A Life Too Short: The Tragedy of Robert Enke (26 page)

The coach had given the team two days off because of the defeat. Not seeing each other was the best therapy, Daum believed. So Robert would have to call Daum. The red-hot fear of the game was back, building up inside him. What would he say to Daum?

His phone rang.

‘Hello?’

‘Robert, it’s Eike.’

‘Eike!’

‘I’m sure you didn’t sleep any more after that game than I did. I just wanted to say that if you fancy a coffee I’ll drop by. We could take a boat-trip on the Bosphorus, too, so that you can see how beautiful the city is. Or, if you feel like it, we could do what Olli Kahn used to do after games like that and go and train till you puke, until you’ve got rid of all your frustration.’

‘Eike, it’s great that you’ve called. I was about to ring you. I’ve got a huge problem, but we can’t talk about it on the phone.’

‘I’ll drop by at your hotel.’

It was Robert’s voice that frightened Eike Immel. Had Teresa split up with him? Had someone in his family died? That would explain the hyper-nervous performance. ‘I still see myself knocking on the door of his hotel room half an hour later, thinking: Shit, what happens now? I would never have expected what happened next.’

Thank God, Eike was a good guy, Robert thought. Always talking, always with a positive view of things, even though he had arthritis in his hip – he’d worn it out during twenty years as a professional goalkeeper. Not exactly ideal for a goalkeeping coach, but that wasn’t the issue right now.

Light flooded through the wide windows into the hotel room. The Bosphorus glittered in the sun. On the opposite bank lay Asia.

Robert waited until Eike had sat down. The chairs were ochre-coloured rhomboids.

‘I have to end my career.’

‘Robert, what’s up?’

‘I can’t go on. I’m just scared – scared to leave the hotel room, scared to open the paper, scared to put on my gloves.’

Eike thought back a couple of decades, to when he had been an international goalkeeper, a semi-finalist in the European Championship, and had precipitously announced his
resignation
from the national team when he thought the coach was suddenly keener on Bodo Illgner. ‘I was scared before every season,’ Immel says. ‘Scared of my rival goalkeepers, scared of a new coach. On some days all it took was for me to discover a tiny hole in the pitch within the six-yard area – oh God, what if a shot lands in that dip? It’ll be unsaveable.’

He knew Robert’s fear, Eike thought, and he knew how quickly it could evaporate. One or two good games later and Eike had always thought: I hope my defence is really bad today so that I have to deal with fifteen serious shots – I can stop anything!

‘Robert, you couldn’t have done anything about those goals.’ Eike really believed that. ‘And the fact that you were nervous … how do you think I felt the first time I played for Manchester City, suddenly in a foreign country? In the first half against Tottenham I went flying under two crosses like an absolute beginner, and later on I had a really good time with City. It’ll be like that for you, believe me.’

‘It’s pointless. The anxiety is there all the time. I can’t go on. I don’t want to go on.’

They talked for two hours before Eike realised that he had lost his goalkeeper. He called Daum, Robert sitting next to him. A short time later the coach came to room 1296. He was ending his career, Robert said, he needed treatment. He never mentioned the word depression, only anxiety. Daum listened, he nodded, he said he understood. He would help him to get out of his contract.

In the meantime, Jörg Neblung had got the number of a respected psychologist via the German Sports University in Cologne. He hoped she would be able to fly with him to Istanbul to examine Robert while he went on playing for Fener. He was the agent who covered his protégé’s back, who had to strengthen him whenever he could, Jörg thought. He had left a message on the psychologist’s answering machine.

His phone rang. Perhaps that was her. It was Daum. Jorg had to come to Istanbul immediately, he said.

Tuesday dawned, the second free day after the game against Istanbulspor. Robert had nothing to do but wait for Jörg. He watched the ships on the Bosphorus from his hotel room, dozens of ferries, oil tankers and steamers. Nowhere is water more alluring than in Istanbul. You can stare at the Bosphorus for ever, and the ships with their leisurely, even movements take you away and bring you back in your dreams. But he was gazing right through the river. His Istanbul consisted entirely of the hotel room.

He picked up the hotel biro with the blue ink and thin nib.

12.08.2003. I’ve finally got to learn to listen properly to what my belly or my mind says. I don’t yet know why I did the thing with Fenerbahçe, probably because I thought I just needed to be needed again, and everything would regain its balance. But unfortunately it’s not as easy as that. My year in Barcelona has changed me a lot. All the self-confidence that I built up in three years in Lisbon has been taken away from me. In my current state of mind I’m not properly equipped for football. For a long time I wouldn’t admit it although I should have noticed: I was always glad when I didn’t have to play, even in training games. When the coach left me out, I presented it as a great injustice (which might have been the case every now and again), but in reality I was always relaxed and happy when I was watching from the sidelines. I’m also really scared of the opinion of the public, the press, and people’s eyes. I’m paralysed by fear. I don’t know how long ago it is that I’ve gone into a game excited but relatively unstressed. In future I’ll try to write from the soul a bit. I hope that helps
.

‘Are you already in Istanbul?’ Teresa asked Jörg on the phone.

‘In principle, yes.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘I’ve arrived, but I don’t know if I’ll ever get to the hotel. The taxi driver thinks it’s appropriate to hurtle through the
city
at eighty miles an hour. And in case you don’t believe me, he’s got all the windows open, too.’

Teresa couldn’t help laughing. As if they’d made a prior arrangement, Teresa and Jörg had been joking with each other since Sunday. Somehow there must be a way through the despair.

The next driver, sent by the club, was already waiting for Jörg at the hotel – windows closed, as he couldn’t avoid noticing. Jörg greeted Robert only briefly because he had to get going. They would see each other later. Jörg didn’t know where they were off to, so he had the feeling he was being taken to the furthermost corner of the city.

Before long he found himself sitting in a flat with Turkish carpets and lots of armchairs facing five men from the club. The president hadn’t come: Yildirim had known straight away that this goalkeeper was beneath him. Jörg knew Daum and his personal assistant Murat Kus but not the other three men with their serious faces. He took them for vice-presidents but they weren’t introduced to him. In fact they were already shouting at him. Kus translated in a jovial voice.

What was Jörg thinking of, what had been going on in his head, foisting such a goalkeeper on Fenerbahçe?

Jörg knew the stories about coach dismissals and player sackings in Turkey. In 2000, the president of Bursaspor had taken a gun out of his desk when his German coach Jörg Berger insisted that the terms agreed in his contract were to be honoured.

Jörg acted as if he hadn’t heard anything. ‘Robert needs a course of therapy, so unfortunately he has to go back to Germany. He’s agreed that with the coach. I would therefore ask the club to grant him a few weeks off.’

‘What? We’re supposed to go on paying him while he takes a rest in Germany? He can have a course of therapy here, too. There are wonderful institutions for therapy like that in Istanbul.’

A servant walked through the room with a silver pot and silently and elegantly poured tea for the men.

‘If Enke wants to go, he should go. But in that case the contract is dissolved and that’s that!’

It wasn’t as easy as that, said Jörg. If the contract was dissolved, Robert would be unemployed until the next transfer window opened in five months’ time. The club would have to give him some sort of financial compensation.

‘He’s not getting any more money! Why do you want money? You won’t get the money as far as the airport!’

He could see that they were upset, Christoph Daum said. The best thing would be for Neblung and Enke simply to go.

‘I’ll have a word with Robert and let you know tomorrow, but I’m sure he won’t simply dissolve the contract and give up his salary,’ said Jörg.

The conversation went round in circles for an hour, but then the vice-presidents, or whoever they were, stood up and left, without shaking hands. They talked loudly in Turkish and pointed at Jörg.

They made him wait for his driver. Daum stayed in the flat as well. He plainly had nothing more to say to Jörg. Without a word of explanation, Daum picked up his phone and rang the Brazilian middleman Juan Figer. Loudly and without the slightest inhibition, Daum was already negotiating for the next new arrivals. Jörg was still in the flat after midnight, not knowing where it was or who it belonged to. He wondered whether life was perhaps just a soap opera after all.

The next morning Robert had to act as if he was still a perfectly normal Fenerbahçe player. He had to go to training.

Daum took him aside. What on earth was his agent playing at, demanding money on top of everything? People in Turkey were hot-blooded, they could get very angry.

And Robert had only just begun to regard the coach as a friend.

In his diary he tried to get his thoughts in order:

14.08.2003. Fenerbahçe have threatened Jörg and me with open violence if we don’t dissolve the contract forthwith.
Daum
joined in, and didn’t act as middleman in any way. I was forced to accept that it was a mistake to open myself up to this man
.

‘How are you?’ Teresa asked on the telephone.

‘Good – apart from the fact that they’ve hung me by my feet from the twelfth-floor window of the hotel,’ Jörg said.

And for a moment Robert laughed with them.

Jörg had moved into Robert’s hotel room. There was safety in numbers, he told Robert. Not being alone was better for Robert, he thought. Whenever they left the room, Jörg placed a wet hair across the door and frame so that he could check when he came back whether anyone had been in the room in their absence. It was a joke, to dispel the gloom, but at the same time it was serious. ‘We had to be prepared for anything, even for our passports to be stolen, drugs to be smuggled into our suitcases, whatever.’

Robert made it clear that Jörg no longer had to take too much trouble over the negotiations. He wanted only one thing: to get out of Istanbul.

The contract was dissolved the same day. Fenerbahçe undertook to pay Robert’s hotel expenses and his return flight. He didn’t ask for another cent.

Fifteen days after he had arrived in Istanbul in his summer shirt, Robert set off for home. Fenerbahçe published a statement: the contract had been dissolved by mutual agreement. Robert told journalists about ‘a feeling’, and couldn’t explain his decision in the first person: ‘If something is simply wrong in a new milieu, and you don’t feel right, you can’t perform properly. And before you head towards an even unhappier situation, it’s better to draw a line under it.’ Daum commented, ‘He was handicapped, but he only told me after the game.’ The journalists concluded that Enke had gone into the game with an injury and had therefore damaged himself with ‘his exaggerated ambition’.

Talking openly about his anxieties didn’t seem like an option.

In the world of football, most people shook their heads
anyway
. A professional didn’t resign. That expectation was encapsulated in the word ‘professional’. Being professional means repressing emotions, carrying on. And if things aren’t working out on the pitch, then a professional just sits on the subs bench, secretly starts to look for a new club and takes his salary in the meantime. ‘Lots of people said Enke has lost his marbles, and fair enough, if you look at it soberly, you could see it like that,’ said Robert.

Only Jupp Heynckes, his coach in Lisbon, saw something else. ‘For the first time in four years I remembered that at Benfica he’d also wanted to go home straight away. Then it occurred to me that he might have a more serious problem.’

According to FIFA regulations a player couldn’t change clubs twice in one transfer window. Robert would indeed be unemployed for at least five months. Was he a lost soul, or was he free? When he thought about it at Ataturk airport, he thought you could be both at the same time, lost and free, defeated and relieved.

In his eagerness to leave Istanbul behind he had arrived at the airport five hours before the flight to Barcelona.

WHEN THOUGHTS BECAME
overwhelming at night, Robert went to the loo. He sat on the toilet and waited in vain for weariness to return. Eventually he crept back through the dark house, hoping none of the dogs would start barking. Teresa was breathing evenly in the bedroom. He lay down beside her and closed his eyes, wanting to force sleep to come.

Why did I sign up with Fenerbahçe against my better judgement? And what if I could have stuck it out in Istanbul just a couple of weeks longer, like everybody said? I will never get out of this hole again …

When he woke up again one or two hours later, he felt as if he hadn’t gone to sleep at all.

How deep can it really go? I pulled my tail in between my legs in Istanbul, and now I’m being punished. But what sort of punishment? Where is it all going to end?

At ten to eight he woke from his non-sleep. He kissed Teresa good morning, told her he was going on the long circuit with the dogs. But even when he was talking there was a heavy silence between them. He could hear it beyond his words. There were so many things he wanted to say to her; he had to tell her how he was. Four times in the night he had tried to flee his thoughts by going to the loo. He noted everything meticulously in his diary, treating himself quite ruthlessly.
The worst night I can remember
, he wrote. But whenever he started talking, the words sounded false, the sentences hollow.