Just a few days later, the neighbour came back. This time he was holding a pile of photographs. The kidnapper pushed me aside surreptitiously, but I was able to catch a quick glimpse. There were family photographs depicting him in his former home in Yugoslavia and a group photo of a football team. He talked incessantly while holding the photographs under Priklopil’s nose. Again I understood only bits of conversation. No, jumping over the chasm was impossible. How was I supposed to make myself understood to this friendly man? Would he understand what I whispered to him in an unobserved moment, which would probably never happen anyway? Natascha who? Who’s been abducted? Even if he did understand me, what would happen next? Would he call the police? Did he even have a telephone? And then? The police would hardly believe him. Even if a police car came to Hollergasse, the kidnapper would have plenty of time to grab me and spirit me inconspicuously back to the car. I didn’t even want to imagine what would happen next.
No, this house would offer me no chance of escape. But the chance would come. Of that I was convinced like never before. I only had to recognize it in time.
That spring, in the year 2006, the kidnapper sensed that I was trying to pull away from him. He was uncontrollable and short-tempered, and his chronic sinus infection tormented him primarily in the night. During the day he redoubled his efforts to oppress me. They became ever more absurd. ‘Don’t talk back!’ he would spit as soon as I opened my mouth, even when he had asked me something. He demanded absolute obedience. ‘What colour is that?’ he barked at me once, pointing to a bucket of black paint.
‘Black,’ I answered.
‘No, that’s red. It’s red because I say it is. Say that it’s red!’
Whenever I refused, an uncontrollable rage possessed him and went on for longer than ever before. The blows followed in quick succession. Sometimes he beat me so long it felt like hours. More than once I almost lost consciousness before he dragged me down the stairs again, locked me away and turned out the light.
I noticed how difficult I again found it to resist a fatal reflex, namely to repress the beatings faster than it took for my injuries to heal. It would have been so much easier to give in. It was like an undertow that dragged me down unremittingly into the depths once it had got hold of me, while I heard my own voice whispering, ‘Perfect world, perfect world. Everything is okay. Nothing has gone wrong.’
I had to fight that undertow with all my might and set out small life rafts for myself – my notes, where I once again recorded every single assault. Today when I hold the lined notepad where I entered all those brutalities in proper handwriting and complete with detailed drawings of my injuries, I feel light-headed. Back then I wrote them down while keeping them at a great distance from me, as if I were sitting a test at school:
15 April 2006. Once he beat my right hand so long and so hard that I could literally feel the blood pooling inside. The entire back of my hand was blue and reddish, the bruise extended through to the palm of my hand, spreading out to encompass my entire palm. Moreover, he gave me a black eye (also on the right side) that was originally located in the outer corner and turned reddish, bluish and green, then travelled upwards across my upper eyelid.
Other assaults that took place recently, provided that I still remember them and haven’t repressed them – In the garden he attacked me with pruning shears because I was too afraid to climb the ladder. I had a greenish-coloured cut above my right ankle, my skin peeled away easily. Then he once threw a heavy bucket of dirt at my pelvis so that I had an ugly reddish-brown bruise. Once I refused to come upstairs with him out of fear. He ripped the sockets out of the wall, threw the timer switch at me and anything else that he could get his hands on along that wall. I had a deep, red, bloody mark on my right outer knee and my calf. In addition, I have a blackish-violet bruise on my left upper arm measuring about eight centimetres, I don’t know how I got it. Several times he kicked and punched me again and again, even my head. Twice he bloodied my lip, once giving me a pea-sized swelling (slightly bluish) on my lower lip. Once he hit me, giving me a crimped swelling on the right side below my mouth. Then I also have a cut on my right cheek (I don’t remember how I got it). Once he threw a toolbox on my feet, giving me pastel green bruises. He beat the back of my hand often with a spanner, wrench or similar. I have two symmetrical blackish bruises below both of my shoulder blades and along my spine.
Today he punched my right eye, making me see a flash of light, and my right ear, where I felt a stabbing pain, a ringing and a crunching. Then he continued to beat my head.
On better days he would again paint a picture of our future together.
‘If I could only trust you not to run away …’ he sighed one evening at the kitchen table. ‘I could take you everywhere with me. I would take you to Lake Neusiedl or Lake Wolfgang and buy you a summer dress. We could go swimming and go skiing in the winter. But I would have to be able to count on you one hundred per cent – otherwise you’d just run away.’
At moments like this I felt infinitely sorry for the man who had persecuted me for over eight years. I didn’t want to hurt him and wanted him to have the rosy future he desired so badly. He would seem so desperate and alone with himself and his crime that I sometimes forgot that I was his victim – and not responsible for his happiness. But I never allowed myself to succumb totally to the illusion that everything would be okay if only I cooperated. You can’t force anyone to be eternally obedient and you certainly can’t force anyone to love you.
Nevertheless, at such moments I swore to him that I would always stay with him, and comforted him, saying, ‘I won’t run away, I promise you. I’ll always stay with you.’ Of course he didn’t believe me and it broke my heart to lie to him. We both vacillated between reality and appearances.
I was present in body, but in my mind I was already on the run. I still couldn’t imagine landing safely on the other side though. The notion of suddenly surfacing in the real world outside frightened me unspeakably. Sometimes I even went so far as to believe that I would commit suicide immediately, as soon as I had left the kidnapper. I couldn’t bear the thought that my freedom would put him behind bars for years on end. Of course, I wanted others to be protected from this man who was capable of anything. I was still providing that protection by absorbing his violent energy myself. Later it would have to be up to the police and the justice system to keep him from committing any more crimes. Still, the thought gave me no satisfaction. I was unable to find any desire for revenge within me – just the opposite. It seemed as if I would only reverse the crime he had committed against me if I delivered him into the hands of the police. First he had locked me up, then I would make sure that he was locked up. In my twisted world view, the crime would not have been cancelled out, but rather intensified. The evil in the world would be no less, but indeed would multiply.
All these reflections were in a way the logical culmination of the emotional insanity I had been subjected to for years. By the two faces of the kidnapper, by the rapid switch between violence and pseudo-normality, by my survival strategy to block out what threatened to kill me. Until black is no longer black, and white is no longer white, but everything is only a grey fog causing you to lose your bearings. I had internalized all of that to such an extent that at times the betrayal of the kidnapper carried more weight than the betrayal of my own life. Perhaps I should just give in to my fate, I thought more than once whenever I was in danger of being sucked under and losing sight of my life rafts.
Other days I racked my brains, thinking about how the world outside would react to me after all those years. The images from the Dutroux trial were still very present in my mind. I never wanted to be presented like the victims in that case, I thought. I had been a victim for eight years and I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life as a victim. I pictured exactly how I would deal with the media. Most preferable was that they would leave me alone. But when they reported on me, then never to use my first name. I wanted to re-enter life as a grown-up
woman. And I wanted to select the media that I would talk to myself.
It was an evening at the beginning of August, when I was sitting at the kitchen table with the kidnapper eating supper. His mother had put a sausage salad in the refrigerator. He gave me the vegetables and piled the sausage and cheese on his own plate. I slowly chewed on a piece of pepper in the hope of being able to suck every last bit of energy from every single red fibre. In the meantime I had gained a bit of weight and now weighed forty-two kilograms, but the work in the Hollergasse flat had exhausted me and I felt physically drained. My mind was wide awake. Now that the renovation work was finished, yet another phase of my imprisonment was over. What was to come next? The normal insanity of everyday life? Summer retreat on Lake Wolfgang, begun with severe beatings, accompanied by humiliations and, as a special treat, a dress? No, I didn’t want to live this life any more.
The next day we were working in the assembly pit. From a distance I could hear a mother calling loudly for her children. Now and again a short puff of air carried a hint of summer and freshly mown grass into the garage where we were overhauling the underneath of the old white delivery van. It was the vehicle he had abducted me in, and now he wanted to sell it. Not only had the world of my childhood moved out of reach into the distance – now all of the set pieces from the first years of my imprisonment were disappearing as well. This van was my connection to the day of my abduction. Now I was working towards making it vanish. With every brushstroke I seemed to be cementing my future in the cellar.
‘You have brought a situation upon us in which only one of us can make it through alive,’ I said suddenly. The kidnapper looked at me in surprise. I wouldn’t be deterred. ‘I really am grateful to you for not killing me and that you have taken such good care of me. That is very nice of you. But you can’t force me to stay with you. I am my own person, with my own needs. This situation must come to an end.’
In response Wolfgang Priklopil took the brush from my hand without a word. I could see from his face that he was deeply frightened. All the years he must have feared this very moment. The moment it became clear that all his oppression had borne no fruit. That when it came right down to it, he hadn’t been able to break me. I continued: ‘It is only natural that I have to go. You should have counted on that from the beginning. One of us has to die; there is no other way out any more. Either you kill me or you let me go.’
Priklopil slowly shook his head. ‘I will never do that. You know that too well,’ he said softly.
I waited for pain soon to explode in some part of my body and mentally prepared myself for it. Never give up. Never give up. I will not give up on myself. When nothing happened, when he only remained standing motionless in front of me, I took a deep breath and spoke the words that changed everything: ‘By now I have tried to kill myself so many times – and here I am, the victim. It would actually be much better if you would kill yourself. You won’t be able to find any other way out anyway. If you killed yourself, all of these problems would suddenly be gone.’
At that moment something inside him seemed to die. I saw the despair in his eyes as he mutely turned away from me and I could hardly bear it. This man was a criminal – but he was the only person I had in the world. As if on fast-rewind, specific scenes from the past few years whizzed before my eyes. I wavered and heard myself say, ‘Don’t worry. If I run away, I’ll throw myself in front of a train. I would never put you in any danger.’ Suicide seemed to me to be the greatest kind of freedom, a release from everything, from a life that had already been ruined long ago.
At that moment I would’ve really liked to have taken back my words. But now it had been said: I would run at the next opportunity. And one of us wouldn’t come through it alive.
Three weeks later I stood in the kitchen, staring at the calendar. I tossed the paper I had torn off into the dustbin and turned away. I couldn’t afford to reflect on things for longer periods. The kidnapper was calling me to work. The day before I’d had to help him finish the advertisements for the flat on Hollergasse. Priklopil had brought me a map of Vienna and a ruler. I measured the route from the flat on Hollergasse to the nearest underground station, checked the scale and calculated how many metres it was on foot. After that he’d called me into the corridor and ordered me to walk quickly from one end to the other. He timed me with his watch. Then I calculated how long it would take to get from the flat to the underground station and to the next bus stop. In his pedantry, the kidnapper wanted to know down to the second how far the flat was from public transport. When the advertisements were finished, he called his friend who was to put them on the Internet. I took a deep breath and smiled. ‘Now everything will be easier.’ He appeared to have completely forgotten our discussion about escape and death.
Just before noon on 23 August 2006, we went into the garden. The neighbours weren’t there and I picked the last strawberries from the bed in front of the privet hedgerow and collected all of the apricots lying on the ground around the tree. Then I washed the fruit off in the kitchen and put it in the refrigerator. The kidnapper went with me every step of the way and at no time did he take his eyes off me.
Around noon he took me to the little garden hut at the back of the property on the left. The hut was separated from a small path by a fence. Priklopil was meticulous about always closing the garden gate. He locked it even when he left the property for only a short moment to knock the dirt out of the floor mats of his red BMW. The white van was parked between the hut and the garden gate, which was to be picked up in the next few days.
Priklopil fetched the vacuum cleaner, plugged it in and ordered me to clean thoroughly the interior, the seats and the floor mats. I was in the middle of doing so when his mobile rang. He walked a couple of steps away from the car, covered his ear with his hand and asked twice, ‘Excuse me please?’ From the brief fragments I picked up through the noise of the vacuum cleaner, I concluded that it must be somebody on the line interested in the flat. Priklopil was overjoyed. Absorbed in his conversation, he turned round and moved several metres away from me towards the pool.
I was alone. For the first time since the beginning of my imprisonment the kidnapper had let me out of his sight while outside. I stood frozen in front of the car for a brief second holding the vacuum cleaner a feeling of paralysis spread through my legs and arms. My ribcage felt as if it were encased in an iron corset. I could hardly breathe. Slowly my hand holding the vacuum cleaner sank. Disordered, confused images raced through my head. Priklopil coming back and finding me gone. Him looking for me and then going on a shooting spree. A train speeding along. My lifeless body. His lifeless body. Police cars. My mother. My mother’s smile.
Then everything happened so fast. With superhuman strength I tore myself out of the paralysing quicksand that was tightening around my legs. The voice of my other self hammered in my head: If you had just been abducted yesterday, you would run now. You have to act as if you didn’t know the kidnapper. He is a stranger. Run. Run. Damn it, run!
I dropped the vacuum cleaner and bolted to the garden gate. It was open.
I hesitated for a moment. Should I go left or right? Where could I find people? Where were the railway tracks? I mustn’t lose my head now, mustn’t be afraid. Don’t turn round, just go. I hurried down the small pathway, turned on to Blasselgasse and ran towards the housing estate that lay alongside the street – small allotment gardens, in between mini houses built on the erstwhile parcels of land. In my ears was only a droning noise; my lungs hurt. And I was certain that the kidnapper was coming closer every second. I thought I heard his footsteps and felt his eyes on my back. Briefly I even thought I felt his breath on the back of my neck. But I didn’t turn round. I would realize it soon enough whenever he threw me to the ground from behind, dragged me back to the house and killed me. Anything was better than going back in the dungeon. I had chosen death anyway. Either by train or by the kidnapper. The freedom to choose, the freedom to die. My thoughts shooting through my head were
all jumbled up, while I rushed onwards. It wasn’t until I saw three people coming towards me in the street that I knew I wanted to live. And that I would.
I bolted towards them and panted at them, ‘You have to help me! I need a mobile to call the police! Please!’ The three of them stared at me in surprise: an older man, a child, maybe twelve years old, and a third person, perhaps the boy’s father.
‘We can’t,’ he said. Then the three of them went round me and continued walking.
The older man turned back once more and said, ‘I’m sorry. I don’t have my mobile on me.’
Tears suddenly came to my eyes. What was I, after all, to the world outside? I had no life in it. I was an illegal, a person with no name and no history. What would happen if nobody believed my story?
I stood on the pavement trembling, my hand gripping a fence. Where to? I had to get off this street. Priklopil had surely noticed already that I was gone. I took a few steps back, pulled myself up over a low fence, landed in one of the gardens and rang the doorbell. But nothing happened, there was nobody to be seen. I ran further, climbed over hedges and flowerbeds, from one garden to the next. Finally I caught sight of an older woman through an open window in one of the houses. I knocked on the window frame and called softly, ‘Please help me! Call the police! I’ve been abducted. Call the police!’
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