I had no idea how wrong I was.
2
What Could Happen Anyway?
The Last Day of My Old Life
The day after returning from my father’s weekend house, I woke up angry and sad. The anger at my mother’s wrath, which was aimed at my father but had been taken out on me, made my chest tighten. I was even more upset at the fact that she had forbidden me from ever seeing him again. It was one of those decisions that adults make over the heads of children, out of anger or caused by a sudden mood, without thinking that it isn’t just about them, but rather about the deepest needs of those who are helplessly faced with such pronouncements.
I hated this feeling of powerlessness – a feeling that reminded me that I was still a child. I wanted to finally be more grown up in the hope that these altercations with my mother wouldn’t get under my skin so much. I wanted to learn how to swallow my feelings, including those deep-seated fears that fights between parents always trigger in children.
As of my tenth birthday I had put the first and least self-sufficient phase of my life behind me. The magic date that was to officially mark my independence was drawing closer: just eight more years to go, then I would move out and get a job. Then I would no longer be dependent on the decisions of grown-ups around me who cared more about their petty quarrels and jealousies than my needs and wants. Just eight more years that I would take advantage of to prepare myself for a life in which I would make the decisions.
I had already taken an important step towards independence several weeks earlier: I had convinced my mother to allow me to walk to school by myself. Although I was in the fourth grade, she had always driven me to school, dropping me off in front of the building. The trip didn’t take more than five minutes. Every day I was embarrassed in front of the other kids for my helplessness, on display to everyone as I got out of the car and my mother gave me a goodbye kiss. I had been negotiating with her for quite a while that it was high time for me to get the hang of walking to school alone. I wanted to show not just my parents, but also myself, that I was no longer a little child. And that I could conquer my fears.
My insecurity was something that rankled me deep down inside. It would come over me even as I was making my way down the stairwell. It grew as I crossed the courtyard and became a dominating emotion as I ran through the streets of the council estate at Rennbahnsiedlung. I felt unprotected and tiny, and hated myself for feeling that way. That day I made a resolution: I wanted to try to be strong. I wanted that day to be the first day of my new life and the last day of my old one. Looking back, it seems rather ironic that it was precisely that day my life as I knew it actually did end, albeit in a way that I could not possibly have imagined.
Decisively, I pushed the patterned duvet aside and got out of bed. As always, my mother had laid out the clothes I was supposed to put on: a dress with a denim top and a skirt made of grey tartan flannel. I felt shapeless in it, constrained, as if the dress was holding me down tightly in a stage that I had long wanted to grow out of.
Grumbling, I slipped it on, then passed though the hallway into the kitchen. My mother had prepared my packed sandwiches and left them on the table wrapped in the napkin which bore the logo from the small café in the Marco-Polo-Siedlung and her name. When it was time to leave the house, I put on my red anorak and my rucksack. I petted the cats and said goodbye to them. Then I opened the door to the stairwell and went out. Almost out the door, I stopped and hesitated, thinking of what my mother had told me a dozen times before: ‘You must never part in anger. You never know if we’ll ever see each other again!’ She could be angry, she was impulsive, and she would often slap me on the spur of the moment. But when it was time to say goodbye she was always very loving. Should I really leave without saying a word? I turned round, but then inside me rose the feeling of disappointment that the previous evening had left behind. I would not give her any more kisses and would instead punish her with my silence. Besides, what could happen anyway?
‘What could happen anyway?’ I mumbled half to myself. My words echoed down the staircase with its grey tiling. That question became the mantra that accompanied me out on to the street and through the block of houses to school. My mantra, arming me against my fear and my guilty conscience for not having said goodbye.
I left the council block, ran along an endless wall and waited at the pedestrian crossing. A tram rattled past, stuffed to the brim with people heading to work. My courage evaporated. Everything around me suddenly seemed much too big. The argument with my mother weighed on me, and the feeling that I was sinking in this new labyrinth of relationships between my quarrelling parents and their new partners, who did not accept me, made me fearful. I had wanted to feel the sensation of embarking on something new that day, but that once again gave way to the certainty that I would have to struggle to find my place in this entangled network of relationships. And how would I ever be able to change my life if a mere pedestrian crossing loomed before me like an insurmountable obstacle?
I began to cry and felt the overpowering desire to simply disappear and vanish into thin air. I let the traffic flow by and imagined myself walking into the street and being hit by a car. It would drag me along for a few metres, and then I would be dead. My rucksack would be lying right next to me and my red jacket would be like a stop light on the asphalt, crying out, ‘Just look at what you’ve done to this girl!’ My mother would come running out of the building, cry over me and realize all of her mistakes. Yes, she would. For certain.
Of course, I did not jump in front of a car, nor in front of the tram. I would never have wanted to draw so much attention to myself. Instead I pulled myself together, crossed the street and walked down Rennbahnweg towards my primary school, located on Brioschiweg. My route took me through a couple of quiet side streets lined with small family houses built in the 1950s with modest front gardens. In an area characterized by industrial buildings and residential estates with prefabricated concrete tower blocks, they seemed anachronistic and yet calming. As I turned on to Melangasse, I wiped the remaining tears from my face and trotted along with my head down.
I don’t remember any longer what caused me to lift my head. A noise? A bird? In any case, my eyes focused on a delivery van. It was parked alongside the street on the right-hand side and seemed strangely out of place in these peaceful surroundings. A man was standing in front of the delivery van. He was lean, not very tall, seemed young and somehow glanced around aimlessly, as if he were waiting for something and didn’t know what.
I slowed my pace and stiffened. A fear that I could hardly put my finger on returned instantly, making the hair on the back of my neck stand up and covering my arms with goose bumps. Immediately I felt the impulse to cross to the other side of the street. A rapid sequence of images and fragments of sentences raced through my head: don’t talk to strange men … don’t climb into strange cars … abduction … child molestation … the many horror stories I had heard on the TV about girls being abducted. But if I really wanted to be grown up, I couldn’t allow myself to give in to my impulse. I had to overcome my fear and I forced myself to keep walking. What could happen after all, I asked myself. The walk to school was my test. I would pass it without deviating.
Looking back, I can no longer say why the sight of the delivery van set off alarm bells inside me: it might have been intuition, although it is likely that any man I had encountered in an unusual situation on the street would have frightened me. Being abducted was, in my childish eyes, something that was a realistic possibility – but deep down inside it was still something that happened only on TV, and certainly not in my neighbourhood.
When I had come within about two metres of the man on the street, he looked me right in the eye. At that moment my fear vanished. He had blue eyes, and with his almost too-long hair he looked like a university student from one of those old made-for-TV movies from the 1970s. His gaze seemed strangely empty. That is one poor man, I thought, because he gave me the feeling that he was
in need of protection; at that very moment I felt the desire to help him. That may sound odd, like a child holding tight at all costs to the naive belief that there is good in everyone. But when he looked at me squarely for the first time that morning, he seemed lost and very vulnerable.
Yes, I would pass this test. I would walk by him, giving him the berth the narrow pavement afforded. I did not like bumping into people and wanted to move out of his way far enough so that I could avoid touching him.
Then everything happened so fast.
The very moment I lowered my eyes and went to walk past the man, he grabbed me by the waist and threw me through the open door into his delivery van. Everything happened in one fell swoop, as if it had been a choreographed scene, as if we had rehearsed it together. A choreography of terror.
Did I scream? I don’t think so. And yet everything inside me was one single scream. It pushed upwards and became lodged far down in my throat: a silent scream as if one of those nightmares had become reality where you try to scream but no sound comes out; where you try to run but your legs move as if trapped in quicksand.
Did I fight back? Did I get in the way of his perfect choreography? I must have fought back, because the next day I had a black eye. I can’t remember the pain inflicted by that blow, only the feeling of paralysing helplessness. The kidnapper had an easy time of it with me. He was 1.72 metres tall, while I was only 1.45 metres. I was plump and not particularly quick anyway. Plus, my heavy school bag hindered my mobility. The whole thing had only taken a few seconds.
The moment the delivery van door closed behind me I was well aware of the fact that I had been kidnapped and that I would probably die. In my mind’s eye I saw the images from Jennifer’s funeral. Jennifer had been molested in a car and killed when she tried to escape. Images of Carla’s parents waiting for word of their daughter. Carla, who had been molested, was found unconscious floating in a pond and died a week later. I had wondered back then what that would be like: dying and what comes after. Whether you felt pain just before, and whether you really see a light.
These images mixed with the jumble of thoughts that flashed through my mind at the same time. Is this really happening? To me? asked one voice. What a completely off-the-wall idea, kidnapping a child. That never turns out well, said another. Why me? I’m short and chubby, I don’t really fit the profile of a typical abduction victim, pleaded another.
The kidnapper’s voice brought me back to the present. He ordered me to sit down on the floor at the back of the van and barked at me not to move. If I didn’t do what he said, I would be in for a nasty surprise. Then he climbed over the front seat and drove off.
Because the cab and the back of the delivery van were not separated, I was able to see him from the back. And I heard him frantically punching numbers into his car phone. But he couldn’t seem to reach anyone.
In the meantime the questions continued to pound in my head: Will he blackmail my family for ransom? Who will pay it? Where is he taking me? What kind of car is this? What time is it? The windows of the delivery van were blacked out with the exception of a narrow strip along the upper edge. From the floor of the van I couldn’t tell where we were going, and I didn’t dare lift my head to look out of the windows. It seemed we had been driving for quite some time and were not headed anywhere in particular. I quickly lost any sense of space or time. But the treetops and the utility poles that kept whizzing by made me feel like we were driving around in circles in my neighbourhood.
Talk. You have to talk to him. But how? How do you talk to a criminal? Criminals don’t deserve any respect, so it didn’t seem appropriate to address him using the Sie form in German used for strangers and persons of respect. So I decided on du, the form of address that had, until now, been reserved for people who were close to me.
Absurdly enough, I asked him first what size shoes he wore. I had remembered that from watching TV shows like Aktenzeichen XY ungelöst*. You had to be able to give an exact description of the perpetrator; even the slightest detail was important. Naturally, I didn’t get an answer. Instead the man snapped at me to be quiet and nothing would happen to me. Even today I don’t know how I managed to get up enough courage to disregard his order. Maybe because I was certain that I was going to die anyway – that things couldn’t get any worse.
‘Are you going to molest me?’ was my next question.
This time I got an answer. ‘You’re too young for that,’ he said. ‘I would never do that.’ Then he made another phone call.
After he had hung up he said, ‘I’m going to take you to a forest and turn you over to the others. Then I’ll be able to wash my hands of this business.’ He repeated that sentence several times, rapid-fire and agitated: ‘I will turn you over, and then I’ll have nothing more to do with you. We’ll never see each other again.’
If he had intended to scare me, then he had found exactly the right words. The pronouncement that he was going to hand me over to ‘others’ took my breath away. I went rigid with fear. He didn’t need to say anything more; I knew what he meant. Child pornography rings had been all over the media for months. Since last summer hardly a week had gone by without some discussion of the people who abducted and molested children while filming it on video. In my mind’s eye I saw everything perfectly: groups of men would pull me into a basement and grope me all over while others took pictures. Up until that moment I had been convinced that I was soon going to die. What seemed in store for me now appeared even worse.
I don’t remember how long we drove until we came to a stop. We were in a pine forest like the many found on the outskirts of Vienna. The kidnapper turned off the engine and made another phone call. Something appeared to have gone wrong. ‘They’re not coming. They’re not here!’ he cursed to himself. He seemed frightened, agitated. But maybe that was also just a trick: maybe he wanted me to take his side against these ‘others’ he was supposed to hand me over to and who had left him hanging; maybe he had just made them up to increase my fear and to paralyse me.
The kidnapper got out and ordered me not to move. I obeyed silently. Hadn’t Jennifer wanted to flee from such a car? How had she tried to do that? And what had she done wrong? My thoughts were all jumbled up inside my head. If he hadn’t locked the door, I could maybe open it. But then what? In just two strides he’d be on me. I couldn’t run very fast. I had no idea what forest we were in and what direction I should run in. And then there were the ‘others’ who were supposed to come and get me, who could be anywhere. I pictured it vividly in my mind, how they would chase me, grab me and throw me to the ground. And then I saw myself as a corpse in the woods, buried under a pine tree.
I thought of my parents. My mother would come to pick me up from afterschool care in the afternoon. And the woman who ran the programme would say to her, ‘But Natascha hasn’t been here!’ My mother would be beside herself and I had no way to protect her. It cut my heart to think of her coming to get me and not finding me. ‘What could happen anyway?’ I had thought as I had left that morning without saying a word of goodbye, without giving her a kiss. You never know if we’ll see each other again.
The kidnapper’s words made me jump. ‘They’re not coming.’ Then he got back in the car, started the engine and drove off again.
This time I recognized the gables and rooftops of the houses that I could just make out through the narrow strips of window along the sides. I could tell where he was steering the car to – back to the edge of the city and then on to the arterial road leading towards the town of Gänserndorf.
‘Where are we going?’ I asked.
‘To Strasshof,’ the kidnapper said forthrightly.
As we drove through Süssenbrunn, a deep sadness engulfed me. We passed my mother’s old shop, which she had recently closed down. Just three weeks before she would have been sitting here at the desk in the mornings, doing the office work. I could still picture her and I wanted to cry out, but I only produced a weak whimper when we drove by the street that led to my
grandmother’s house. Here I had spent the happiest moments of my childhood.
The car came to a standstill in a garage. The kidnapper ordered me to remain lying down on the floor in the back and turned the engine off. Then he got out, fetched a blue blanket, threw it over me and wrapped me up tight. I could hardly breathe, and I was surrounded by absolute darkness. When he picked me up like a wrapped package and carried me out of the car, panic struck me. I had to get out of that blanket. And I had to go to the toilet.
My voice sounded muffled and foreign under the blanket when I asked him to put me down and let me go to the toilet. He stopped for a moment, then unwrapped me and led me through a hallway to a small guest toilet. From the hallway I was able to catch a glimpse of the adjoining rooms. The furnishings appeared fusty and expensive – yet another indication to me that I had really fallen victim to a crime. In the TV police shows that I knew, criminals always had large houses with expensive furnishings.
The kidnapper stood in front of the door and waited. I immediately locked the door and breathed a sigh of relief. But the moment of relief lasted only a few seconds. The room had no windows and I was trapped. The only way out was through the door and I couldn’t stay locked behind that door forever. Especially as it would have been easy for him to break it open.
When I came out of the toilet after a while, the kidnapper wrapped me up in the blanket again: darkness, stuffiness. He lifted me up and I felt him carry me several steps downwards: a cellar? Once at the bottom of the stairs, he laid me on the floor, pulled on the blanket to move me forward, threw me again over his shoulder and continued onwards. It seemed an eternity before he put me down again. Then I heard his footsteps moving away from me.
I held my breath and listened. Nothing. There was absolutely nothing to hear. Still, it was a long time before I dared to cautiously peel the blanket off. There was absolute darkness all around. It smelled of dust and the stale air was strangely warm. Beneath me I could feel the cold, naked floor. I rolled myself into a ball on the blanket and whimpered softly. My own voice sounded so peculiar in the silence that I became frightened and stopped. I don’t remember how long I remained lying there. At first I tried to count the seconds and the minutes. Twenty-one, twenty-two … I mumbled to myself, to time the length of the seconds. I tried to keep track of the minutes on my fingers. I kept losing count, and I couldn’t allow that to happen, not now! I had to concentrate, remember every detail! But I quickly lost all sense of time. The darkness, the odour that caused disgust to well up in me – all of this lay upon me like a black cloth.
3,096 Days Page 4