3,096 Days (9 page)

To prove that I had written the letter myself, I enclosed a photograph from my pencil case, of me ice-skating the previous winter, wrapped up in thick overalls, a smile on my face and my cheeks red. It seemed a snapshot from a world very far away, a world filled with the loud laughing of children, pop music from rattling loudspeakers and vast swathes of cold, fresh air. A world where, after spending an afternoon on the ice, you could go home, take a hot bath and watch TV while drinking hot chocolate. I stared at the photograph for minutes on end, memorizing every detail so as never to forget the feeling I associated with that outing. I probably knew that I would have to preserve every single happy memory in order to recall them in the darkest moments. Then I placed the photograph with the letter and made an envelope from another sheet of paper.

With a mixture of naivety and confidence, I waited for the kidnapper.

When he came, I made an effort to be calm and friendly. ‘You have to send this letter to my parents so that they know that I’m alive!’ He opened the envelope, read what I had written, and refused. I begged and pleaded with him not to leave my parents in the dark much longer. I appealed to the conscience I presumed him to have. ‘You mustn’t turn into such a bad person,’ I told him.
What he had done was wrong, but making my parents suffer was much worse. I kept searching for new reasons why and wherefore, and assured him that nothing could happen to him as a result of the letter. He had read it himself and could see that I had not betrayed him … The kidnapper said ‘no’ for a long time – then suddenly gave in. He assured me that he would post the letter to my parents.

It was completely naive of me, but I so wanted to believe him. I lay down on my sunlounger and imagined how my parents would open the letter, how they would find the hidden clues and rescue me. Patience, I just had to have a little patience, and then this nightmare would be over.

The next day, my fantasy came crashing down like a house of cards. The kidnapper came into my dungeon with an injured finger, claiming that ‘someone’ had torn the letter from him in a dispute, injuring him as he fought to get it back. He hinted that it had been the people who supposedly had ordered my abduction and who didn’t want me to contact my parents. The fictitious ‘bad guys’ from the pornography ring became threateningly real. At the same time, the kidnapper donned the role of protector. After all, he had wanted to grant my request and had made such a great effort that he had been hurt in the process.

Today I know that he had never intended to post that letter and had probably burned it, just like all the other objects that he had taken from me. Back then I wanted to believe him.

In the first few weeks the kidnapper did everything to avoid destroying his image as my purported protector. He even fulfilled my greatest wish: a computer. It was an old Commodore C64 with very little memory capacity. But it came with a few floppy disks with games I could use to distract myself. My favourite was an ‘eating’ game. You moved a small man through an underground labyrinth in order to avoid monsters and ‘eat up’ bonus points. It
was a somewhat more sophisticated version of Pac-Man. I spent hours and hours scoring points. When the kidnapper was in the dungeon, we sometimes played together on a split screen. Back then he often let me, the small child, win. Today I see the analogy to my own situation in the cellar, where monsters were able to penetrate at any time, monsters that you had to run away from. My bonus points were rewards, like the computer, ‘won’ by ‘impeccable’ behaviour.

When I got tired of that one, I switched to Space Pilot, where you had to fly through space and shoot alien spaceships. The third game on my C64 was a strategic game called
Kaiser
, or Emperor. In it, you ruled over people and challenged others to become Emperor. He liked that game best. He would send his people to war with enthusiasm. He would also let them starve or make them perform forced labour as long as it served to increase his power and wouldn’t decimate the hordes he needed for his armies.

All of this still took place in a virtual world. But it wouldn’t take long for him to show me his other face.

‘If you don’t do what I tell you, I will have to turn your light off.’

‘If you’re not good, then I’ll have to tie you up.’

In my situation I had absolutely no chance of not being ‘good’, and I didn’t know what he meant. Sometimes a sudden movement on my part was enough to cause his mood to change. Or when I looked directly at him, despite his order that I should keep my eyes strictly on the floor. Everything that didn’t fit the fixed template that he had prescribed for my behaviour spurred his paranoia. Then he would berate me and accuse me time and time again of only wanting to trick him, deceive him. It was in all likelihood the uncertainty about whether I really could communicate with the outside world that drove him to abuse me verbally like that. He did not like it when I insisted on my point of view that he was
wrongly accusing me. He wanted recognition when he brought me something, praise for the effort that he had had to undertake on my account – for example, in dragging the heavy heater down into the dungeon. Even back then he began to demand gratitude from me. And even back then I tried to deny it to him as much as I could, saying, ‘I’m only here because you’ve locked me up.’ Secretly, I couldn’t do anything but rejoice when he brought me food and other items I desperately needed.

Today, as an adult, it seems amazing to me that my fear, my recurrent panic, was not directed towards the kidnapper’s person. It may have been my reaction to his nondescript appearance and his insecurity, or his strategy aimed at giving me as much of a sense of security as possible in this unbearable situation by making himself indispensable as an attachment figure. The threatening part of my situation was the dungeon under the earth, the closed-in walls and locked door, and the people who had supposedly ordered my abduction. The kidnapper himself created the impression sometimes that his crime had been merely a pose that he had struck, but which did not fit with his personality. In my childish imagination, he had decided at some point to become a criminal and commit an evil deed. I never doubted that his actions constituted a crime that had to be punished. But I separated the crime distinctly from the person who had committed it. The bad guy was most certainly a role he was only playing.

‘From now you’ll have to cook for yourself.’

One morning during the first week, the kidnapper came into the dungeon carrying a box made out of dark plywood. He put it up against the wall, put a hotplate and a small oven on it and plugged both of them in. Then he disappeared again. When he came back, he was carrying a stainless-steel pot and a pile of ready-to-eat food: tins of beans and goulash, and a selection of those instant meals that come in small white plastic dishes and colourful
cardboard packages and are warmed using steam. Then he explained to me how the hotplate worked.

I was happy to have got back a small piece of my independence. But when I poured the first tin of beans into the small pot and placed it on the hotplate, I didn’t know how hot to make it or how long it would take for the food to cook. I had never cooked anything before, and I felt alone and out of my depth. And I missed my mother.

Looking back, it seems astonishing to me that he let a ten-year-old cook, especially as he was otherwise so keen to see me as the small, helpless child. But from then on, I warmed one meal a day on the hotplate myself. The kidnapper came to the dungeon every morning and then one more time, either at noon or in the evening. In the morning he brought me a cup of tea or hot chocolate, a piece of cake or a bowl of cereal. At noon or in the evening, depending on when he had time, he would come with tomato salad and cold-cut sandwiches, or with a hot meal that he shared with me. Noodles with meat and sauce, a rice dish with meat, Austrian home-style cooking that his mother had made for him.

Back then I had no idea where the food came from or how he lived. Or whether he even had a family who was in on his crime and sat comfortably with him in his living room, while I lay on my thin mattress in the basement. Or whether the people who had supposedly ordered my abduction lived up in the house with him, only sending him down to bring me proper supplies. In fact, he made certain that I ate healthy food and regularly brought me dairy products and fruit.

One day he brought me a couple of lemons, which gave me an idea. It was a childish and naive plan, but it seemed ingenious to me at the time: I was going to fake an illness which would force the kidnapper to take me to a doctor. I had always heard my grandmother and her friends tell stories about the time during the
Russian occupation in eastern Austria after World War II, how the women avoided being raped or carried off, which was the order of the day back then. One of their tricks was to smear red jam into their face so that it looked like an awful skin disease. Yet another trick involved lemons.

Once I was alone again, I took my ruler and carefully separated the razor-thin skin from the fleshy part of the lemon and carefully glued it to my arm using lotion. It looked disgusting, as if I truly had a purulent infection. When the kidnapper came back, I held up my arm to him and faked terrible pain. I whimpered and asked him to please take me to the doctor. He stared at me steadfastly, then with one gesture he wiped the lemon skin from my arm.

That day he turned my light off. Lying in the darkness, I racked my brains to think of more ways I could try to force him to let me go. I couldn’t think of any.

My only hope in those days rested with the police. At that point I was still counting on being freed and hoped that my rescue would take place before he handed me over to the ominous people who had ostensibly ordered my abduction – or found somebody else who could figure out what to do with an abducted girl. Every day I waited for men in uniform to break down the walls of my dungeon. In fact, in the world outside the large-scale search for me had been called off after only three days. The search of the surroundings had been unsuccessful and now the police were questioning all the people closest to me. Only the media issued daily requests for information, with my picture and always the same description:

The girl is about 1.45 metres tall, weighing forty-five kilograms and has a plump stature. She has straight, light-brown hair with a fringe and blue eyes. At the time of her disappearance, the ten-year-old was wearing a red ski jacket with a hood, a denim dress with a top
whose sleeves are grey-and-white checked, light blue tights and black suede shoes size 34. Natascha Kampusch wears glasses with light-blue plastic oval frames and a yellow nose bridge. According to the police, she has a slight squint. The girl was carrying a blue plastic rucksack with a yellow cover and turquoise straps.

From the case file I know that over 130 tips had been received after four days. People said they had seen me with my mother in a supermarket in Vienna, alone at a motorway rest stop, once in the town of Wels and three times in the province of Tyrol. The police in Kitzbühel, Tyrol, searched for me for days. A team of Austrian law enforcement officers travelled to Hungary where somebody reported having seen me in Sopron. The small Hungarian village where I had spent the previous weekend with my father at his holiday house was searched systematically from top to bottom by the Hungarian police. A neighbourhood watch was set up, and my father’s house was placed under surveillance, because it was thought that I still had my child’s photo identification with me from the weekend and could have run away there. One man called the police and demanded a ransom of one million Austrian schillings for me. A copycat and a con-artist, like so many to come.

Six days after my abduction, the head of the investigation told the media, ‘In Austria, as in Hungary, uniformed police officers are searching for Natascha by putting up posters. No one is giving up. However, the hope of finding the child alive has vanished.’ Not one of the many tips turned out to lead to a hot trail.

And yet, the police failed to pursue the one tip that would have led them to me: on Tuesday, one day after my abduction, a twelve-year-old girl reported having seen a child abducted in a white delivery van with darkened windows on Melangasse. However, the police did not at first take this piece of information seriously.

In my dungeon I had no idea that the outside world had already begun grappling with the thought that I could be dead. I was
convinced that the large-scale search was still underway. Whenever I lay on my sunlounger, staring at the low, white ceiling with the bare bulb, I imagined the police talking to each one of my schoolmates, and played their answers through in my mind. I pictured the women who supervised afterschool care, as they described again and again when and where they had seen me for the last time. I considered who of our many neighbours would have watched me leave the house, and if anyone had witnessed the abduction and seen the white delivery van on Melangasse.

Even more intensely, I pondered fantasies that the kidnapper had demanded a ransom after all and would let me go once the money was handed over. Every time I warmed my food on the hotplate, I carefully tore off the small pictures of the meals and hid them in the pocket of my dress. I knew from films that kidnappers sometimes had to prove that their victims were still alive for the ransom to be handed over. I was prepared: with the pictures I could prove that I had regularly had something to eat. And I could also use them to prove to myself that I was still alive.

To be on the safe side, I chipped off a small piece of the veneer from the hotplate and placed it in my dress pocket as well. That way nothing could go wrong. I imagined that the kidnapper would drop me off at an undisclosed location after the payment of the ransom and leave me alone there. My parents would be told of my location and come to get me. Afterwards we would alert the police, and I would hand over the veneer chip to the officers. Then all the police would have to do would be to search all of the garages in Strasshof for basement dungeons. The hotplate with the missing chip from its veneer would be the vital piece of evidence.