sit down in the changing-room. He had something to say to them, he said. Most of the players stared at the floor. ‘As you know, Lara has died. Please, don’t be stand-offish, talk to me openly if you have any questions. Just be perfectly natural about her death.’ He seemed commanding, grounded.

  ‘It was a moving performance,’ says Tommy Westphal, his friend, the team assistant. ‘But no one asked him about Lara. No one from the team could say a thing to him that went beyond normal sympathy. I had the feeling his team-mates found it harder to deal with the situation than he did.’ How were they to go on talking to each other when Robert was among them? Were they even allowed to go on laughing on the training-ground?

  It was no easier for their parents and friends. How were they to express their sympathy and support if Teresa and Robert didn’t want to see anybody?

  Robert’s mother escaped to the mountains around Jena. It was a beautiful day, the day after Lara’s death, the third-last day of that fairy-tale summer of 2006. Gisela Enke remembered to drink a large amount of water before she set off. She marched more than she walked, as if she could outpace the news. At some point she tripped on the mountain path. She didn’t try to get up; she felt she wouldn’t be able to do it anyway. Just lie where you are, Robert’s mother said to herself, no one will come by anyway.

  Back at home she wrote a letter to Robert and Teresa. She pretended it was Lara who was writing. ‘You remember, Papa, when I spat out my food and covered you from head to toe? You couldn’t bring yourself to laugh that time.’ When Robert and Teresa read the letter they couldn’t help crying, and that did them good.

  The next Saturday his father was suddenly standing in front of him. Robert was lining up in the changing-room corridor before the game against Bayer Leverkusen. His father threw his arms around him. Robert shivered, touched and embarrassed at the same time. He wasn’t keen on the idea that his father had battled his way past all the stewards to the sanctum of the stadium: ‘I’m Robert Enke’s father, please let me through, I’ve got to get to my son.’

  The referee blew his whistle. Six days after Lara’s death, Robert performed strongly in a Bundesliga match against Leverkusen that ended 1–1. He alone registered that he had made a few small mistakes.

  It didn’t occur to anyone that Lara’s death might topple him back into a depression. In his grief there was hardly any time or room for the idea. And besides, he seemed so composed.

  Marco Villa hadn’t been able to attend Lara’s funeral. He was a professional, he had to play football, now for a Serie D club based in a suburb of Naples where a local meat wholesaler had promised amazing salaries. That day Marco played unemotionally. He thought about Lara and scored a goal without noticing what he was doing. Three thousand people in the stadium applauded him. His team-mates came running over to congratulate him and couldn’t understand why he wasn’t throwing his arms up in the air, why he wasn’t beaming from ear to ear. Before half-time, Marco scored another goal. Then he pretended he’d sprained a muscle and got himself substituted. He sat alone in the dark changing-room while the second half carried on outside. He was a striker, and he had just scored for the first time in seven years.

  SIXTEEN

  Afterwards

  TERESA HAD SOME photographs stored on her camera that she still hadn’t printed. They were a few weeks old. They showed Robert with Lara by the Maschsee – their last outing together, by the big lake in Hanover. What would they do with those photos now? How could they do anything with those photos?

  ‘Let’s put them on the wall,’ said Teresa.

  He nodded, so that he didn’t have to speak.

  They didn’t want to avoid their daughter’s death, they wanted to remember the beautiful moments. But of course that didn’t work every day.

  Teresa stopped eating. She helplessly watched herself getting thinner and thinner, feeling no desire for food. He was pursued by questions. Could Lara’s death have been prevented? What if the doctors had operated on only one of her ears? Would her little heart have stood the strain then? ‘We all overestimated her strength,’ he said, without noticing how loudly he was suddenly talking.

  The high chair still stood at the kitchen table. They couldn’t simply clear it away. But how, when they saw that chair, could they keep from thinking how empty it was?

  But the countless inner breakdowns, most of which lasted no more than a few minutes, led to an unimaginably beautiful insight: pain brought them together. ‘There are moments in life when you feel very powerfully: I’d like to grow old with this person. That’s how it was with Robbi and Terri after Lara’s death,’ says Marco Villa.

  They went together to Lara’s nursery. Her name was still on the door in bright magnetic letters, her toys still lay on the carpet. They sat down on the floor. Do you remember, they said to each other. Lara wanting the nurse to put on the same sort of baseball cap as Teresa. Lara eating a whole jar of food on her last day.

  They didn’t want to avoid their daughter’s death, they wanted to remember the beautiful moments. And on some days they actually could.

  Lara’s death was less than two weeks in the past when Robert got some news. For the first time in seven years he had been included in the Germany squad. Could he only ever experience extremes of sorrow and joy? He persuaded himself that he could be proud of his selection: he didn’t need to be ashamed if he felt something like joy. He felt like a robot issuing orders to itself: be glad.

  In early October the national team met in Berlin for a training-camp. At the end of the week they would play a friendly against Georgia, and he was to be substitute goalkeeper. The director of media at the German Football Association cautiously asked him how he felt about a press conference. His inclusion after such a long time was obviously newsworthy.

  Of course he would do it, said Robert.

  But he would have to expect questions about Lara.

  He was prepared for that, said Robert.

  He hadn’t talked to reporters since her death, which hadn’t been very hard: journalists, even from the tabloids, had reverently kept their distance. Now here he was in Berlin sitting on a podium in front of a hundred of them. He asked if he could say something before the first question. ‘First of all I would like to take the opportunity, in my wife’s name as well as my own, to say thank you to all the incredible numbers of people who have expressed their sympathy to us over the last few weeks. Each individual letter was very welcome, and helped us go on a little further. Please publish that. It’s really important to my wife and me.’

  The questions that followed were asked in muted voices. He kept interrupting his answers with a little cough.

  ‘Lara’s illness forced me to confront life and death,’ he said, which is why even before her death he had been preoccupied with the question of what would happen if she died. ‘Things have to go on. Grief can’t defeat you.’

  Robert’s performance was one of the most impressive ever experienced at a football press conference, the sportswriters wrote afterwards. Testimony to his enormous strength.

  Robert himself didn’t feel enormously strong. He had simply pulled himself together. ‘I was just scared that people would avoid me because they didn’t know how to respond to me. That’s why I tried from the outset to be as natural as possible.’

  After two or three months he sometimes spoke about Lara on the phone of his own accord. He had been looking at photographs of her only yesterday, he might say, and ‘in every other picture she was laughing’. But once when we talked about her for a newspaper article – publicly, so to speak – he said, ‘Come on, let’s leave the television on’ (there was a football match on at the time). That way he wouldn’t hear his own words so much. ‘I can’t run away from her death,’ he said. ‘I know I have to come to terms with it.’ Coming to terms, he then said, that
sounds wrong now, but he couldn’t think of a better phrase. I knew what he meant, didn’t I? I nodded, and we stared at the television.

  Shortly before Christmas their dead daughter put them to the test again. Should they go on living in Empede to be close to her grave, or should they move on? Perhaps they could only really leave the horror behind them by moving away from it. Robert’s contract with Hannover 96 was due to run out in six months. The moment to make the decision had come: stay or go? The options of Hamburg and Leverkusen had fallen through. Through a happy chance, Hamburg SV had suddenly been able to sign up an excellent goalkeeper in the form of Frank Rost. Bayer Leverkusen wanted to try their hand with Butt and the talented Adler in the background. ‘If my goalkeeping coach hadn’t had me, presumably he would have brought in Robert,’ says René Adler. ‘He was always taken with Robert.’ That left VfB Stuttgart, who were on their way to the German championship and were wooing Robert.

  ‘Let’s go,’ said Teresa. ‘Let’s have a new start in Stuttgart.’

  ‘I don’t know. I owe so much to Hannover. If they hadn’t saved me from Tenerife that time I might still be playing in the Second Division.’

  ‘But in a new place we’d be free of that depressing memory that clings to every object, every place.’

  ‘Going away would only mean running away from the memory.’

  ‘OK then, stay with Hannover, then at least we won’t have to think about it any more,’ Teresa said abruptly.

  But it wasn’t as simple as that. Of course he went on thinking about it. He would be playing Champions League matches with Stuttgart; he might even win a title. Maybe he should meet Stuttgart’s coach Armin Veh during the winter break. But Veh avoided making any firm commitment to see him. In all likelihood Stuttgart would lose their goalkeeper in six months’ time. Timo Hildebrand wanted to go abroad. In that case Veh wanted Enke. But the coach was still fighting for Hildebrand, and before that battle was won or lost he didn’t want to be seen with another goalkeeper.

  So Jörg Neblung negotiated with Hannover first. He met the club president Martin Kind the day before Christmas at his company headquarters in Grossburgwedel. Kind employed almost two thousand people making hearing aids and distributing them around the world. He wasn’t a particular fan of football so many people wondered what possessed him to use his millions to put Hannover 96 back in the Bundesliga. On the other hand it could hardly have harmed sales of hearing aids when the name of the company was made more famous by the boss’s commitment to football.

  Robert was one of the few footballers at the club with whom Kind had anything like a personal relationship. Kind liked the analytical, lofty perspective from which Robert viewed football. He knew that losing him would strip the club of its optimism. Robert gave life to the dream that Hannover 96 could be something bigger than a local favourite. Professional footballers are adored after only three good games, and Robert Enke, a top-ranker in a mid-ranking club, benefited from an excess of esteem at Hannover.

  To keep the keeper, Kind assembled an extraordinary sum of money for Hannover 96, some of it from external backers – over six million euros. But it soon became clear during the negotiations that there was a problem. Kind thought the six million would be enough for a four-year contract, Jörg argued that Robert should receive the same amount of money over three years. He would still be earning less than he would with Stuttgart.

  Kind had brought along Gregor Baum, a member of the board of directors who deals in real estate and racehorses. With his harsh tone, Baum ensured that the meeting was over quickly, but that it also finished without an agreement being reached.

  Robert and Teresa waited for Jörg in the Hotel Kokenhof, right next to the hearing-aid company. There were Christmas decorations up in reception. After he had described to them what had happened at the negotiations, Jörg said he thought Robert should say no to Hannover for the time being. That didn’t mean they couldn’t do business in a few weeks’ time. ‘And then,’ says Jörg, ‘the decision was made against 96.’ Hannover knew what a goalkeeper in his category earned elsewhere, Robert thought out loud, and he had been prepared to stay even though he had worse prospects with 96 and would receive a smaller salary than in Stuttgart. If the club was then half-hearted in its financial treatment of him, that might be a sign for him to go.

  Jörg’s phone rang.

  ‘Mr Neblung, we’ve talked again. We’re willing to raise the offer. It’s important to us that Robert stays with 96.’ Kind asked the agent to come to his office straight away.

  That evening a press photographer was called to the Kokenhof to take a picture of Robert Enke and Martin Kind shaking hands. Enke had signed a three-year contract, until July 2010.

  In Hanover the fans and local media celebrated as if Robert had given them a present by deciding to stay. He started to get a bit frightened. The fulsome commentaries read as if he were a romantic who had pegged back his personal ambition out of gratitude to Hannover 96. But what if he wanted to leave in two years’ time? Would he be denounced as a hypocrite? ‘I stayed not least because 96 stretched themselves financially for me to an incredible extent,’ he stressed, ‘and because I expect things to go forward here in a sporting sense.’

  In the end he was a professional, not an idealist. But at the same time he unconsciously derived a new source of joy from the devotion of the fans. Immersed in cries of thank you and bravo, he no longer doubted his decision to stay. He sat with Teresa by Lara’s grave and suddenly he was sure he couldn’t have gone away. He was slowly coming to believe what Teresa and he had been saying to each other like a mantra since 17 September 2006. ‘You can’t grieve every minute. It’s not reprehensible to be able to eat again, to laugh again.’

  Two months later it was announced that Timo Hildebrand of VfB Stuttgart was switching to FC Valencia. Now Stuttgart’s coach Armin Veh would have loved to talk to Robert Enke.

  When a session was over at the winter training-camp in Jerez de la Frontera in January 2007, the men from Cabin Two didn’t leave the pitch. Midfielder Hanno Balitsch put on Robert’s gloves and went and stood in goal and Michael Tarnat fired in free kicks. Robert lurked in the box, and Tarnat sometimes directed the ball not at the goal but deliberately at Robert’s backside. ‘I can’t work like this!’ shouted Robert, and laughed with the others.

  There seemed to be an area in his body that was untouched by fun, that laughter couldn’t penetrate. But increasingly often he found that he was able to cut himself off from that part. He could be thinking of Lara one minute, filled with despair, and the next laughing at Tarnat. Even during Bundesliga games ‘my thoughts strayed repeatedly to her’. He smiled again. ‘But with a goalkeeper that’s not so dramatic.’

  Teresa had no team. She started jogging in the fields around Empede. She ran every day, at least ten kilometres, until her feet started hurting. A fatigue fracture, the doctor diagnosed.

  ‘Perhaps I should go to a psychologist this time,’ she said to Robert one evening.

  ‘You?’

  ‘I think it would help me.’

  ‘You don’t need a psychologist!’ He said it to cheer her up. They would find their life without Lara together. But did he say it partly because it would have destroyed his view of the world? His wife, the stronger one in his eyes, seeing a psychologist?

  In the weeks that followed Teresa found herself thinking the same thought on a number of occasions: perhaps she did need professional help. His rejection of the idea became more vehement the more often she expressed it. Eventually she herself believed that she would get better without a psychologist. But she often wondered why he had protested so strongly against the idea.

  Suddenly they had time. The afternoons that had been subject to the severe rhythm of Lara’s needs now lay ahead of them. Would they manage to do something and enjoy them without a guilty conscience?

  They drove to Hamburg, they went to Lake Steinhuder. One afternoon Robert rang their neighbours’ doorbell. His internet was down, could
he quickly use his neighbour’s computer? Uli Wilke had been the best footballer in the village before Robert moved to Empede. He had played for TSV Havelse in the Third Liga. In his early forties, he was now working as a car salesman. After Robert had used the internet, they fell into conversation.

  Uli came over to watch football on the television with him, and he and Teresa helped the Wilkes build a stone wall in the garden. The Wilkes had two little girls – that was the test the others couldn’t even see: bearing the fact that other couples had wonderful children.

  Would they ever try for another child? Robert told himself it was too soon to ask the question. But the question kept coming back.

  A doctor they had met at the clinic asked if they could look after her little daughter Laura. Teresa and Robert didn’t like to say no. Laura came to see them more and more often. Finally they realised why the doctor was entrusting her daughter to them. It wasn’t so much to do with the child needing to be minded; they were to get used to being around children again. They were to stop seeing the lack of Lara in every child they came across.

  Teresa can’t say when, whether it was after four or five months – there wasn’t a moment – but eventually they were glad when someone called out ‘Hello?’ in a bright voice outside their door. The children from the village began to call on them unannounced. The garden gate was always open.

  At around that time an eight-page fax arrived for Robert at the Hannover 96 office. The national coach was inviting him to play in the international against Denmark in Duisburg on 27 March 2007 (and also reminding him that for his submission to the referee he would need to produce a valid passport or ID card).

  It was no longer possible to ignore the fact that the Germany coach Joachim Löw was serious about him. At an age when careers on the global stage are usually coming to an end, Robert was to play his first international. ‘I wouldn’t have thought that I was going to be selected again – I’m nearly thirty after all.’