3,096 Days (30 page)

Other days I racked my brains, thinking about how the world outside would react to me after all those years. The images from the Dutroux trial were still very present in my mind. I never wanted to be presented like the victims in that case, I thought. I had been a victim for eight years and I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life as a victim. I pictured exactly how I would deal with the media. Most preferable was that they would leave me alone. But when they reported on me, then never to use my first name. I wanted to re-enter life as a grown-up woman. And I wanted to select the media that I would talk to myself.

It was an evening at the beginning of August, when I was sitting at the kitchen table with the kidnapper eating supper. His mother had put a sausage salad in the refrigerator. He gave me the vegetables and piled the sausage and cheese on his own plate. I slowly chewed on a piece of pepper in the hope of being able to suck every last bit of energy from every single red fibre. In the
meantime I had gained a bit of weight and now weighed forty-two kilograms, but the work in the Hollergasse flat had exhausted me and I felt physically drained. My mind was wide awake. Now that the renovation work was finished, yet another phase of my imprisonment was over. What was to come next? The normal insanity of everyday life? Summer retreat on Lake Wolfgang, begun with severe beatings, accompanied by humiliations and, as a special treat, a dress? No, I didn’t want to live this life any more.

The next day we were working in the assembly pit. From a distance I could hear a mother calling loudly for her children. Now and again a short puff of air carried a hint of summer and freshly mown grass into the garage where we were overhauling the underneath of the old white delivery van. It was the vehicle he had abducted me in, and now he wanted to sell it. Not only had the world of my childhood moved out of reach into the distance – now all of the set pieces from the first years of my imprisonment were disappearing as well. This van was my connection to the day of my abduction. Now I was working towards making it vanish. With every brushstroke I seemed to be cementing my future in the cellar.

‘You have brought a situation upon us in which only one of us can make it through alive,’ I said suddenly. The kidnapper looked at me in surprise. I wouldn’t be deterred. ‘I really am grateful to you for not killing me and that you have taken such good care of me. That is very nice of you. But you can’t force me to stay with you. I am my own person, with my own needs. This situation must come to an end.’

In response Wolfgang Priklopil took the brush from my hand without a word. I could see from his face that he was deeply frightened. All the years he must have feared this very moment. The moment it became clear that all his oppression had borne no fruit. That when it came right down to it, he hadn’t been able to break me. I continued: ‘It is only natural that I have to go. You
should have counted on that from the beginning. One of us has to die; there is no other way out any more. Either you kill me or you let me go.’

Priklopil slowly shook his head. ‘I will never do that. You know that too well,’ he said softly.

I waited for pain soon to explode in some part of my body and mentally prepared myself for it.
Never give up. Never give up. I will not give up on myself.
When nothing happened, when he only remained standing motionless in front of me, I took a deep breath and spoke the words that changed everything: ‘By now I have tried to kill myself so many times – and here I am, the victim. It would actually be much better if you would kill yourself. You won’t be able to find any other way out anyway. If you killed yourself, all of these problems would suddenly be gone.’

At that moment something inside him seemed to die. I saw the despair in his eyes as he mutely turned away from me and I could hardly bear it. This man was a criminal – but he was the only person I had in the world. As if on fast-rewind, specific scenes from the past few years whizzed before my eyes. I wavered and heard myself say, ‘Don’t worry. If I run away, I’ll throw myself in front of a train. I would never put you in any danger.’ Suicide seemed to me to be the greatest kind of freedom, a release from everything, from a life that had already been ruined long ago.

At that moment I would’ve really liked to have taken back my words. But now it had been said: I would run at the next opportunity. And one of us wouldn’t come through it alive.

Three weeks later I stood in the kitchen, staring at the calendar. I tossed the paper I had torn off into the dustbin and turned away. I couldn’t afford to reflect on things for longer periods. The kidnapper was calling me to work. The day before I’d had to help him finish the advertisements for the flat on Hollergasse. Priklopil had brought me a map of Vienna and a ruler. I measured the route
from the flat on Hollergasse to the nearest underground station, checked the scale and calculated how many metres it was on foot. After that he’d called me into the corridor and ordered me to walk quickly from one end to the other. He timed me with his watch. Then I calculated how long it would take to get from the flat to the underground station and to the next bus stop. In his pedantry, the kidnapper wanted to know down to the second how far the flat was from public transport. When the advertisements were finished, he called his friend who was to put them on the Internet. I took a deep breath and smiled. ‘Now everything will be easier.’ He appeared to have completely forgotten our discussion about escape and death.

Just before noon on 23 August 2006, we went into the garden. The neighbours weren’t there and I picked the last strawberries from the bed in front of the privet hedgerow and collected all of the apricots lying on the ground around the tree. Then I washed the fruit off in the kitchen and put it in the refrigerator. The kidnapper went with me every step of the way and at no time did he take his eyes off me.

Around noon he took me to the little garden hut at the back of the property on the left. The hut was separated from a small path by a fence. Priklopil was meticulous about always closing the garden gate. He locked it even when he left the property for only a short moment to knock the dirt out of the floor mats of his red BMW. The white van was parked between the hut and the garden gate, which was to be picked up in the next few days.

Priklopil fetched the vacuum cleaner, plugged it in and ordered me to clean thoroughly the interior, the seats and the floor mats. I was in the middle of doing so when his mobile rang. He walked a couple of steps away from the car, covered his ear with his hand and asked twice, ‘Excuse me please?’ From the brief fragments I picked up through the noise of the vacuum cleaner, I concluded that it must be somebody on the line interested in the flat. Priklopil
was overjoyed. Absorbed in his conversation, he turned round and moved several metres away from me towards the pool.

I was alone. For the first time since the beginning of my imprisonment the kidnapper had let me out of his sight while outside. I stood frozen in front of the car for a brief second holding the vacuum cleaner a feeling of paralysis spread through my legs and arms. My ribcage felt as if it were encased in an iron corset. I could hardly breathe. Slowly my hand holding the vacuum cleaner sank. Disordered, confused images raced through my head. Priklopil coming back and finding me gone. Him looking for me and then going on a shooting spree. A train speeding along. My lifeless body. His lifeless body. Police cars. My mother. My mother’s smile.

Then everything happened so fast. With superhuman strength I tore myself out of the paralysing quicksand that was tightening around my legs. The voice of my other self hammered in my head:
If you had just been abducted yesterday, you would run now. You have to act as if you didn’t know the kidnapper. He is a stranger. Run. Run. Damn it, run!

I dropped the vacuum cleaner and bolted to the garden gate. It was open.

I hesitated for a moment. Should I go left or right? Where could I find people? Where were the railway tracks? I mustn’t lose my head now, mustn’t be afraid.
Don’t turn round, just go
. I hurried down the small pathway, turned on to Blasselgasse and ran towards the housing estate that lay alongside the street – small allotment gardens, in between mini houses built on the erstwhile parcels of land. In my ears was only a droning noise; my lungs hurt. And I was certain that the kidnapper was coming closer every second. I thought I heard his footsteps and felt his eyes on my back. Briefly I even thought I felt his breath on the back of my neck. But I didn’t turn round. I would realize it soon enough whenever he threw me to the ground from behind, dragged me back to the house and
killed me. Anything was better than going back in the dungeon. I had chosen death anyway. Either by train or by the kidnapper. The freedom to choose, the freedom to die. My thoughts shooting through my head were all jumbled up, while I rushed onwards. It wasn’t until I saw three people coming towards me in the street that I knew I wanted to live. And that I would.

I bolted towards them and panted at them, ‘You have to help me! I need a mobile to call the police! Please!’ The three of them stared at me in surprise: an older man, a child, maybe twelve years old, and a third person, perhaps the boy’s father.

‘We can’t,’ he said. Then the three of them went round me and continued walking.

The older man turned back once more and said, ‘I’m sorry. I don’t have my mobile on me.’

Tears suddenly came to my eyes. What was I, after all, to the world outside? I had no life in it. I was an illegal, a person with no name and no history. What would happen if nobody believed my story?

I stood on the pavement trembling, my hand gripping a fence. Where to? I had to get off this street. Priklopil had surely noticed already that I was gone. I took a few steps back, pulled myself up over a low fence, landed in one of the gardens and rang the doorbell. But nothing happened, there was nobody to be seen. I ran further, climbed over hedges and flowerbeds, from one garden to the next. Finally I caught sight of an older woman through an open window in one of the houses. I knocked on the window frame and called softly, ‘Please help me! Call the police! I’ve been abducted. Call the police!’

‘What are you doing in my garden? What do you want here?’ a voice snapped at me through the windowpane. She eyed me mistrustfully.

‘Please call the police for me! Quick!’ I repeated breathlessly. ‘I’m the victim of an abduction. My name is Natascha Kampusch …
Please ask for the Vienna police. Tell them it’s about an abduction case. They should come here in an unmarked car. I am Natascha Kampusch.’

‘Why did you come to me of all people?’

I started. But then I saw that she hesitated for a moment.

‘Wait by the hedge. And don’t walk on my lawn!’

I nodded mutely as she turned away and disappeared from sight. For the first time in seven years I had spoken my name. I was back.

I stood by the hedgerow and waited. Seconds passed. My heart beat in my throat. I knew that Wolfgang Priklopil would be looking for me and was in a panic that he would go completely berserk. After a while I saw two police cars with blue flashing lights over the fences of the allotment gardens. Either the woman had not passed on my request for an unmarked car or the police had disregarded it. Two young police officers got out and entered the small garden.

‘Stay where you are and put your hands in the air!’ one of them barked at me.

This was not the way I had imagined my first encounter with my newfound freedom. With my hands raised like a criminal, standing beside the hedge, I told the police who I was.

‘My name is Natascha Kampusch. You must have heard about my case. I was abducted in 1998.’

‘Kampusch?’ replied one of the two officers.

I heard the kidnapper’s voice:
Nobody will miss you. They are all glad that you’re gone.

‘Date of birth? Registered domicile?’

‘Seventeenth of February 1988, domiciled in Rennbahnweg 27, stairway 38, floor 7, door 18.’

‘Abducted when and by whom?’

‘In 1998. I have been held captive in the house at Heinestrasse 60. The kidnapper’s name is Wolfgang Priklopil.’

There couldn’t have been any greater contrast between the
sober ascertaining of fact and the mixture of euphoria and panic that was literally coursing through me.

The voice of the officer, who was radioing to confirm my claims, penetrated my ears only with difficulty. The tension was nearly tearing me apart inside. I had run only a couple of hundred metres; the kidnapper’s house was only a hop, skip and a jump away. I tried to breathe in and out evenly to get a grip on my fear. I didn’t doubt for a second that it would be a piece of cake for him to eliminate these two young police officers. I stood by the hedge as if frozen and strained to hear. Twittering birds, a car in the distance. But it seemed like the calm before the storm. Shots would be fired presently. I tensed my muscles. I had taken the leap. And had finally landed on the other side. I was prepared to fight for my new-found freedom.

SPECIAL REPORT

Case: Natascha Kampusch – Woman claiming to be missing person.

Police attempting to ascertain identity.

Vienna (APA) – The case of Natascha Kampusch, now missing for over eight years, has taken a surprising turn. A young woman is claiming to be the girl who went missing on 2 March 1998 in Vienna. The Austrian Federal Criminal Police Office has begun an investigation into ascertaining the identity of the woman. ‘We do not know whether she is in fact the missing Natascha Kampusch or just disorientated,’ Erich Zwettler from the Federal Criminal Police Office told the Austria Press Agency. The woman was at the police station in Deutsch-Wagram in Lower Austria.

23 August 2006

I wasn’t a disorientated young woman. It was painful to me that something like that would even be considered. But for the police, who had to compare the missing person photographs from back
then, which showed a small, pudgy primary school child, to the emaciated young woman who now stood before them, that was probably a distinct possibility.