3,096 Days (25 page)

Punches and kicks, choking, scratching, contusion on wrist, squeezing of the same, shoved against the door frame. Hit with hammer (heavy hammer) and fists in stomach area. I have bruises on: right hip bone, right upper (5 x 1 cm) and lower (c. 3.5 cm in diameter) arm, on my left and right outer thigh (left c. 9–10 cm long and deep black to purple, c. 4 cm wide) as well as on both shoulders. Abrasions and scratches on both thighs, my left calf.

Diary entry, January 2006

I was seventeen when the kidnapper brought a video of the film
Pleasantville
into the dungeon. The story is about a brother and a sister who grow up in the US in the 1990s. At school the teachers talk about gloomy job prospects, AIDS and the threat of the destruction of the planet due to climate change. At home, the divorced parents fight on the phone over who is to take the kids for the weekend. And there’s nothing but problems with their friends. The brother escapes into the world of a television series from the 1950s: ‘Welcome to Pleasantville! Morals and decency. Warm welcomes: “Hi honey, I’m home!” The right food. “Do you want some biscuits?” Welcome to the perfect world of Pleasantville. Only on TV Time!’ In Pleasantville the mother serves dinner exactly when the father comes home from work. The children are nicely dressed and always hit the basket when playing basketball. The world consists only of two streets and the fire
brigade has only one job: rescuing cats from trees. Because there are no fires in Pleasantville.

After a fight over the remote control, the brother and sister suddenly land in Pleasantville. They are trapped in this strange place where there are no colours and the inhabitants live according to rules that the two find incomprehensible. When they adapt and integrate themselves into this society, it can be very nice in Pleasantville. But when they break the rules, the friendly inhabitants turn into an angry mob.

The film was a parable of the life I was living. For the kidnapper, the outside world was synonymous with Sodom and Gomorrah: dangers, dirt and vice lurked everywhere. A world which for him had become the epitome of what he had failed at and what he wanted to keep his, and my, distance from. Our world behind the yellow walls was supposed to be like Pleasantville: ‘Do you want some more biscuits?’ – ‘Thank you, dear.’ It was an illusion that he conjured up again and again in his chitchat: we could have such a nice life. In that house with the gleaming surfaces that shone too much and with the furniture that nearly choked on its own conventionality. But he continued to work on the façade, investing in his – our – new life, which he then battered with his fists the next minute.

In
Pleasantville
there is a scene where someone says, ‘My reality is only what I know.’ When I leaf through my diary today, I am shocked sometimes to see how well I adapted to Priklopil’s screenplay with all its contradictions:

Dear diary,

It is time to pour my heart out completely and without reservation about the pain that I have come to know. Let us begin in October. I no longer know how it all was, but the things that happened were not very nice. He planted the Brabant Thuja shrubs. They look very nice. At times he wasn’t doing very well, and when he isn’t doing very well, he makes my life hell.
Whenever he has a headache and takes a tablet, he gets an allergic reaction, and that means that his nose begins to run badly. But the doctor gave him drops to swallow. In any case, it was very difficult. There were unpleasant scenes again and again. At the end of October the new bedroom furniture arrived with the sonorous name Esmerelda. The blankets, pillows and mattresses came somewhat earlier. Everything of course hypoallergenic and washable at high temperatures. When the bed had come, I had to help him take apart the old wardrobe. That took about three days. We had to take apart the pieces, carry the heavy mirrored doors over to the study, the sides and shelves we carried downstairs. Then we went into the garage and opened all of the furniture and part of the bed. The furniture consisted of two bedside tables with two drawers each and gold-coloured brass handles, two dressers, a high, narrow one with … [incomplete]

Gold-coloured brass handles, polished by the perfect housewife, who put the dinner on the table, cooked according to the recipes of his even more perfect mother. When I did everything right and kept to my designated choreography between the backdrops, the illusion held up for a moment. But any deviation from the screenplay, which no one had given me ahead of time, was punished with draconian severity. His unpredictability became my greatest enemy. Even when I was convinced that I had done everything well, even when I thought I knew what prop was needed at any given moment, I was not safe from him. A look that rested on him for too long, a wrong plate on the table that had been the right one yesterday, and he flew into a rage.

Sometime later I wrote in my notes:

Brutal punches to the head, my right shoulder, my stomach, my back and my face, as well as to my ear and eye. Uncontrolled, unpredictable, excessively sudden outbursts of rage. Screaming, insults, pushing me while climbing the stairs. Choking, sitting on me and holding my mouth and
nose closed, suffocating me. Sitting on my arm joints, kneeling on my knuckles, wringing my arms with his fists. On my forearms I have finger-shaped bruises and a scratch and abrasion on my left forearm. He sat on my head or, kneeling on my torso, beat my head against the floor with full force. This several times and with all his strength, giving me a headache and making me feel nauseated. Then an uncontrolled shower of punches, throwing objects at me, pushing me viciously against the bedside table.

The bedside table with the brass handles.

Then again he allowed me things that gave me the illusion that he cared. For example, he let me grow my hair again. But that was only part of his choreography. Because I then had to dye it peroxide blonde in order to conform to his image of the ideal woman: obedient, hard-working, blonde.

I spent more and more time upstairs in the house, spent hours dusting, tidying up and cooking. As always he never let me out of his sight for a second. His desire to control me completely went so far that he even took all the doors to the toilets off their hinges: I was not to be out of his sight for two minutes. His permanent presence drove me to desperation.

But he too was a prisoner of his own screenplay. Whenever he locked me in his dungeon, he had to supply me with food, etc. Whenever he fetched me to come upstairs, he spent every single minute monitoring me. His methods were always the same. But the pressure on him grew. What if a hundred blows weren’t enough to keep me down? Then he would be a failure in his Pleasantville as well. And there was no turning back.

Priklopil was aware of this risk. As a result he did everything he could to make me understand what would be in store for me should I dare leave his world. I remember a scene when he humiliated me so badly that I immediately fled back into the house.

One afternoon I was working upstairs and asked him to open a window. All I wanted was a bit more air, a hint of the twittering birds outside. The kidnapper barked at me, ‘You only want me to open it so that you can scream and run away.’

I swore he could believe me that I wouldn’t run. ‘I’ll stay, I promise. I’ll never run away.’

He looked at me doubtfully, then grabbed me by the upper arm and dragged me to the front door. It was broad daylight outside and, although the street was devoid of people, his manoeuvre was still risky. He opened the door and shoved me outside without ever loosening his grip on my arm. ‘Go on, run! Go on! Just see how far you get the way you look!’

I was paralysed with fright and shame. I was hardly wearing anything and tried to cover my body as best I could with my free hand. My shame that a stranger might see me so emaciated, with all my bruises and the short stubbly hair on my head, was greater than the slim hope that someone could witness the scene and start to wonder.

He did that a few times, shoving me outside naked in front of the house and saying, ‘Go on, run! Just see how far you get.’ Each time the world outside would become more and more threatening. I was confronted with a massive conflict between my longing to know that world outside and the fear of taking that step. For months I had begged to be allowed outside for a short time and again and again I was told, ‘What do you want out there? You’re not missing anything. Outside is just the same as inside here. Besides, you’ll scream when you’re outside, and then I’ll have to kill you.’

He, in turn, vacillated between his pathological paranoia, his fear of having his crime discovered, and his dream of a normal life where we would have to go out into the outside world. It was a vicious circle, and the more he felt backed into a corner by his own thoughts, the more aggressively he turned against me. Like
before, he relied on a mixture of psychological and physical violence. He trampled mercilessly on what remained of my selfesteem and hammered the same words into me over and over: ‘You are worthless. You should be grateful to me that I took you in. Nobody else would take you.’ He told me that my parents were in jail and that nobody was living in our old flat. ‘Where would you go if you ran away? Nobody out there wants you. You would come crawling back to me remorsefully.’ And he reminded me insistently that he would kill anyone who happened to witness any attempt at escape. The first victims, he told me, would probably be the neighbours. And I certainly didn’t want to be responsible for them, did I?

He meant the people in the house next door. Ever since I had swum in their pool from time to time, I had felt connected to them in a unique way. As if they were the ones who had enabled me to enjoy my small escape from everyday life in the house. I never saw them, but in the evening when I was upstairs in the house, I sometimes heard them calling their cats. Their voices sounded friendly and concerned. Like people who take loving care of those who are dependent on them. Priklopil tried to keep any contact with them largely to a minimum. Sometimes they brought him a cake or a trinket from their travels. One time they rang the bell while I was in the house and I had to hide quickly in the garage. I heard their voices as they stood in front of the door with the kidnapper, giving him some homemade food. He always threw such things away immediately. Given his obsession with cleanliness, he never would have eaten any of it because they disgusted him.

When he took me out for the first time, I had no sense of liberation. I had looked forward so much to finally being allowed to leave my prison. However, I sat in the passenger seat and was paralysed with fear. The kidnapper had drilled into me precisely what I was to say if someone were to recognize me: ‘First of all you are to act
as if you don’t know what they’re talking about. If that doesn’t help, you say, “No, you’ve got the wrong person.” And if somebody asks me who you are, you are my niece.’ Natascha had ceased to exist long ago. Then he started the car and drove slowly out of the garage.

We drove down Heinestrasse in Strasshof: front gardens, hedgerows with family houses behind them. The street was empty of people. I could feel my heart beating in my throat. For the first time in seven years I had left the kidnapper’s house. He drove through a world I knew only from my memories and from short video films the kidnapper had made for me years ago. Small snapshots that showed Strasshof, occasionally a few people. When he turned on to the main street and queued up in traffic, I saw a man walking down the pavement out of the corner of my eye. He walked in a strangely monotonous way, never stopping, never making a surprising movement, like a wind-up toy soldier with a key sticking out of his back.

Everything I saw seemed unreal. It was like the first time I stood in the garden at night at the age of twelve; doubts struck me about the existence of all these people who moved so matter-of-factly and nonchalantly through an environment which I knew, but which had become completely alien to me. The bright light that bathed everything seemed as if it came from a gigantic spotlight. At that moment I was certain the kidnapper had arranged everything. It was his film set, his own gigantic
Truman Show
. All the people here were extras, everything was only play-acted in order to make me believe that I was outside, while in reality I remained trapped in an expanded prison cell. I didn’t understand until later that I was caught in my own psychological prison.

We left Strasshof, drove cross-country for a bit and stopped in a small forest. I was allowed to get out of the car briefly. The air smelled tangy, of wood, and below me dappled sunlight skimmed across the dry pine needles. I knelt down and carefully laid my
hand on the ground. The needles pricked me, leaving behind red dots on the heel of my hand. I took a few steps towards a tree and placed my forehead against a tree trunk. The craggy bark was warm from the sun and exuded the intense odour of resin. Just like the trees I remembered from my childhood.

On the way back, neither of us said a word. When the kidnapper let me out of the car in the garage and locked me in my dungeon, a deep sadness welled up within me. I had looked forward to the world outside for so long, had pictured it in the most vivid colours. And now I had moved through it as if it were an imaginary world. My reality had become the birch wallpaper in the kitchen. This was the environment in which I knew how I was supposed to move. Outside, I stumbled around as if caught in the wrong film.

That feeling ebbed somewhat the next time I was allowed out. The kidnapper had become emboldened by my submissive and frightened attitude in my first tentative steps outside the house. Just a few days later he took me to a chemist’s in town. He had promised to allow me to pick something nice there. The kidnapper parked the car in front of the shop and hissed at me once again, ‘Not a word. Otherwise everyone in there will die.’ Then he got out, walked around the car and held the door open for me.