3,096 Days (6 page)

Then everything happened so fast.

The very moment I lowered my eyes and went to walk past the man, he grabbed me by the waist and threw me through the open door into his delivery van. Everything happened in one fell swoop, as if it had been a choreographed scene, as if we had rehearsed it together. A choreography of terror.

Did I scream? I don’t think so. And yet everything inside me was one single scream. It pushed upwards and became lodged far down in my throat: a silent scream as if one of those nightmares had become reality where you try to scream but no sound comes out; where you try to run but your legs move as if trapped in quicksand.

Did I fight back? Did I get in the way of his perfect choreography? I must have fought back, because the next day I had a black eye. I can’t remember the pain inflicted by that blow, only the feeling of paralysing helplessness. The kidnapper had an easy time of it with me. He was 1.72 metres tall, while I was only 1.45 metres. I was plump and not particularly quick anyway. Plus, my heavy school bag hindered my mobility. The whole thing had only taken a few seconds.

The moment the delivery van door closed behind me I was well aware of the fact that I had been kidnapped and that I would probably die. In my mind’s eye I saw the images from Jennifer’s funeral. Jennifer had been molested in a car and killed when she tried to escape. Images of Carla’s parents waiting for word of their daughter. Carla, who had been molested, was found unconscious floating in a pond and died a week later. I had wondered back then what that would be like: dying and what comes after. Whether you felt pain just before, and whether you really see a light.

These images mixed with the jumble of thoughts that flashed through my mind at the same time.
Is this really happening? To me?
asked one voice.
What a completely off-the-wall idea, kidnapping a child. That never turns out well
, said another.
Why me? I’m short and chubby, I don’t really fit the profile of a typical abduction victim
, pleaded another.

The kidnapper’s voice brought me back to the present. He ordered me to sit down on the floor at the back of the van and barked at me not to move. If I didn’t do what he said, I would be in for a nasty surprise. Then he climbed over the front seat and drove off.

Because the cab and the back of the delivery van were not separated, I was able to see him from the back. And I heard him frantically punching numbers into his car phone. But he couldn’t seem to reach anyone.

In the meantime the questions continued to pound in my head:
Will he blackmail my family for ransom? Who will pay it? Where is he taking me? What kind of car is this? What time is it?
The windows of the delivery van were blacked out with the exception of a narrow strip along the upper edge. From the floor of the van I couldn’t tell where we were going, and I didn’t dare lift my head to look out of the windows. It seemed we had been driving for quite some time and were not headed anywhere in particular. I quickly lost any sense of space or time. But the treetops and the utility poles that kept whizzing by made me feel like we were driving around in circles in my neighbourhood.

Talk. You have to talk to him. But how? How do you talk to a criminal?
Criminals don’t deserve any respect, so it didn’t seem appropriate to address him using the
Sie
form in German used for strangers and persons of respect. So I decided on
du
, the form of address that had, until now, been reserved for people who were close to me.

Absurdly enough, I asked him first what size shoes he wore. I had remembered that from watching TV shows like
Aktenzeichen XY ungelöst
*
. You had to be able to give an exact description of the perpetrator; even the slightest detail was important. Naturally, I didn’t get an answer. Instead the man snapped at me to be quiet and nothing would happen to me. Even today I don’t know how
I managed to get up enough courage to disregard his order. Maybe because I was certain that I was going to die anyway – that things couldn’t get any worse.

‘Are you going to molest me?’ was my next question.

This time I got an answer. ‘You’re too young for that,’ he said. ‘I would never do that.’ Then he made another phone call.

After he had hung up he said, ‘I’m going to take you to a forest and turn you over to the others. Then I’ll be able to wash my hands of this business.’ He repeated that sentence several times, rapid-fire and agitated: ‘I will turn you over, and then I’ll have nothing more to do with you. We’ll never see each other again.’

If he had intended to scare me, then he had found exactly the right words. The pronouncement that he was going to hand me over to ‘others’ took my breath away. I went rigid with fear. He didn’t need to say anything more; I knew what he meant. Child pornography rings had been all over the media for months. Since last summer hardly a week had gone by without some discussion of the people who abducted and molested children while filming it on video. In my mind’s eye I saw everything perfectly: groups of men would pull me into a basement and grope me all over while others took pictures. Up until that moment I had been convinced that I was soon going to die. What seemed in store for me now appeared even worse.

I don’t remember how long we drove until we came to a stop. We were in a pine forest like the many found on the outskirts of Vienna. The kidnapper turned off the engine and made another phone call. Something appeared to have gone wrong. ‘They’re not coming. They’re not here!’ he cursed to himself. He seemed frightened, agitated. But maybe that was also just a trick: maybe he wanted me to take his side against these ‘others’ he was supposed to hand me over to and who had left him hanging; maybe he had just made them up to increase my fear and to paralyse me.

The kidnapper got out and ordered me not to move. I obeyed
silently. Hadn’t Jennifer wanted to flee from such a car? How had she tried to do that? And what had she done wrong? My thoughts were all jumbled up inside my head. If he hadn’t locked the door, I could maybe open it. But then what? In just two strides he’d be on me. I couldn’t run very fast. I had no idea what forest we were in and what direction I should run in. And then there were the ‘others’ who were supposed to come and get me, who could be anywhere. I pictured it vividly in my mind, how they would chase me, grab me and throw me to the ground. And then I saw myself as a corpse in the woods, buried under a pine tree.

I thought of my parents. My mother would come to pick me up from afterschool care in the afternoon. And the woman who ran the programme would say to her, ‘But Natascha hasn’t been here!’ My mother would be beside herself and I had no way to protect her. It cut my heart to think of her coming to get me and not finding me. ‘What could happen anyway?’ I had thought as I had left that morning without saying a word of goodbye, without giving her a kiss.
You never know if we’ll see each other again.

The kidnapper’s words made me jump. ‘They’re not coming.’ Then he got back in the car, started the engine and drove off again.

This time I recognized the gables and rooftops of the houses that I could just make out through the narrow strips of window along the sides. I could tell where he was steering the car to – back to the edge of the city and then on to the arterial road leading towards the town of Gänserndorf.

‘Where are we going?’ I asked.

‘To Strasshof,’ the kidnapper said forthrightly.

As we drove through Süssenbrunn, a deep sadness engulfed me. We passed my mother’s old shop, which she had recently closed down. Just three weeks before she would have been sitting here at the desk in the mornings, doing the office work. I could still picture her and I wanted to cry out, but I only produced a weak
whimper when we drove by the street that led to my grandmother’s house. Here I had spent the happiest moments of my childhood.

The car came to a standstill in a garage. The kidnapper ordered me to remain lying down on the floor in the back and turned the engine off. Then he got out, fetched a blue blanket, threw it over me and wrapped me up tight. I could hardly breathe, and I was surrounded by absolute darkness. When he picked me up like a wrapped package and carried me out of the car, panic struck me. I had to get out of that blanket. And I had to go to the toilet.

My voice sounded muffled and foreign under the blanket when I asked him to put me down and let me go to the toilet. He stopped for a moment, then unwrapped me and led me through a hallway to a small guest toilet. From the hallway I was able to catch a glimpse of the adjoining rooms. The furnishings appeared fusty and expensive – yet another indication to me that I had really fallen victim to a crime. In the TV police shows that I knew, criminals always had large houses with expensive furnishings.

The kidnapper stood in front of the door and waited. I immediately locked the door and breathed a sigh of relief. But the moment of relief lasted only a few seconds. The room had no windows and I was trapped. The only way out was through the door and I couldn’t stay locked behind that door forever. Especially as it would have been easy for him to break it open.

When I came out of the toilet after a while, the kidnapper wrapped me up in the blanket again: darkness, stuffiness. He lifted me up and I felt him carry me several steps downwards: a cellar? Once at the bottom of the stairs, he laid me on the floor, pulled on the blanket to move me forward, threw me again over his shoulder and continued onwards. It seemed an eternity before he put me down again. Then I heard his footsteps moving away from me.

I held my breath and listened. Nothing. There was absolutely nothing to hear. Still, it was a long time before I dared to cautiously
peel the blanket off. There was absolute darkness all around. It smelled of dust and the stale air was strangely warm. Beneath me I could feel the cold, naked floor. I rolled myself into a ball on the blanket and whimpered softly. My own voice sounded so peculiar in the silence that I became frightened and stopped. I don’t remember how long I remained lying there. At first I tried to count the seconds and the minutes.
Twenty-one, twenty-two
… I mumbled to myself, to time the length of the seconds. I tried to keep track of the minutes on my fingers. I kept losing count, and I couldn’t allow that to happen, not now! I had to concentrate, remember every detail! But I quickly lost all sense of time. The darkness, the odour that caused disgust to well up in me – all of this lay upon me like a black cloth.

When the kidnapper came back, he had brought a light bulb that he screwed into a fixture on the wall. The harsh light that blazed outwards so suddenly blinded me and brought no relief – because now I could see where I was. The room was small and empty, the walls covered with wood panelling; a bare pallet bed was affixed to the wall on hooks. The floor was light-coloured laminate. A toilet with no lid stood in the corner and a double stainless-steel sink was along one wall.

Was this what a criminal gang’s secret hiding place looked like? A sex club? The walls covered in light-coloured wood reminded me of a sauna and triggered a chain of ideas: sauna in the basement – child molester – criminal. I pictured fat, sweaty men setting upon me. For me a sauna in the basement was the place people like that lured their victims in order to molest them. But there was no stove and none of those wooden buckets that you usually see in saunas.

The kidnapper instructed me to stand in front of him at a certain distance and not to move. Then he began to remove the wooden pallet bed and to unscrew from the wall the hooks that had been holding it up. During all of this, he spoke to me in a voice
that people usually reserve for household pets: gentle and placating. I was not to be afraid, everything was going to be all right, if only I would do what he told me. He looked at me the way the proud owner looks at his new car; or worse – like a child eyeing his new toy, full of anticipation and at the same time uncertain of everything he can do with it.

After some time my panic began to subside and I got up the courage to address him. I begged him to let me go: ‘I won’t tell anybody anything. If you let me go, nobody will notice anything. I’ll just say that I ran away. If you don’t keep me overnight, nothing will happen to you.’ I tried to explain to him that he had just committed a grave mistake, that they were already looking for me and were certain to find me. I appealed to his sense of responsibility and I begged for sympathy. But it was no use. He made it unequivocally clear to me that I would be spending the night in this dungeon.

Had I been able to foresee that this room would be both my refuge and my prison for 3,096 nights, I don’t know how I would have reacted. Looking back today, I realize that just knowing I would have to remain in the basement that first night triggered a reaction that probably saved my life – and was dangerous as well. What appeared to be outside the realm of the thinkable was now a fact: I was locked in the basement of a criminal and I was not going to be freed, at least not today. A shockwave passed through my world, and reality shifted just a little. I accepted what had happened and, instead of railing against my new situation with desperation and indignation, I acquiesced. As an adult you know that you give up a little piece of yourself whenever you have to tolerate circumstances that, before they occur, are completely outside the realm of the imagination. A crack appears in the foundation on which your own personality rests. And yet adapting is the only correct response, as it ensures your survival. Children act more intuitively. I was intimidated and did not resist, but rather I began to make myself at home – at least for one night.

With hindsight it seems to me quite bizarre how my panic gave way to a kind of pragmatism. How quickly I comprehended that my pleading would be futile and every additional word would bounce right off this strange man. How instinctively I felt that I had to accept the situation in order to get through this one endless night in the cellar.