Free 3,096 Days by Natascha Kampusch

behave like a man who had been preparing for years to abduct a child and whose long-cherished wish had just been fulfilled. Quite the opposite: he seemed like someone whom a distant acquaintance had suddenly saddled with an unwanted child, and who did not know what to do with this little creature that had needs he didn’t know how to cope with.
    In my first days in the dungeon, the kidnapper treated me like a very small child. I found this accommodating, as I had inwardly regressed to the emotional level of a kindergarten-aged child. He brought me anything I wanted to eat – and I behaved as if I were spending the night with a distantly related great aunt who could be credibly convinced that chocolate was an appropriate breakfast food. The very first morning, he asked me what I wanted to eat. I wanted fruit tea and croissants. In fact, the kidnapper came back with a thermos filled with rosehip tea and a brioche croissant from one of the most well-known bakeries in town. The printing on the paper bag confirmed my suspicions that I was being held somewhere in Strasshof. Another time I asked for salty sticks with honey and mustard. This ‘order’ was also promptly delivered. It seemed very strange to me that this man fulfilled my every request, given that he had taken everything else away from me.
    His penchant for treating me like a small child also had its downside. He would peel every orange for me and put it in my mouth piece by piece, as if I were unable to feed myself. Once, when I asked for chewing gum, he refused – for fear that I would choke on it. In the evenings he forced my mouth open and brushed my teeth as one would a three-year-old who cannot yet hold her toothbrush. After a few days he grabbed my hand roughly and, gripping it tightly, cut my fingernails.
    I felt pushed aside, as if he had taken the remaining dignity I was trying to preserve in that situation. At the same time I also knew that I was largely responsible for finding myself on this level, a level that protected me to a certain extent. Because the very first day I had realized how widely the kidnapper fluctuated in his paranoia, between treating me as if I were too small on the one hand or too independent on the other.
    I acquiesced in my role, and when the kidnapper returned to the dungeon the next time to bring me food, I did everything I could to keep him there. I pleaded. I begged. I vied for his attention so that he would occupy himself with me, play with me. My time in the solitary dungeon was driving me mad.
    So there we were after a few days; I was sitting with my kidnapper in my jail playing Chinese checkers, Nine Men’s Morris, Parcheesi. The situation seemed unreal to me, as if taken from an absurd film. Nobody in the world outside would believe that an abduction victim would do anything to make her kidnapper play Parcheesi. But the world outside was no longer my world. I was a child and alone, and there was only one person who could relieve this oppressive loneliness.
    I sat on the mat with my kidnapper, rolled the dice and moved the pieces. I stared at the patterns on the playing board, at the small colourful pieces, and tried to forget about my surroundings and imagine the kidnapper as a fatherly friend who was generous in taking time to play with a child. The better I succeeded in allowing myself to be absorbed by the game, the further away the panic receded. I knew that it was lurking in a corner somewhere, always ready to pounce. And when I was about to win a game, I would surreptitiously make a mistake so as to put off the threat of being alone.
    In those first days, the presence of the kidnapper seemed to me a guarantee that I would be spared the final cruelty. Because in all his visits he talked about the people who had supposedly ‘ordered’my kidnapping and with whom he had spoken on the telephone so frantically during my abduction. I continued to assume that they must have something to do with a child pornography ring.