3,096 Days (17 page)

After the endless hours and days that I had spent in my dungeon completely isolated, I was very susceptible to his orders and manipulations. The lack of light and human contact had weakened me to such an extent that I was no longer able to defy him beyond a certain basic level of resistance. I never stopped resisting him completely, which helped me draw the boundaries that I saw as indispensable. But I rarely thought of escape any more. It seemed as if the invisible leash that he put me on upstairs was becoming more and more real, as if I were in fact chained to him and not physically able to move either nearer or further away. He had anchored the fear of the world outside – where no one loved me, no one missed me and no one was looking for me – so deep inside me that it almost became greater than my longing for freedom.

When I was in the dungeon, I tried to keep myself as busy as
possible. On the long weekends I spent by myself, I continued to clean and tidy up for hours until everything was clean and smelled fresh. I painted a great deal and used even the smallest bit of space on my pad for my pictures: my mother in a long skirt, my father with his fat stomach and his moustache, me laughing in between. I drew the radiantly yellow sun that I hadn’t seen for many, many months, and houses with smoking chimneys, colourful flowers and playing children – fantasy worlds that for hours allowed me to forget what my reality looked like.

One day, the kidnapper gave me a book of handicrafts. It was meant for pre-school children and made me more sad than it cheered me up. Catching paper aeroplanes was simply not possible in just five square metres of space. A better gift was the Barbie doll I was given just a little while later, and a small sewing kit, the kind that you sometimes find in hotels. I was infinitely grateful for this long-legged person made of plastic that now kept me company. It was a Horse-Riding Barbie with riding boots, white trousers, a red waistcoat and a riding crop. I asked the kidnapper for days to bring me some scraps of fabric. Sometimes it could take ages for him to satisfy such requests. And then only if I followed his orders precisely. If I cried, for example, he would take away all my amenities, such as the books and videos I needed to live. In order to get something I wanted I had to show him my gratitude and praise him for everything he did – including the fact that he had locked me up.

Finally I had worked on him so much that he brought me an old top, a white polo shirt made of soft, smooth jersey with a fine blue pattern. It was the one he had worn the day of my abduction. I don’t know whether he had forgotten or simply wanted to get rid of it out of paranoia. I used the material to make a cocktail dress with thin spaghetti straps made of thread and an elegant asymmetrical top for my Barbie. Using a string that I had found among my school things, I turned a sleeve into a case for my
glasses. Later I was able to persuade the kidnapper to allow me to have an old cloth serviette, which had become blue in the wash and he now used as a cleaning rag. From that I made a ball gown for my Barbie, with a thin rubber band at the waist.

Later, I made trivets from wires and folded miniature artworks out of paper. The kidnapper brought me craft needles so that I could practise crocheting and knitting. Outside, as a primary school girl, I had never learned to do them properly. When I had made mistakes, people quickly lost patience with me. Now I had an infinite amount of time, nobody corrected me, and I could always start over again, until my small handcrafted projects were finished. These craft projects became a psychological lifesaver for me. They kept me from madness in the lonely inactivity I was forced to endure. And at the same time I could think of my parents while I made small gifts for them – for some day when I would be free again.

Of course, I couldn’t breathe a word to the kidnapper that I was making something for my parents. I hid the pictures from him and spoke less frequently of them, because he reacted more and more indignantly whenever I talked about my life outside, before my imprisonment. ‘Your parents don’t love you. They don’t care about you, otherwise they would have paid your ransom,’ he had said in the beginning, still annoyed whenever I spoke about how much I missed them. Then, sometime in the spring of 1999, came the prohibition: I was no longer allowed to mention my parents or to speak of anything I had experienced before my imprisonment. My mother, my father, my sisters and nephews, school, my last ski trip, my tenth birthday, my father’s holiday house, my cats. Our apartment, my habits, my mother’s shop. My teacher, my friends from school, my room. Everything that had existed before was now taboo.

The prohibition on my past became a standard component of his visits to my dungeon. Whenever I mentioned my parents, he
flew into a rage. When I cried, he turned the light off and left me in complete darkness until I was ‘good’ again. Being ‘good’ meant I was to be grateful that he had ‘rescued’ me from my previous life.

‘I rescued you. You belong to me now,’ he said over and over. Or: ‘You no longer have a family. I am your family. I am your father, your mother, your grandma and your sisters. I am now your everything. You no longer have a past.’ He hammered it into me. ‘You’re so much better off with me. You’re lucky that I took you in and that I take such good care of you. You belong to me now. I have created you.’

Pygmalion loathing their lascivious life,
Abhorr’d all womankind, but most a wife:
So single chose to live, and shunn’d to wed,
Well pleas’d to want a consort of his bed.
Yet fearing idleness, the nurse of ill,
In sculpture exercis’d his happy skill;
And carv’d in iv’ry such a maid, so fair,
As Nature could not with his art compare …

Ovid,
Metamorphoses

Today I believe that Wolfgang Priklopil, in committing a terrible crime, wanted to create nothing more than his own little perfect world with a person that could be there just for him. He probably would never have been able to do so the normal way and had therefore decided to force and mould someone to do it. Basically, he didn’t want anything more than anyone else: love, approval, warmth. He wanted somebody for whom he himself was the most important person in the world. He didn’t seem to have seen any other way to achieve that than to abduct a shy, ten-year-old girl and cut her off from the outside world until she was psychologically so alienated that he could ‘create’ her anew.

The year I turned eleven, he took from me my history and my identity. I was not to be anything more than a piece of blank paper on which he could pen his sick fantasies. He even denied me my reflection in the mirror. If I couldn’t see myself reflected in my social interactions with anyone else other than the kidnapper, I wanted to at least be able to see my own face to keep from losing myself completely. But he refused my request for a small mirror again and again. It wasn’t until years later that I received a mirrored bathroom cabinet. When I gazed into it I no longer saw the childlike features I once had, but rather an unfamiliar face.

Had he truly recreated me? Whenever I ask myself that question today, I can’t answer it unequivocally. On the one hand, he had picked the wrong person when he chose me. I continued to resist his attempts to erase my identity and make me into his creature. He never broke me.

On the other hand, his attempts to make me into a new person fell on fertile ground, especially because of who I was. Just before my abduction I had been sick of my life and was so dissatisfied with myself that I had decided to change something. And just minutes before he threw me into his delivery van, I had vividly imagined throwing myself in front of a moving car – that’s how much I hated the life that I saw myself forced to live.

Of course, the fact that I was not allowed to have my own history made me infinitely sad. I felt it was a gross injustice that I was not allowed to be myself any more or talk about the deep pain the loss of my parents had caused. But what actually remained of my own history? It now consisted only of memories that had very little to do with the real world that had continued to turn without me. My primary school class no longer existed; my little nephews had grown and would perhaps not even recognize me, even if I were suddenly to stand in front of them. And perhaps my parents really were relieved because they were now spared the long and tiresome arguments over me. By cutting me off from everything for so long, the
kidnapper had created the perfect foundation to enable him to take my past away from me. Because even while on the conscious level and to his face I held tight to my opinion that my abduction had been a serious crime, his constantly repeated command to view him as my saviour seeped ever more deeply into my subconscious. Basically it was much easier for me to look upon the kidnapper as my saviour, not as an evil person. In a desperate attempt to force myself to see the positive aspects of my imprisonment, so as not to let it destroy me, I said to myself, ‘At least it can’t get any worse.’ Unlike what had happened in many of the cases that I’d heard about on television, up to that point the kidnapper had neither raped nor murdered me.

The theft of my identity did, however, offer me a great deal of freedom. Today when I think back to that feeling, it seems incomprehensible and paradoxical in light of the fact that I had been so completely robbed of my liberty. But back then I felt unencumbered by preconceived opinions for the first time in my life. I was no longer just a small cog in a family where the roles had already long been doled out – and where they had assigned me that of clumsy roly-poly. A family in which I had become a pawn for the adults whose decisions I often didn’t understand.

Although I was now caught up in a system of complete oppression, had lost my freedom of movement and one single person governed every detail of my life, this form of oppression and manipulation was direct and clear. The kidnapper was not the kind of person to act subtly – he wanted to exercise his power in an open and unvarnished way. In the shadow of his power, which dictated how I should do everything, I was paradoxically able to be myself for the first time in my life.

One sign of this was the fact that since my abduction I never again wet the bed. Although I was subjected to an inhuman burden, a certain kind of stress seems to have lifted from me at that time. If I had to sum it up in one sentence, I would say that
by giving up my history and submitting to the kidnapper’s wishes, I felt wanted – for the first time in a long time.

In late autumn 1999, the stripping of my identity was complete. The kidnapper had ordered me to pick out a new name: ‘You are no longer Natascha. Now you belong to me.’

I had refused for a long time, partly because I found that using names was unimportant anyway. There was only me and him, and ‘you’ was enough to know who was being addressed. But saying the name ‘Natascha’ triggered so much anger and displeasure in him that I acquiesced. And besides, hadn’t I always disliked that name? When my mother called it reproachfully, it had the ugly sound of unmet demands and expectations I could never live up to. I had always wished for one of those names that other girls had: Stefanie, Jasmin, Sabine. Anything but Natascha. ‘Natascha’ contained everything that I had not liked about my former life. Everything I wanted to get rid of, everything I was forced to get rid of.

The kidnapper suggested ‘Maria’ as my new name, because both his grandmothers were called Maria. Although I did not like his suggestion, I agreed, because Maria was my middle name anyway. However, that didn’t sit well with the kidnapper because the point was I was to have a completely new name. He pressed me to suggest something different. That very minute.

I leafed through my calendar, which gave the saints’ days, and on 2 December found one possibility right next to Natascha: ‘Bibiane’. For the next seven years, ‘Bibiane’ became my new identity, even though the kidnapper never succeeded in entirely wiping out my old one.

The kidnapper had taken my family away, my life and my freedom, my old identity. The physical prison of the dungeon underground, behind the many heavy doors, was supplemented piece by piece by a psychological one, whose walls grew ever higher. And I began
to thank the prison warden who had built it. Because at the end of the year, he granted me one of the wishes most dear to my heart: a moment outside under the sky.

It was a cold, clear December night. He had already communicated to me his rules for this ‘outing’ days before: ‘If you scream, I will kill you; if you run, I will kill you; I will kill anyone who hears or sees you, if you are so dumb as to draw attention to yourself.’ It wasn’t enough for him any more to threaten to kill just me. He also burdened me with the responsibility for anyone I might call to for help. I believed his murderous plans immediately and without reflection. Even today I’m convinced that he would’ve been capable of killing an unsuspecting neighbour who had accidentally taken notice of me. Anyone who goes to so much effort to keep a prisoner in the cellar would not hesitate to commit murder.

When he grabbed me firmly by the upper arm and opened the door to the garden, a deep sense of happiness came over me. The cool air gently caressed my face and arms, the odour of rot and isolation that had taken over my nose slowly receded, and my head became lighter. For the first time in nearly two years, I felt the soft ground beneath my feet. Every blade of grass that gave way under the soles of my shoes seemed to me a precious, singular living creature. I lifted my head and looked at the sky. The infinite space that opened up before me took my breath away. The moon was low on the horizon and a couple of stars twinkled far above. I was outside. For the first time since I had been pulled into a delivery van on 2 March 1998. I tilted my head all the way back and tried with difficulty to suppress a sob.

The kidnapper led me through the garden up to the privet hedgerow. Once there, I stretched out my hand, cautiously touching the dark leaves. They smelled tangy and shone in the moonlight. It seemed like a miracle to me to touch something living with my hand. I plucked a few leaves and put them in my pocket. A souvenir of what was living in the world outside.