3,096 Days (29 page)

I remember our first trip to the flat on Hollergasse exactly. The kidnapper didn’t take the fastest route via the motorway – he was
too miserly to pay the toll fee. Instead, he queued up in the traffic jam on Vienna’s Gürtel. It was morning and the last commuters of the rush-hour pressed in on both sides of the delivery van. I observed the people behind their steering wheels. Men with tired eyes looked at us from the van next to ours. They sat tightly squeezed in, obviously labourers from Eastern Europe, picked up by Austrian construction companies ‘kerb crawling’ in the morning along the arterial roads, only to dump them out there again in the evening. At once I felt a kinship with those day-labourers: no documents, no work permit, totally exploitable. That was the reality I found so hard to bear that morning. I sank deep into my seat and gave myself over to my daydream: I was on my way to a normal, regular job with my boss – just like all the other commuters in the cars next to us. I was an expert in my field and my boss placed great importance on my opinion. I lived in a grown-up world where I had a voice that was heard.

We had crossed nearly the entire city when Priklopil turned on to the Mariahilfer Strasse at the West Railway Station, driving outwards from the city centre and rolling alongside a small market where only half the stands were occupied. Then he turned on to a small side street. There he parked the car.

The flat was on the first floor of a rundown house. The kidnapper waited a long time before he allowed me to get out. He was afraid that someone would see us, and only wanted to let me scurry across the pavement once the street was empty of people. I let my eyes sweep down the street: small car repair shops, Turkish greengrocers, kebab stands and dodgy, tiny bars were scattered among the scenery of grey older buildings constructed during Vienna’s Age of Promotorism in the late 1800s, which had served as tenements for the masses of poor workers from the Austrian Empire’s crown lands. Even now the area was inhabited primarily by immigrants. Many of the flats still had no bathroom; the toilets
were out in the corridor and were shared among neighbours. The kidnapper had purchased one of these flats.

He waited until the street was clear, then he shooed me into the stairwell. The paint was peeling off the walls and most of the letter boxes were bent open. When he opened the wooden door to the flat and shoved me inside, I could hardly believe how tiny it was. Nineteen square metres – just four times larger than my dungeon. A room with a window looking out on to the back courtyard. The air smelled stale, like body odour, mildew and old cooking oil. The wall-to-wall carpet, which had probably been dark green at some point, had taken on an indefinable grey-brown colour. A large damp stain teeming with maggots could be seen on one wall. I breathed in deeply. Hard work awaited me here.

From that day on, he took me with him to the Hollergasse flat several times a week. Only when he had longer errands to run did he lock me in my dungeon the whole day. The first thing we did was to drag the old, worn-out furniture out of the flat and on to the street. When we stepped out of the building an hour later, it was gone: taken by neighbours who had so little that even that furniture was good enough for them. Then we began the renovation work. It took me two whole days just to tear up the old carpet. A second carpet came to light under it and a thick layer of dirt. The adhesive had become so stuck to the floor underneath over the years that I had to scrape it up centimetre by centimetre. Then we poured a layer of concrete screed, on which we laid laminate flooring – the same as in my dungeon. We stripped the old wallpaper from the walls, filled the cracks and holes and put up fresh paper, which we painted white. We added the cabinets for a miniature fitted kitchen and a tiny bathroom, hardly larger than the shower tray and the new mat in front of it.

I toiled like a heavy labourer. Chiselling, carrying, sanding, smoothing, hauling tiling. Wallpapering the ceiling, standing on a narrow board balanced between two ladders. Lifting furniture.
The work, the hunger and the constant struggle against my dropping blood pressure took so much out of me that any thought of escape was a very distant notion. In the beginning I had hoped for a moment in which the kidnapper would leave me by myself. But there were none. I was under constant surveillance. It was amazing the efforts he made to prevent me from fleeing. Whenever he went out into the corridor to go to the toilet, he pushed heavy boards and beams in front of the window so that I couldn’t open it quickly and scream. When he knew he would have to be outside for more than five minutes, he screwed the boards on. Even here he constructed a prison for me. When the key turned in the lock, I was transported back to my dungeon in my mind. The fear that something would happen to him and that I would have to die in that flat seized me here as well. I breathed a sigh of relief every time he came back.

Today that fear seems strange to me. After all, I was in a building with flats and could have screamed or beat against the walls. Unlike in the cellar, I would have been found quickly here. There were no rational reasons for my fear. It crept up from my insides, straight out of the dungeon within me.

One day, a strange man suddenly appeared in the flat.

We had just hauled the laminate for the floor up to the first floor. The door was only slightly ajar, when an older man with salt-and-pepper hair entered and greeted us loudly. His German was so bad that I could hardly understand him. He welcomed us to the house and obviously wanted to launch into a neighbourly chat about the weather and our renovation work. Priklopil pushed me behind him and shook him off with terse replies. I felt the panic welling up within him and let it infect me as well. Although that man could have meant my rescue, I felt almost harassed by his presence. That’s how much I had internalized the kidnapper’s perspective.

That evening I lay on my bunk bed in my dungeon and replayed the scene in my head over and over. Had I acted wrongly? Should I have screamed? Had I missed yet another decisive opportunity? I had to try to train myself to act with resolve the next time. In my thoughts I imagined the path from my position behind the kidnapper towards the strange neighbour like a leap across a yawning chasm. I could picture myself exactly taking a run at it, speeding towards the edge of the abyss and jumping. But I never saw myself landing on the other side. As hard as I tried, I couldn’t get the image to form. Even in my fantasy, the kidnapper snatched at my T-shirt again and again, yanking me back. The few times I eluded his grasp, I hovered in the air above the chasm for a few seconds before plunging into the abyss. It was an image that tormented me the whole night through. A symbol that I was on the verge of doing it, but would again fail at the deciding moment.

Just a few days later, the neighbour came back. This time he was holding a pile of photographs. The kidnapper pushed me aside surreptitiously, but I was able to catch a quick glimpse. There were family photographs depicting him in his former home in Yugoslavia and a group photo of a football team. He talked incessantly while holding the photographs under Priklopil’s nose. Again I understood only bits of conversation. No, jumping over the chasm was impossible. How was I supposed to make myself understood to this friendly man? Would he understand what I whispered to him in an unobserved moment, which would probably never happen anyway? Natascha who? Who’s been abducted? Even if he did understand me, what would happen next? Would he call the police? Did he even have a telephone? And then? The police would hardly believe him. Even if a police car came to Hollergasse, the kidnapper would have plenty of time to grab me and spirit me inconspicuously back to the car. I didn’t even want to imagine what would happen next.

No, this house would offer me no chance of escape. But the
chance would come. Of that I was convinced like never before. I only had to recognize it in time.

That spring, in the year 2006, the kidnapper sensed that I was trying to pull away from him. He was uncontrollable and short-tempered, and his chronic sinus infection tormented him primarily in the night. During the day he redoubled his efforts to oppress me. They became ever more absurd. ‘Don’t talk back!’ he would spit as soon as I opened my mouth, even when he had asked me something. He demanded absolute obedience. ‘What colour is that?’ he barked at me once, pointing to a bucket of black paint.

‘Black,’ I answered.

‘No, that’s red. It’s red because I say it is. Say that it’s red!’

Whenever I refused, an uncontrollable rage possessed him and went on for longer than ever before. The blows followed in quick succession. Sometimes he beat me so long it felt like hours. More than once I almost lost consciousness before he dragged me down the stairs again, locked me away and turned out the light.

I noticed how difficult I again found it to resist a fatal reflex, namely to repress the beatings faster than it took for my injuries to heal. It would have been so much easier to give in. It was like an undertow that dragged me down unremittingly into the depths once it had got hold of me, while I heard my own voice whispering, ‘Perfect world, perfect world. Everything is okay. Nothing has gone wrong.’

I had to fight that undertow with all my might and set out small life rafts for myself – my notes, where I once again recorded every single assault. Today when I hold the lined notepad where I entered all those brutalities in proper handwriting and complete with detailed drawings of my injuries, I feel light-headed. Back then I wrote them down while keeping them at a great distance from me, as if I were sitting a test at school:

15 April 2006. Once he beat my right hand so long and so hard that I could literally feel the blood pooling inside. The entire back of my hand was blue and reddish, the bruise extended through to the palm of my hand, spreading out to encompass my entire palm. Moreover, he gave me a black eye (also on the right side) that was originally located in the outer corner and turned reddish, bluish and green, then travelled upwards across my upper eyelid.

Other assaults that took place recently, provided that I still remember them and haven’t repressed them – In the garden he attacked me with pruning shears because I was too afraid to climb the ladder. I had a greenish-coloured cut above my right ankle, my skin peeled away easily. Then he once threw a heavy bucket of dirt at my pelvis so that I had an ugly reddish-brown bruise. Once I refused to come upstairs with him out of fear. He ripped the sockets out of the wall, threw the timer switch at me and anything else that he could get his hands on along that wall. I had a deep, red, bloody mark on my right outer knee and my calf. In addition, I have a blackish-violet bruise on my left upper arm measuring about eight centimetres, I don’t know how I got it. Several times he kicked and punched me again and again, even my head. Twice he bloodied my lip, once giving me a pea-sized swelling (slightly bluish) on my lower lip. Once he hit me, giving me a crimped swelling on the right side below my mouth. Then I also have a cut on my right cheek (I don’t remember how I got it). Once he threw a toolbox on my feet, giving me pastel green bruises. He beat the back of my hand often with a spanner, wrench or similar. I have two symmetrical blackish bruises below both of my shoulder blades and along my spine.

Today he punched my right eye, making me see a flash of light, and my right ear, where I felt a stabbing pain, a ringing and a crunching. Then he continued to beat my head.

On better days he would again paint a picture of our future together.

‘If I could only trust you not to run away …’ he sighed one
evening at the kitchen table. ‘I could take you everywhere with me. I would take you to Lake Neusiedl or Lake Wolfgang and buy you a summer dress. We could go swimming and go skiing in the winter. But I would have to be able to count on you one hundred per cent – otherwise you’d just run away.’

At moments like this I felt infinitely sorry for the man who had persecuted me for over eight years. I didn’t want to hurt him and wanted him to have the rosy future he desired so badly. He would seem so desperate and alone with himself and his crime that I sometimes forgot that I was his victim – and not responsible for his happiness. But I never allowed myself to succumb totally to the illusion that everything would be okay if only I cooperated. You can’t force anyone to be eternally obedient and you certainly can’t force anyone to love you.

Nevertheless, at such moments I swore to him that I would always stay with him, and comforted him, saying, ‘I won’t run away, I promise you. I’ll always stay with you.’ Of course he didn’t believe me and it broke my heart to lie to him. We both vacillated between reality and appearances.

I was present in body, but in my mind I was already on the run. I still couldn’t imagine landing safely on the other side though. The notion of suddenly surfacing in the real world outside frightened me unspeakably. Sometimes I even went so far as to believe that I would commit suicide immediately, as soon as I had left the kidnapper. I couldn’t bear the thought that my freedom would put him behind bars for years on end. Of course, I wanted others to be protected from this man who was capable of anything. I was still providing that protection by absorbing his violent energy myself. Later it would have to be up to the police and the justice system to keep him from committing any more crimes. Still, the thought gave me no satisfaction. I was unable to find any desire for revenge within me – just the opposite. It seemed as if I would only reverse the crime he had committed against me if I delivered
him into the hands of the police. First he had locked me up, then I would make sure that he was locked up. In my twisted world view, the crime would not have been cancelled out, but rather intensified. The evil in the world would be no less, but indeed would multiply.

All these reflections were in a way the logical culmination of the emotional insanity I had been subjected to for years. By the two faces of the kidnapper, by the rapid switch between violence and pseudo-normality, by my survival strategy to block out what threatened to kill me. Until black is no longer black, and white is no longer white, but everything is only a grey fog causing you to lose your bearings. I had internalized all of that to such an extent that at times the betrayal of the kidnapper carried more weight than the betrayal of my own life. Perhaps I should just give in to my fate, I thought more than once whenever I was in danger of being sucked under and losing sight of my life rafts.