3,096 Days (4 page)

When I had wet my bed for the nth time, my mother reacted in a manner that was common at the time. She thought it was wilful behaviour on my part that could be trained out of a child by force and punishment. She spanked my behind and asked angrily, ‘Why are you doing this to me?’ She railed, despaired and was powerless to do anything. And I continued to wet my bed night after night. My mother bought rubber sheets and put them
on my bed. It was a humiliating experience. From discussions with friends of my grandmother I knew that rubber pads and special sheets were used for the old and infirm. I just wanted to be treated like a big girl. But I couldn’t stop. My mother woke me up during the night to put me on the toilet. But I wet the bed anyway, and she changed my sheets and my pyjamas, swearing all the while. Sometimes I would wake up dry in the mornings and proud of it, but she quickly put a damper on my happiness, bluffing, ‘You just can’t remember that I had to change you once again in the middle of the night. Just look at the pyjamas you’re wearing.’ These were accusations I was unable to counter. She punished me with disdain and ridicule. When I asked for undergarments for my Barbie doll, she laughed at me, saying that I would just wet them anyway. I was so embarrassed I wished the ground would swallow me up.

Finally she began to monitor how much I was drinking. I had always been a thirsty child, drinking copiously and frequently. But now my drinking was precisely regulated. I was only given a little to drink during the day and nothing more at night. The more prohibited water or juices became, the greater my thirst, until I could think of nothing else. Every swallow, every trip to the toilet, was observed and commented on, but only when we were alone – otherwise what would people think.

In pre-school, the bed-wetting took on a new dimension. I began to wet myself during the day as well. The other children laughed at me, and the teachers simply egged them on, embarrassing me time and again in front of the group. They probably thought that the ridicule would make me control my bladder better. But every humiliation only made it worse. A trip to the toilet or a drink of water became torture. They were forced upon me when I did not want them and denied me when I desperately needed them. We had to ask for permission to go to the toilet and in my case, every time I asked, I was told, ‘But you just went. Why do you have to go again?’ Vice versa, they forced me to go to the toilet before any
outings, before eating, before my afternoon nap, and monitored me while I did it. Once, when the teachers suspected me of having wet myself again, they even forced me to show all the other children my knickers.

Each time I left the house with my mother, she always brought along a bag with a change of clothes. The bundle of clothing reinforced my feelings of shame and insecurity. It was as if the adults seemed to expect me to wet myself. And the more they expected it, and the more they scolded and ridiculed me, the more they were proven right. It was a vicious circle that I could not find a way out of throughout primary school. I remained a ridiculed, humiliated and perpetually thirsty bed-wetter.

After two years of quarrelling and a number of attempts at reconciliation, my father finally moved out for good. I was now five years old and I had gone from being a cheerful toddler to an insecure, taciturn person who no longer liked life and sought out various ways to protest. Sometimes I withdrew, sometimes I screamed, vomited and had outbursts of crying from the pain and the feeling of being misunderstood. I once suffered with gastritis for weeks.

My mother, who was also reeling from the break-up, transferred her way of dealing with it to me. Just as she swallowed the pain and uncertainty and carried on bravely, she demanded that I keep a stiff upper lip as well. She had a very difficult time understanding that, as a small child, I was completely incapable of doing so. When I became too emotional for her, she reacted aggressively to my outbursts. She accused me of feeling sorry for myself and either tried to tempt me with treats or threatened punishment if I didn’t stop.

My anger at a situation that was incomprehensible to me gradually turned against the one person who had remained after my father had moved out: my mother. More than once I was so
angry at her that I resolved to move out. I packed a few of my things in my gym bag and said farewell to her. But she knew that I wouldn’t get any further than the door and remarked on my behaviour with a wink, saying, ‘OK, take care.’ Another time I removed all of the dolls that she had given me from my room and placed them in a row in the hallway. I meant for her to see that I had resolved to lock her out of the realm that was my room. But, of course, these attempts to outmanoeuvre my mother were not a solution to my actual problem. When my parents split up, I had lost the anchors of stability in my life and was unable to continue relying on the people who had previously always been there for me.

The disregard I suffered slowly destroyed my self-esteem. When you think of violence perpetrated on children, you picture systematic, heavy blows that result in bodily injuries. I experienced none of that in my childhood. It was rather a mixture of verbal oppression and occasional ‘old school’ slaps across the face that showed me that as a child I was the weaker one.

It was not anger or cold calculation that drove my mother to do it, but rather an aggression that flared up, shot out of her like a flash and was doused just as quickly. She slapped me when she felt overburdened or when I had done something wrong. She hated it when I whined, asked her questions or queried any of her explanations – that too earned me another slap.

At that time and in that area it was not unusual to treat children that way. Quite the contrary – I had a much ‘easier’ life than many of the other kids in my neighbourhood. In the courtyard I was able to observe time and again mothers screaming at their children, pushing them to the ground and pummelling them. My mother would never have done such a thing, and her way of casually slapping me across the face would certainly not have shocked anyone. When she slapped me in public, nobody intervened – though, for the most part, she was too much of a lady to even risk being
observed. Open violence, that was something the other women in our council estate engaged in. I was required to wipe away my tears or cool my cheek before I left the house or climbed out of the car.

At the same time, my mother also tried to assuage her guilty conscience with gifts. She and my father competed to buy me the prettiest clothes or to take me on outings at the weekend. But I didn’t want any gifts. At that phase of my life the only thing I needed was someone to give me unconditional love and support, something my parents were not able to do.

A memory from my primary school years demonstrates the extent to which I had internalized the fact that I could expect no help from adults. I was about eight years old and had travelled with my class to spend a week on a school retreat to the country in the province of Styria. I was not an athletic child and did not dare play any of the wild games that other children liked to play. But I wanted to brave at least one attempt on the playground.

The pain shot sharply through my arm as I fell from the monkey bars and hit the ground. I tried to sit up, but my arm gave out, causing me to fall back. The cheerful laughter from the children all around me on the playground rang hollowly in my ears. I wanted to scream. Tears ran down my cheeks, but I couldn’t make a sound. It wasn’t until a schoolmate of mine came over that I was able to ask her to get the teacher. The girl ran to her, but the teacher sent her back to tell me that I had to come over myself if I wanted something.

I struggled once again to get up, but I hardly had to move for the pain in my arm to return. I remained helplessly lying on the ground. It wasn’t until sometime later that the teacher from another class helped me up. I clenched my teeth and didn’t complain. I didn’t want to be any trouble to anyone. Later my teacher noticed that something was wrong with me. She suspected
that I was bruised from the fall and permitted me to spend the afternoon in the television room.

That night I lay in my bed in the dormitory, and the pain was so bad I could hardly breathe. Still, I didn’t ask for help. It wasn’t until late the next day when we were visiting the Herberstein zoological park that my teacher realized I had seriously injured myself and took me to the doctor. He immediately sent me to the hospital in Graz. My arm was broken.

My mother came with her boyfriend to pick me up from the hospital. The new man in her life was well known to me – my godfather. I didn’t like him. The ride to Vienna was a hellish ordeal. For three long hours my mother’s boyfriend complained that they had to drive such a long way just because of my clumsiness. My mother tried to lighten the mood, but she couldn’t make him cease his criticisms. I sat in the back seat and cried softly to myself. I was ashamed that I had fallen, and I was ashamed of the trouble I was causing everyone.
Don’t make trouble. Don’t make a scene. Don’t be hysterical. Big girls don’t cry.
These mantras from my childhood, heard a thousand times, had enabled me to bear the pain of my broken arm for a day and a half. Now, as we drove along the motorway, a voice inside my head was repeating them in between the tirades my mother’s boyfriend was letting loose.

My teacher had to face disciplinary proceedings because she had failed to take me to the hospital immediately. It was certainly true that she had neglected her duty to supervise me. But I was myself largely responsible for the neglect. My confidence in my own perceptions was so minimal that not even with a broken arm did I have the feeling that I was allowed to ask for help.

In the meantime, I only saw my father at the weekends or when he took me with him on his delivery routes. He too had fallen in love again after separating from my mother. His girlfriend was
nice, but reserved. Once she mused to me, ‘Now I know why you are so difficult. Your parents don’t love you.’ I protested loudly, but the observation haunted my wounded childish soul. Maybe she was right? After all, she was a grown-up, and grown-ups were always right.

I couldn’t shake the thought for days.

When I was nine I began using food to compensate for my frustrations. I had never been a thin child and had grown up in a family where food played a major role. My mother was the kind of woman who could eat as much as she wanted without gaining a pound. It might have been due to hyperactivity of the thyroid or just her active nature. She ate slices of bread with lard and cake, roast pork with caraway and ham sandwiches. She didn’t gain any weight and never got tired of emphasizing that to others: ‘I can eat whatever I want,’ she piped, holding a slice of bread with a fatty spread on it in her hand. I inherited her lack of moderation with food, but not her ability to burn up all those calories.

On the other hand, my father was so fat that I was embarrassed as a child to be seen with him. His stomach was enormous and the skin stretched as taut as the belly of a woman eight months pregnant. When he lay on the couch, his stomach jutted upwards like a mountain, and as a child I often patted it, asking, ‘When’s the baby due?’ My father would just laugh good-naturedly. Piles of meat were always stacked on his plate, and he had to have several large dumplings, which swam in a veritable ocean of sauce. He devoured huge portions and continued to eat even when he was no longer hungry.

When we went on our family daytrips at the weekend – first together with my mother, later with his new girlfriend – everything centred around food and eating. While other families went hiking in the mountains, biking or visited museums, we headed
to culinary destinations. He drove to a new wine tavern or went on trips to country inns located in castles, not for the historical guided tours, but to take part in medieval-style banquets: piles of meat and dumplings that you pushed into your mouths with your hands, mugs of beer to wash them down – this was the kind of daytrip that appealed to my father.

And I was constantly surrounded by food in the two shops, the one in Süssenbrunn and the one in the Marco-Polo-Siedlung that my mother had taken over after splitting up with my father. When my mother picked me up from afterschool care and took me to the shop, I kept boredom at bay by eating: an ice cream, gummi bears, a piece of chocolate, a pickle. My mother usually gave in – she was too busy to pay close attention to everything I was stuffing into my mouth.

Now I began to overeat systematically. I would devour an entire packet of Bounty chocolate bars, drink a large bottle of Coke, and then top it off with more chocolate until my stomach was stretched ready to burst. When I was barely able to put anything more in my mouth, I began eating again. The last year before my abduction I gained so much weight that I had gone from being chubby to being a really fat young girl. I exercised even less, and the other kids teased me even more. And I compensated for my loneliness by eating all the more. On my tenth birthday I weighed forty-five kilos.

My mother would frustrate me further by saying, ‘I like you anyway, no matter what you look like.’ Or: ‘You only have to put an ugly child in a pretty dress.’ When I became offended, she laughed and said, ‘Don’t think I mean you, sweetie. Don’t be so sensitive.’ ‘Sensitive’ – that was the worst. You were not allowed to be sensitive. Today I am often surprised at how positively the word ‘sensitive’ is used. When I was a child, it was an insult for people who were too soft for this world. Back then I wished I could have been allowed to be softer. Later on, the toughness
that chiefly my mother had imposed on me probably saved my life.

Surrounded by sweets of all sorts, I spent hours alone in front of the television or in my room with a book in my hand. I wanted to flee from this reality, which held nothing but humiliations in store for me, to other worlds. At home our TV had all of the channels available and nobody really paid any attention to what I was watching. I flipped through the channels aimlessly, watching kids’ programmes, news and crime stories that frightened me, and still I soaked them up like a sponge. In the summer of 1997 one issue dominated the media: in the Salzkammergut, one of Austria’s lake districts predominantly located in Upper Austria, the police discovered a child pornography ring. Horrified, I heard on the TV that seven grown men had lured an unknown number of small boys into a specially equipped room in a house by offering them small amounts of money. There, they molested them and made videos of what they did that were sold all over the world. On 24 January 1998 yet another scandal shook Austria. Videos of the molestation of girls between the ages of five and seven had been sent out through the mail. One video showed a man luring a seven-year-old girl from her neighbourhood into an attic room, where he had severely molested her.