A Life Too Short: The Tragedy of Robert Enke (38 page)

‘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.’

‘Don’t make yourself any older than you are – you’re only twenty-nine,’ said Germany’s goalkeeping coach Andreas Köpke.

After the 2006 World Cup, Oliver Kahn had stepped down. At the age of thirty-seven Jens Lehmann only had a limited future ahead of him as Germany’s number one. The goal was open, and Robert was the most likely applicant after Timo Hildebrand.

When Denmark’s coach Morten Olsen learned about Löw’s line-up, he grumbled. They were too weak an opposition. It was a friendly but Olsen wanted his team to be put to the test. Seven players in the German team, from Robert Enke to Jan
Schlaudraff
, didn’t even have experience of ten internationals between them. But the future was supposed to belong to them. In fact the steepest career curve of all the newcomers in Duisburg that night would be that of the referee. Howard Webb, another international beginner, would go on to oversee the 2010 World Cup Final.

24. ‘Enke flies’: one of Robert’s phenomenal saves in goal
.

In the tunnel outside the changing-rooms, before they went out, Robert’s hair stood straight up in the air. He had been tousling it with his gloves. His lips were narrow. There was nervousness in his eyes, not fear.

The game left him no time to brood. Only a minute had passed when a free kick flew in from the left wing and the Dane Daniel Agger soared high seven yards in front of goal, unencumbered. It was an outstanding header, solid, aimed at the right-hand corner. Robert hadn’t yet touched the ball. He dived, and as he flew in the air parallel to the bar, his back arching with physical tension, he steered the ball around the post. People who have never been goalkeepers themselves see saves like that as a goalkeeper’s greatest feats.

Shortly before half-time Thomas Kahlenberg ran towards him on his own with the ball. Robert just stood there. To the unpractised eye he was doing nothing. He didn’t even touch the ball when Kahlenberg ran past him. ‘Kahlenberg dribbled round Enke,’ the sportswriters wrote. In fact Robert had just executed the greatest feat of the evening. He had blocked the Dane’s line of fire so skilfully and for so long
that
all Kahlenberg could do was move past him on the left, where he found no space and inevitably ran out of play.

‘A lot of charisma and excellent reactions,’ the coach said of him after the game. Robert called his debut ‘quite decent’. Germany had lost 1–2, but the sports journalists wanted to make a winner out of him. Now he could lay claim to being Germany’s number two goalkeeper, couldn’t he?

‘You know you’re not going to get an answer to that one from me.’

Didn’t he at least see himself fighting Timo Hildebrand for the number two position after that game?

‘You mustn’t forget that this is only the third time I’ve been named in the squad. Timo has been included many times before.’

Germany defined itself as the promised land of the goalkeeper, the home of Sepp Maier, Toni Schumacher, Oliver Kahn. Even the most mundane question was enough for an extended debate, in this case: who would be the country’s substitute goalkeeper?

‘I’ll never be able to say publicly this colleague or that one is worse than me, I should be ahead of him. I know what respect is.’

The journalists were disappointed. What had happened to German goalkeepers? Didn’t they like stirring up trouble any more? At least they still had Lehmann for a while longer – Mad Jens.

In the summer of 2007, after Robert’s third summer in Hanover ended on familiar terrain – eleventh position in the Bundesliga – he and Teresa went to Lisbon for their holidays, as they had done the previous year.

The comparison couldn’t be ignored: a year ago they had spent their time in Portugal in a state of euphoria, not least because Lara had made such good progress. And now? They were enthusiastic again, even if the excitement could no longer capture them completely. ‘The loss of a child is terrible, that never goes away,’ says Teresa. ‘But we had spent two years living with Lara in a state of emergency, with the constant fear
that
she might die. On holiday in Lisbon I noticed for the first time, unbearable though her death was, it was also to some extent a liberation. We could live without fear again.’