3,096 Days (18 page)

After a short moment, he turned me round without a word and led me back into the house. The first time I saw it in the moonlight from the outside: a yellow house with a sloped roof and two chimneys. The windows were outlined in white. The lawn we were walking across seemed unnaturally short and well maintained.

Suddenly I was beset by doubts: I saw grass, trees, leaves, a piece of the sky, a house, a garden. But was this the world as I remembered it? Everything looked too flat, too artificial. The grass was green and the sky big, but you could see that these were stage backdrops! He had placed the shrubbery and the house there in order to deceive me. I had landed in a kind of theatre production, where the outdoor scenes of a television series were filmed. There were no neighbours, no city with my family only twenty-five minutes away by car. Instead, all of them were the kidnapper’s accomplices who were trying to make me believe that I was outside, while they watched me on huge monitors and laughed at my naivety. I closed my hand firmly around the leaves in my pocket, as if they could prove something to me: that this was real, that
I
was really real. But I felt nothing. Only a large emptiness that reached mercilessly for me like a cold hand.

My childhood was over when I was abducted at the age of ten. I ceased being a child in the dungeon in the year 2000. One morning I woke up with a cramping pain in my abdomen and found spots of blood on my pyjamas. I knew immediately what was happening. I had been waiting for my period to start for years. I knew the particular brand of sanitary pads I wanted from a commercial that the kidnapper had recorded after some of the television series. When he came into the dungeon, I asked him as matter-of-factly as possible to buy me several packets. Confronted with this new development, the kidnapper was deeply unsettled, and his paranoia reached a new level. Until then, he had painstakingly picked up every piece of lint, frantically wiped away every single fingerprint, in order to eliminate all traces of me, and now he was nearly hysterical in making sure that I wouldn’t sit down anywhere upstairs in the house. If I was allowed to sit somewhere, he put down a pile of newspapers first in an absurd attempt to prevent even the tiniest spot of blood from staining his house. He continued to worry daily that the police would show up and search his house for traces of DNA.

I felt personally harassed by his behaviour, like an untouchable. It was a confusing time when I urgently needed to be able to talk to my mother or one of my older sisters about the changes taking place inside my body that had so suddenly confronted me. But the only person I had to talk to was a man who was
completely out of his depth on the issue. Who treated me as if I were dirty and disgusting. And who obviously had never lived with a woman.

His behaviour towards me underwent a clear change once I entered puberty. As long as I had still been a child, I was ‘allowed’ to remain in my dungeon and go about my business within the narrow framework of his rules. Now, having become a woman, I had to be at his service, performing tasks in and on the house under his strict supervision.

Upstairs in the house I felt as if I were in an aquarium, like a fish in a too-small container who looks longingly at the outside world, but doesn’t jump out of the water as long as it can still live in its prison. Because crossing that line means certain death.

The line demarcating where the outside began was so absolute that it appeared insurmountable to me. As if the house was in a different dimension to the world outside its yellow walls. As if the house, the garden and the garage with its dungeon were located on a different matrix. Sometimes a hint of spring would waft in through a tilted window. From time to time I could hear a distant car driving down the peaceful street. Otherwise nothing more from the world outside could be discerned. The blinds were always down and the entire house was bathed in dim light. The alarm systems on the windows were activated – at least, I was convinced that they were. There were still moments when I thought of escape. But I no longer made any specific plans. The fish does not jump over the edge of the glass bowl where only death awaits.

But my longing for freedom remained.

I was now being constantly watched. I was not allowed to take a single step without him having already ordered me to. I had to stand, sit or walk however the kidnapper wanted. I had to ask if I wanted to stand up or sit down, before I turned my head or how to hold out my hand. He told me where I was to direct my gaze
and even accompanied me to the toilet. I don’t know what was worse, the time I spent alone in the dungeon or the time I was no longer alone, not even for a second.

This permanent surveillance reinforced my feeling of having landed in an absurd experiment. The atmosphere in the house intensified that impression. Behind its bourgeois façade, it seemed to have fallen out of time and space. Lifeless, uninhabited, like a backdrop for a gloomy film. On the outside, it fitted perfectly into its environment: conventional, extraordinarily well maintained, with thick shrubbery around the large garden to carefully screen it from the neighbours. Curious eyes were unwanted.

Strasshof is a faceless town with no history, with no centre and no character, as you would expect with a population today of about 9,000. After the town limit sign, the houses, stooping in the flat Marchfeld plain, line a thoroughfare and a railway line, interrupted time and again by the commercial areas common to the cheap surroundings of any large city. In particular, the town’s full name, ‘Strasshof an der Nordbahn’, or ‘Strasshof on the Northern Railway Line’, is a major clue that this is an area whose lifeline is its connection to Vienna. You travel away from here, you travel through here, you don’t travel to here without good reason. The town’s attractions include a ‘locomotive monument’ and a railway museum named ‘Heizhaus’, or ‘boiler house’. A century ago, not even fifty people lived here; today its inhabitants work in Vienna, returning to their suburban houses, lined up monotonously next to one another, only to sleep. At the weekend, the lawnmowers hum, the cars are polished and the cosy living room remains hidden behind closed curtains and blinds in partial darkness. Here, the façade is what counts, not what you might discover behind it. The perfect place to lead a double life. The perfect place for a crime.

The house itself was laid out as a typical early 1970s building. On the ground floor, a long hallway in which a staircase led to the
upper floor. On the left the bathroom and toilet, on the right the living room, and at the end of the hallway, the kitchen. This was an oblong room, with a kitchenette on the left with rustic cabinet fronts of dark wood veneer. On the floor, tiling with an orange-brown flowered pattern. A table, four chairs with cloth coverings, hooks in the ‘Prilblume’ flower design on the grey-white wall tiling with the dark green decorative flowers next to the sink.

The most striking part of the room was the mural wallpaper which covered the wall on the right: a forest of birch trees, green, with slender trunks stretching upwards, as if trying to flee the oppressive atmosphere of the room. When I looked at it properly for the first time, it seemed grotesque to me that someone who could commune with nature at any time, who could go out into life whenever he liked, would surround himself with artificial, dead nature; while I desperately tried to bring life into my bedroom in the dungeon, be it only in the form of a couple of plucked leaves.

I don’t know how often I scrubbed and polished the floor and the tiling in the kitchen until they gleamed immaculately. Not the tiniest streak, not the smallest crumb was allowed to mar the smooth surfaces. And when I thought I was done, I had to lie on the floor in order to check even the furthest corner from that perspective. The kidnapper always stood behind me, giving me orders. It was never clean enough for him. On countless occasions, he took the cloth from my hand and showed me how to clean ‘properly’. And he flew into a rage if I besmirched a beautiful smooth surface with an oily fingerprint, thereby destroying the façade of the untouched and pure.

For me, the worst thing was cleaning the living room. It was a large room that exuded a gloom that did not only come from the closed blinds. A dark, nearly black coffered ceiling, dark wood panelling, a green leather suite, light-brown wall-to-wall carpeting. A dark brown bookcase containing works such as Kafka’s
The Judgement
and Peter Kreuder’s
Only Dolls Don’t Cry
. An unused fireplace with a poker and, on the mantel above, a candle on a wrought-iron candle holder, a clock, a miniature helmet from a medieval knight’s armour. Two medieval portraits on the wall above the fireplace.

Whenever I spent any long period of time in that room, I had the impression that the gloom would penetrate through my clothes into every pore of my body. The living room seemed to me the perfect mirror image of the kidnapper’s ‘other’ side. Conservative, conformist and well adjusted on the surface, barely covering the dark layer underneath.

Today I know that for years Wolfgang Priklopil had barely changed anything in that house built by his parents in the 1970s. He wanted to renovate completely to his specifications only the upper floor, which had three bedrooms, and the attic. An attic dormer window was to allow additional light in; the dusty attic, with its bare wooden beams along the slanted roof, was to be outfitted with drywalling and transformed into a living space. For me, this meant that a new phase of my imprisonment was about to begin.

For the next months and years the upper floor under renovation was where I spent most of my time during the day. Priklopil himself no longer had a regular job, although sometimes he did disappear to do some ‘business’ with his friend Holzapfel. I didn’t find out until much later that they renovated flats in order to rent them out. However, they can’t have had too many orders coming in, because most of the time the kidnapper was busy renovating his own house. I was his only worker. A worker he could fetch from the dungeon as needed to do the back-breaking work that most people would have paid tradesmen to do, and who he then coerced into cooking and cleaning ‘after the working day’ before he locked her in the cellar again.

Back then I was actually much too young to do all the jobs he burdened me with. Whenever I see twelve-year-old kids today complaining and rebelling when asked to do easy chores, it makes me smile every time. I don’t begrudge them that small act of rebellion at all. I couldn’t rebel; I had to obey.

The kidnapper, who didn’t want any strange workmen in the house, took on the entire renovation project himself and forced me to do things that were far beyond my strength and capabilities. Together with him, I dragged marble slabs and heavy doors, hauled sacks of cement across the floor, broke open concrete with a chisel and a sledgehammer. We installed the dormer window, insulated and covered the walls, poured screed, then laid heating pipes and electric cabling, plastered the drywall panels, hammered an opening between the upper floor and the new attic floor and built a staircase with marble tiling.

The upper floor was next. The old flooring was ripped out, a new one put in. The doors were removed, the door frames sanded and repainted. The old brown fibre wallpaper had to be torn off the walls and new wallpaper hung and painted. We built a new bathroom with marble tiling in the attic. I was his assistant and serf in one: I had to help him carry things, hand him tools, scrape, chisel, paint. Or hold the bowl with the filler for hours, not moving, while he smoothed out the walls. When he sat down and took a break, I had to fetch him drinks.

The work had its upside too. After two years during which I could hardly move around in my tiny room, I enjoyed the exhausting physical activity. The muscles in my arms grew, and I felt strong and useful. Most of all in the beginning I enjoyed being allowed to spend several hours a day during the week outside my dungeon. Of course, the walls around me upstairs were no less insurmountable. The invisible leash too was stronger than ever before. But at least I had a change of pace.

At the same time, upstairs in the house, I was helplessly at the
mercy of the kidnapper’s evil, dark side. I had evidence from the incident with the drill that he was susceptible to uncontrolled outbursts of rage if I wasn’t ‘good’. In the dungeon there was hardly any opportunity not to be ‘good’. But now, as I worked, I could make a mistake any second. And the kidnapper didn’t like mistakes.

‘Hand me the putty knife,’ he said on one of our first days in the attic. I gave him the wrong tool. ‘You can’t f— do anything, can you?’ he burst out. From one second to the next his eyes went dark, as if a cloud had cast a shadow over his irises. His face became distorted. He grabbed a sack of cement lying next to him, lifted it and threw it at me with a shout. It took me unawares and the heavy sack hit me with such force that I staggered for a moment.

I froze inside. It wasn’t so much the pain that shocked me. The sack was heavy, and the impact hurt, but I could have handled it. It was the sheer aggression bursting forth from the kidnapper that took my breath away. After all, he was the only person in my life; I was completely dependent on him. That outburst threatened me in an extreme way. I felt like a battered dog, who is not allowed to bite the hand that beats him because it is the same hand that feeds him. The only way out I had was to escape into myself. I closed my eyes, blocked everything out and didn’t move a centimetre.