As they commenced take-off, Mats could not get the voice out of his head.
‘What are a thousand deaths?’ it asked, the voice of reason, which sounded very faintly like the aviophobia seminar leader. It was however slightly hoarse and difficult to understand amid the din of the aeroplane accelerating into the sky. Mats’ fingers clenched the armrests and he lowered his head.
‘Nothing. Statistically, a thousand air accident deaths per year are of no consequence.’
He knew all this, but it left him cold.
The statistics didn’t help. On the contrary.
The moment the cabin light had briefly flickered and the engines had roared into life, Mats was convinced that all studies and forecasts declaring aeroplanes to be the safest means of transport in the world – with ‘only’ a thousand deaths per year on sixty million flights – were bogus.
‘This equates to 0.003 deaths per billion passenger kilometres,’ the leader had announced with a laugh. Because this figure was so low that the German Statistical Office had rounded it down to zero. Statistically, there was absolutely no risk of a fatal accident when flying.
‘Tell that to the relatives of the passengers whose plane disappeared from radar over the Indian Ocean recently,’ the snake snickered, having coiled itself around Mats’ neck as well as his chest. As it pulled ever tighter, the snake hissed, ‘Can you hear the rattling? Do you think that’s okay? I didn’t know the Argentinian runways had recently been paved.’
Mats glanced to his right, looking over the head of the sleeping man to the window. He saw the lights of the terminal race past and felt the nose of the aircraft climb as the noise of the engines grew louder.
They must’ve reached the speed of 280 kilometres an hour required for take-off, which was just below that of his blood shooting its way through his throbbing jugular.
It’s starting.
Mats wanted to swallow but his mouth was too dry. His hand moved up to his neck and loosened an invisible tie. When the rattling stopped and the giant became airborne, he felt like thrashing around.
He looked up at the ceiling, where the creaking of the creamy-white overhead lockers imparted little confidence. Mats could hear the glasses clinking in the galley. On the screen in front of him he saw a map of the world and an aeroplane symbol the size of an insect setting its course for the Atlantic. Its flight route was marked with a dotted semi ellipse.
Flight time: 13 hours and 3 minutes
Wind: 50 km/h
Height above sea level: 360 metres
Distance to destination: 11,900 kilometres
Good God. So high already?
And so far to go?
The angle at which he was sitting reminded him of being hauled up to the top of a rollercoaster. Just before you plunge back down.
Crash.
Mats shook his head and reached for the paper bag in the pocket of the seat in front of him. Not to throw up, but to have something he could breathe into if things got worse. Which he was bound to need if he couldn’t banish the image of a burning plane wreck in the ocean from his mind.
Mats peered again at the window.
A mistake.
The densely woven carpet of the lights of Buenos Aires lay below them.
Below me!
He looked back at the monitor, saw the reflection of his haunted, haggard face hovering above the ocean to the west of the South American coastline and tried a trick.
Acupressure often helped when he had a migraine. Counter-pain.
Mats had realised long ago that this technique worked for acute psychological pain too. To relieve the thrust of his fear of flying he needed a mental counter-pressure.
Which is why he thought of Katharina.
Her hair on the floor. And the blood she’d vomited into the toilet along with her food.
Back then.
He recalled those last, frayed signs of life he’d witnessed from her. The death rattle through the closed bedroom door. Which he could still hear outside the front door as he left, never to return. ‘I’ve got to get out of here,’ he heard the snake hiss. It had appeared back then too, uttering the same words when he’d abandoned his wife.
‘Out of here!’ it now repeated, four years later, and Mats heard the hissing, accompanied by a hydraulic humming beneath his seat. The sound of that freely spinning, gigantic drill they’d prepared him for in the aviophobia seminar.
The retraction of the undercarriage and landing flaps.
That’s done! Mats thought, without feeling any better.
The angle at which they were sitting levelled out and the snake loosened its grip a little, allowing Mats more air, but still it lay heavily on his chest.
Better than nothing.
The take-off, the second most dangerous phase of the flight (after the landing), during which 12 per cent of all accidents occurred, was almost over. The engines were practically at cruising speed. It became quieter.
‘Now we’re one of ten thousand,’ Mats thought. Swiss researchers had discovered that at any point in time at least ten thousand aircraft were in the air simultaneously. With more than a million passengers on board.
A city of people with no ground beneath their feet.
Mats looked to either side of him and envied the two sleeping passengers. The guy who’d nabbed his window seat had pulled the hat further down his head. And Trautmann was snoring lightly with his mouth open.
Mats couldn’t imagine finding peace in these cramped seats. Just for the hell of it he tried closing his eyes briefly and repeating in his mind the mantra of the aviophobia seminar leader: ‘It’s unpleasant, but not dangerous.’
He managed to keep it up for a while: about five minutes that felt like five hours, at the end of which he was hardly any calmer. The fact that he no longer felt like jumping up screaming and running to the emergency exits he considered a minor triumph. Mats wouldn’t be able to hold out for long, however, so again he tried to conjure the image of his dying wife. Without success, or at least not in the way he’d expected.
Because all of a sudden – with his eyes still closed – a heady, aromatic oriental ladies’ scent filled his nose.
That perfume…
The memory associated with it was so intense that it triggered a number of physical reactions all at once. He shuddered, the right corner of his mouth began to twitch. And his eyes were so itchy that he wrenched them open. Full of both fear and hope.
It’s not possible, he thought – the only conceivable thought – and when he saw the woman hurrying away down the aisle he tried to convince himself that his eyes were fashioning images his brain wanted to see: a medium-height woman with shoulder-length brown hair, a slim back and ample hips, who occasionally grabbed onto the head rests of the seats as if she were struggling up a hill even though the plane was no longer climbing so steeply.
She’d pulled down the hem of a black rollneck sweater to the top of her thighs.
Because she thinks her bum’s too fat.
Mats watched the woman with the familiar gait: small steps with the tips of her feet facing slightly inwards. ‘As if you were dribbling an invisible soccer ball,’ he’d once jokingly described it to her.
‘You should talk. You stomp around like a pirate with a wooden leg,’ had come her reply and that put him in his place.
He undid his belt with tears in his eyes. He wanted to slip out of his seat, even though the seatbelt sign was still lit. Wanted to go after the woman who couldn’t be who she reminded him of. With her scent, which only on her skin reminded him of dark hollyhocks.
With her clothes, her gait, the slightly curly hair. And not least her way of pulling up the curtain dividing cattle class from business class.
With her left hand.
She’s left-handed!
Like Katharina.
His wife who died four years ago.