Mats found Kaja in the ‘lobby’, the lower-level reception area for first class passengers – the first thing those well-heeled travellers saw when they entered the aircraft on a separate gangway reserved just for them. Apart from the curving cabin walls, hardly anything here resembled an aeroplane. It certainly did look like the reception desk of an ultramodern boutique hotel with its semicircular leather lounge chairs that harmonised perfectly with the cream-coloured carpet, illuminated by an arc lamp of the sort usually seen in a nice living room.
The lobby was situated between the cockpit and the fully reclining chairs of first class and wasn’t being used by the passengers at the moment. When Mats came down the spiral stairs, Kaja was alone at a pearlescent sideboard, filling a champagne flute on a mirrored silver tray.
He could’ve used the glass elevator next to the restrooms, presumably reserved for handicapped passengers. Surely some who could afford that three-room villa above would be even older and less fit than he was.
‘Kaja?’ Mats asked gently, and she jumped so violently the liquid she was pouring missed the glass. ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to frighten you.’
Not yet.
The truth was he wanted, no, needed to talk to her about the Faber video.
The video was so explosive it had shaken even him to the core. Everything he thought he’d known about Kaja now appeared in a wholly new and mysterious light to him as well.
‘It’s no problem.’ Kaja gave a fake smile and looked around. Mats got the sense that she wasn’t checking to see if anyone had noticed her little mishap.
She was scared of being alone with him.
‘Should I have someone clear your plate and get your bed ready?’ she asked as she dried the tray with a cloth napkin.
‘That’s not why I’m here.’
She topped off the glass and shook her head. ‘I’m afraid I’m unable to see to you personally at the moment, Dr Krüger. But you don’t have to go to the trouble of coming all the way down here when you need something. There’s a call button on every remote. Just push it and a flight attendant will be there immediately.’
‘I don’t want a flight attendant. I want to talk to you.’
Kaja lifted the tray and all her body trembled as she, in the span of a second, dropped any and all professional courtesy: ‘And I do not want to talk to you,’ she snarled at him. ‘Our conversation, it has to end. Leave me in peace.’
‘I can’t do that,’ Mats answered, as calmly as was possible for him.
He glanced to the right, down the aisle to first class, but could only make out a velvety curtain fluttering as if in the wind. The aeroplane kept gliding along through this rough sea that was the night sky, still shaking slightly, and the seatbelt signs had stayed on.
‘In addition, I have to insist that you return to your seat at once. This turbulence could get worse at any time.’
Mats gave her a harsh stare. ‘Are you talking about the flight? Or yourself?’
Kaja’s eyes searched his. Frightened, nearly speechless. He could see in her eyes that she was questioning whether he was still the reasonable man she’d confided in before.
No. I’m not.
In the dim light of the arc lamp, her face looked nearly white now as if deliberately made up pale. As she held the tray, he could see some polish was lacking on one of her fingernails.
‘I’m not doing great. I don’t understand, Dr Krüger. I get the feeling that you’re trying to open my old wounds on purpose. I haven’t had to think about everything as much in the last few years. There are days when it doesn’t even enter my head. But now, a few minutes with you and I keep seeing all these images.’
The champagne glass quivered on the tray, nearly in sync with her lower lip.
‘Which images?’ Mats asked maliciously, but she didn’t take the bait.
‘No, don’t. Please stop.’
He took a deep breath and acted as if he’d respect her wishes. ‘Okay, all right. I understand. And, yes, I’m sorry. Please listen to me a moment, though. I won’t ask you any more questions – it’s not you I want to talk about at all.’
‘Then what?’ she said warily.
‘Let me tell you something about me. Because I know exactly how you feel.’
‘Dr Krüger, please I…’
He pointed at the seating area, but she didn’t follow him.
‘You might know that I lost my wife four years ago.’
‘I read the obituary in Tagesspiegel. I’m very sorry. She had cancer, right?’
‘Yes. But she died from the poison that she drank.’
‘So, suicide?’
He nodded.
‘Katharina couldn’t take the pain anymore. She contacted organisations abroad that support people in cases of assisted suicide, obtained the appropriate means. All against my will.’
‘Why are you telling me this right now?’ Kaja asked with a timid glance towards the curtain. In the few hours since their first conversation, she had shrunk a couple of centimetres. She was letting her shoulders slump, and the burden weighing on her was making her spine curve. ‘I have a passenger waiting for his order.’
She tried passing by Mats.
‘Just one minute, Kaja. That’s all I need. Katharina, she didn’t want any more than that from me herself. One final minute, with me by her side. The final minute of her life. Yet I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t stand it, that all that I once loved, that light of my life, showing me the way, was supposed to die right there before my eyes and fade away.’
‘I understand that.’
Mats could feel the tears coming, and no wonder, having never opened up to anyone like this up until now. Everything he said matched reality. Sadly.
‘I haven’t forgiven myself to this day. It was selfish, egotistical. Just like what I did afterwards. The lowest thing I’ve ever done.’
‘What was that?’ Kaja had to know, and Mats could tell that it was working. By exposing a little of himself, he’d won back a little of their lost trust.
Hopefully.
He was also realising that confiding in someone really did have a cleansing effect. He’d been dragging his feelings of guilt around with him for too long, incapable of healing himself. But his professor always used to put it like this: ‘Psychology is doomed to fail because we’re making the absurd attempt of hoping to understand our minds using our minds.’
‘I drove over to a colleague’s. Felicitas Heilmann. You met her, briefly. She’s the psychiatrist you talked to when you called the mental health hotline. A good friend of mine. I felt horrible, hopeless, and alone. Well, she trusted me.’
Kaja placed the tray back on the sideboard. ‘What are you trying to tell me, Dr Krüger?’
‘That was four years ago, Kaja, and I’ve been running away from it ever since. I ran from the bedroom of my dying wife and into the bedroom of my younger colleague, who I knew loved me. Although I didn’t reciprocate her feelings. I was fleeing from myself, into a low and egotistical form of self-pity. I slept with her.’
Mats swallowed hard.
‘I ran from a highly sober state into that of a senseless drunk and was barely able to form a sentence when my daughter Nele called me on my phone. I was still lying in that bed, and Feli picked up for me. To hear the message that Nele had found my wife dead in her own bed.’
The time had come. Mats couldn’t fight it anymore. The tears flowed yet didn’t keep him from vividly describing to Kaja everything weighing on his chest:
‘And then I kept fleeing. From Nele, who’s hated me with no end ever since that day. “You miserable, cowardly piece of shit,” she screamed at me when I came home. “You cheat on Mom while she’s dying?”
‘And she was right. With every single one of her furious accusations. Nele forbade me to come to the funeral, which she planned all by herself. And me? I didn’t want it to become a scandal. I was even so weak I packed up my things and kept on running, as far away as I could this time, to my brother in Buenos Aires. I eventually found my feet there. Or at least, so I thought.’
‘But what does that have to do with me?’ Kaja said. ‘I’m not running away.’
‘Oh, yes you are. I didn’t want to make it so explicit at first. But you haven’t really faced the truth either. You fled. Not physically, but certainly mentally. Otherwise you wouldn’t be reacting so strongly right now, especially since I’ve only presented you with fragments of the actual truth.’
Kaja cleared her throat. The splotches on her neck were darker. ‘What is that supposed to mean? What actual truth? There’s nothing that we haven’t spoken about in full detail.’
Mats grimaced with remorse. ‘Not true, Kaja. There is. Please, just give me a brief moment, and I will prove it to you.’
As he spoke that last sentence, the curtain was pulled to the side and Valentino, the attendant she apparently called Ken, stepped into the lobby.
‘So this is where you’re hiding,’ he said, and his expression darkened once he saw who was here with her.
He pointed at the tray on the sideboard. ‘3G is annoyed enough already.’
‘I’m coming right now,’ Kaja promised and picked up the tray again, pushing hair out of her eyes with her free hand.
‘Please,’ Mats whispered into her ear as she passed. ‘I have to show you something. It will change your life.’
She shook her head and kept going, yet turned around again right before the curtain Valentino was holding open for her. ‘I’ll see to it, Dr Krüger. Just give me five minutes.’
Then she disappeared into first class with her fellow flight attendant.