3,096 Days (31 page)

Before we went to the car, I asked for a blanket. I didn’t want the kidnapper to see me, because I thought he was still in the vicinity, or that somebody was making a video of the scene. There was no blanket, but the police officers shielded me from view.

Once in the car, I ducked down low in the seat. When the police officer started the engine and the car began to move, a wave of relief washed over me. I had done it. I had escaped.

At the police station in Deutsch-Wagram I was received like a lost child. ‘I can hardly believe that you’re here! That you’re alive!’ The officers who had worked on my case crowded around me. Most of them were convinced of who I was; only one or two wanted to wait for a DNA test. They told me how long they had looked for me. That special task forces had been formed and then replaced by others. Their words rushed past me left and right. I was trying to focus, but I hadn’t spoken to anyone for so long that I was overwhelmed. I stood helplessly in the middle of all these people, feeling infinitely weak, and began to shake in my thin dress. A female police officer gave me her jacket.

‘You’re cold. Put this on,’ she said caringly. I immediately took her into my heart.

Looking back, I am amazed that they didn’t take me straight to a quiet place and wait at least a day before interrogating me. After all, I was in a complete state of panic. For eight and a half years I had believed the kidnapper when he told me that people would die if I ran. Now I had done exactly that and nothing of the sort had happened. Nevertheless, I could feel fear breathing down my neck so that I couldn’t feel safe or free at the police station. I had no idea how to cope with the storm of questions and sympathy. I felt completely without protection.

Today I think that they should have let me rest a bit under gentle
care. Back then, I didn’t question the hubbub. Without stopping for breath, without a second of respite, I was taken to an adjacent room after they had noted down my personal information. The friendly female police officer who had given me her jacket was entrusted with questioning me.

‘Sit down and tell me about it calmly,’ she said.

I glanced around the room uncertainly. A room with innumerable police files and slightly stale air, which exuded busy efficiency. The first room in which I spent any amount of time after my imprisonment. I had prepared myself for this moment for so long, but the whole situation still seemed surreal.

The first thing the police officer asked me was whether it was okay for her to use the informal
du
with me. She said that it might be easier, for me as well. But I didn’t want that. I didn’t want to be ‘Natascha’, who could be treated like a child and pushed around. I had escaped, I was grown-up, and I was going to fight to be treated as such.

The police officer nodded, asked me inconsequential questions and had sandwiches brought in. ‘Eat something. You’re nothing but skin and bones,’ she suggested.

I held the sandwich she had given me and didn’t know what to do. I was so befuddled that the ministrations, the well-meant suggestion, seemed like an order I couldn’t follow. I was too wound up to eat and had gone without food for so long anyway that I knew I would have terrible stomach cramps if I ate an entire sandwich right now. ‘I can’t eat anything,’ I whispered. But the habit of obeying orders kicked in. Like a mouse, I nibbled along the edge of the sandwich. It took some time for my tension to ease enough so I could concentrate on the conversation.

The female officer immediately made me feel I could trust her. While the male officers intimidated me and I regarded them extremely warily, I felt that I could let my guard down a bit with a woman. I hadn’t been close to a woman for such a long time that
I stared at her, fascinated. Her dark hair was parted on the side and a lighter-coloured strand softened her look. A heart-shaped gold pendant dangled on her necklace; earrings sparkled at her ears. I felt safe with her.

Then I began to tell her my story. From the beginning. The words literally poured out of me. I felt a weight drop from me with every sentence I spoke about my imprisonment. As if putting it in words in this sober police room, dictating it into a police report, could take the awfulness away from the horror. I told her how much I was looking forward to an adult life where I would make the decisions; that I wanted my own flat, a job, later my own family. Eventually I almost had the feeling that I had made a friend. At the end of my questioning the officer gave me her watch. It made me feel that I was actually the mistress of my own time once again. No longer dictated to by another, no longer dependent on the timer switch that decreed when it was to be light and when it was to be dark.

‘Please don’t give any interviews,’ I asked her as we said goodbye. ‘But if you do talk to the media, please say something nice about me.’

She laughed. ‘I promise that I won’t give any interviews – who’s going to ask me anything anyway!’

The young police officer to whom I had entrusted my life only kept her word for a few hours. By the next day she could no longer withstand the pressure from the media and went on television, revealing details of my questioning. Later she apologized to me for it. She was terribly sorry, but like everyone else, she was completely overwhelmed by the situation.

Her fellow police officers in Deutsch-Wagram also approached the situation with remarkable naivety. Nobody was prepared for the media circus that broke out when news of my escape leaked. After my initial questioning I followed the plan that I had been drawing up for months, but the police had no strategy ready.

‘Please do not inform the press,’ I repeated over and over.

They just laughed, ‘The press isn’t going to come here.’

But they were badly mistaken. By the time I was due to be taken to police headquarters in Vienna that afternoon, the building was already surrounded. Fortunately I had enough presence of mind to ask them to place a blanket over my head before I left the police station. But even under the blanket I could make out the storm of flash photography. ‘Natascha! Natascha!’ I heard on all sides. Assisted by two police officers, I stumbled, as best as I could, towards the car. The picture of my white, bruised legs under the blue blanket, which revealed only a strip of my orange dress, went round the world.

On my way to Vienna I found out that the search for Wolfgang Priklopil was in full swing. The police had called at the house but found no one. ‘A manhunt is under way,’ one of the officers told me. ‘We don’t have him yet, but every able-bodied officer is working on it. There is nowhere the kidnapper can run, certainly not abroad. We will catch him.’ From that moment on I waited for the news that Wolfgang Priklopil had killed himself.

I had set off a bomb. The fuse was lit and there was no way to put it out again. I had chosen life. Only death remained for the kidnapper.

I recognized my mother immediately when she walked into police headquarters in Vienna. A total of 3,096 days had gone by since that morning I had left the flat on Rennbahnweg without saying goodbye. Eight and a half years, during which it had torn my heart apart that I had never been able to apologize. My entire youth without my family. Eight Christmases, my birthdays from the eleventh to the eighteenth, innumerable evenings when I would have liked to have had a word from her, a touch. Now she stood before me, almost unchanged, like a dream that has suddenly become reality. She sobbed loudly and laughed and cried at the
same time as she ran towards me and hugged me. ‘My child! My child! You’re here again! I always knew that you’d come back again!’ I breathed in her scent deeply. ‘You’re here again,’ whispered my mother, over and over. ‘Natascha – you’re here again.’

We hugged, holding each other tightly for a long time. I was so unused to such close physical contact that so much closeness made my head spin.

Both my sisters had walked into police headquarters right behind her. They too burst into tears when we hugged. My father came a bit later. He rushed up to me, stared disbelievingly and first looked for the scar I had from an injury suffered as a child. Then he embraced me, lifted me up and sobbed, ‘Natascha! It’s really you!’ The big and strong Ludwig Koch was crying like a baby, and I cried too.

‘I love you,’ I whispered when he had to leave again too soon – just like the many times he had dropped me off at home after a weekend together.

It is strange how after such a long separation all we wanted to ask were trivial questions. ‘Are my cats still alive?’ ‘Are you still together with your boyfriend?’ ‘How young you look!’ ‘How grown-up you are!’ As if it was a conversation with a stranger to whom – out of politeness or because you don’t have anything else to talk about – you don’t want to get too close. As if we had to slowly get to know each other again. For me, in particular, it was an unbelievably difficult situation. I had got through the last few years only by withdrawing into myself. I couldn’t simply flip the switch and, despite the physical closeness, I still felt as if there was a wall between me and my family. As if from under a bell jar, I watched them laugh and cry while my tears dried. I had lived in a nightmare too long; my psychological prison was still there and stood between me and my family. In my perception they all looked exactly the same as eight years ago, while I had gone from being a school-aged child to an adult woman. I felt as if we were
prisoners in different time bubbles that had briefly touched and were now drifting apart at top speed. I had no idea how they had spent the last few years, what had happened in their world. But I knew that for everything I had experienced there were no words – and that I couldn’t let the emotions causing my inner turmoil show. I had locked them away for so long that I couldn’t tear open the door to my own emotional dungeon that easily.

The world I had returned to was no longer the world I had left. And I was no longer the same. Nothing would be as before – never. That became clear to me when I asked my mother, ‘How is Grandmother?’

My mother looked at the floor awkwardly. ‘She passed away two years ago. I’m very sorry.’

I swallowed and immediately tucked the sad news behind the thick armour I had built up during my imprisonment. My grandmother. Bits of memories swirled through my head. The scent of
Franzbranntwein
and Christmas tree candles. Her apron, the feeling of closeness and the knowledge that thinking of her had got me through so many nights in my dungeon.

Now that my parents had done their duty by identifying me, they were escorted out. My own duty was to make myself available to the police apparatus. I still had not yet had a moment of peace.

The police organized a psychologist to offer me support over the next few days. I was asked again and again how they could get the kidnapper to give himself up. I had no answer. I was certain that he would kill himself, but I had no idea how or where. In Strasshof, I overheard, the house was examined for explosives. Late in the afternoon officers discovered my dungeon. While I was sitting in the station, specialists in white suits rummaged through the room that had been my prison and my refuge for eight years. Just a few hours ago I had woken up there.

That evening I was taken to a hotel in the province of Burgenland
in an unmarked police car. After the Vienna police had been unsuccessful in locating me, a special task force in Burgenland had taken over my case. I was now given over to their supervision. Night had already fallen long ago when we arrived at the hotel. Accompanied by the police psychologist, the officers led me into a room with a double bed and a bathroom. The entire floor had been cleared and was guarded by armed police officers. They were afraid that the kidnapper, who was still at large, would attempt revenge.

I spent my first night of freedom with a police psychologist who talked incessantly and whose words rippled over me in a constant stream. Again I was cut off from the outside world – for my own protection, the police assured me.

They were probably right, but in that room I nearly went off the rails myself. I felt locked up and wanted only one thing: to listen to the radio. To find out what had happened to Wolfgang Priklopil. ‘Believe me, that isn’t good for you,’ the police psychologist shook me off again and again. Inside, I was in a spin, but I heeded her instructions. Late that night I took a bath. I sank into the water and tried to relax. I could count on two hands how often I had been allowed to take a bath in all the years of my imprisonment. Now I could run my own bath and put in as much bubble bath as I wanted. But I couldn’t enjoy it. Somewhere out there was the man who had been the only person in my life for eight and a half years, looking for a way to kill himself.

I heard the news the next day in the police car that took me back to Vienna.

‘Is there any news of the kidnapper?’ was my first question as I climbed into the car.

‘Yes,’ said the officer cautiously. ‘The kidnapper is no longer alive. He committed suicide, throwing himself in front of a train at 8:59 p.m. near Vienna’s northern railway station.’

I lifted my head and looked out of the window. Outside, Burgenland’s flat, summery landscape glided past me on the motorway.
A flock of birds rose up out of a field. The sun stood low on the sky, bathing the late summer meadows in warm light. I took a deep breath and stretched out my arms. A feeling of warmth and safety coursed through my body, moving outwards from my stomach to the tips of my toes and fingers. My head felt light. Wolfgang Priklopil was no more. It was over.

I was free.