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

one next to Robert. They got on well, she thought, though if she was him she’d give the haircut a bit of thought. He had already started training with the professional footballers of Carl Zeiss Jena and wore his fair hair the way they did, short at the sides, long at the top – ‘like a bird’s nest on his head’.

    1. Robert with Teresa and his family after a game between Jena sports college and a Thuringian team .
    ‘Hi, what are you doing here?’ she asked him. It was after ten o’clock at night.
    ‘I’m waiting for somebody.’
    ‘Oh, OK. Well, have a nice evening.’
    She smiled at him briefly and hurried on.
    ‘Hey!’ he cried after her. ‘You’re the one I’m waiting for, obviously!’
    And he’d been waiting for more than five hours, he told her a bit later, when they were having a drink in a bar called the French Pub.
    He was still living with his mother in the flats on Liselotte Herrmann Strasse, but he hadn’t told her or anyone that he was going to go and wait for Teresa at the station. He kept his feelings, his important decisions, all to himself. For weeks afterwards, while he and Teresa were getting closer, he didn’t tell his friends a thing. But they weren’t surprised when the two of them became a couple – that Robert Enke could achieve that, too. ‘We still often talk about it,’ says one of his former school friends, Torsten Ziegner, ‘about how Robert was this kid with a really sunny nature who managed to do whatever he put his mind to, who couldn’t be thrown off track, who was always in a good mood.’ Torsten turns his glass of water around in front of him to keep the short silence from getting too big. And for a moment everyone there in the living-room of Andy Meyer, another friend from those days, thinks the same thing: how strange that sounds today, thinking of Robert as a kid with a sunny nature. ‘Although,’ Andy says at last, speaking bravely into the silence, ‘actually I still think that, in spite of everything, Enkus was a child of joy.’
    The daylight, reflected by the snow and given a glaring quality, falls through the window of the single-family house in Zwätzen, an area of newly built houses just outside Jena. It’s one in the afternoon and Andy has just got up. There’s still a hint of tiredness in his eyes. He’s a nurse and was on night-shift. Torsten’s jeans fit loosely; the Gallagher brothers would like his jacket with its little diamonds and its stand-up collar. He’s a professional footballer, a slender, wiry athlete, and at thirty-two he’s back with FC Carl Zeiss Jena in the Third Liga. You see Andy and Torsten, in their early thirties, and you immediately sense the warmth, the humour, of those youthful times. ‘We realised immediately that we had the same interests – or rather, the same dis interests,’ says Torsten.
    ‘More than anything else,’ adds Andy, ‘we laughed.’
    It was always the four of them in those days: Torsten Ziegner, Andy Meyer, Mario Kanopa, who went off to be a teacher on the Dutch border, and Robert Enke, who they called Enkus – who they go on calling Enkus because as far as they’re concerned he’s still the person he used to be.
    Robert grew up among clothes lines. He and his friends met in the courtyards of the flats in the afternoon. ‘Over the Line’ was the name of the game on the estate. He would stand in goal between two clothes props and lob the ball over to his partner who would then volley the ball at the goal.
    From a distance his home, the satellite town of Lobeda, is still the first thing you see of Jena. Some forty thousand people used to live there, more than a third of the inhabitants of Jena; about seventeen thousand remain. On the side-streets between the fifteen-storey industrialised blocks on the Communist boulevards there are a few lower blocks no different from the ones you might see in a West German suburb like Frankfurt-Schwanheim or Dortmund-Nordstadt. While the two German states