3,096 Days by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780670920006
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2010-04-27T12:00:00+00:00

6

Torment and Hunger

The Daily Struggle to Survive

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.

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