I'm No Monster Page 13

  It had given him much pleasure and satisfaction to build the cellar, to transform it into what he imagined to be an inhabitable place. And, once his daughter was inside, he was quick to exercise the new freedoms it gave him. Those first forty-eight hours were the first step in Josef’s deliberate and systematic humiliation of his daughter. The cellar as an isolation unit, a torture chamber, a porn film—all rolled into one.

  Decades later, one of the doctors who treated Elisabeth would compare her father’s treatment of his daughter to what the Vietcong had done to American troops captured in combat in Vietnam. Well known for their cruelty—deprivation of food, water, light, deprivation of everything was their specialty—they tortured prisoners and held some of them for many years. “It’s easy to die but hard to live. And we’ll show you how hard it is to live”: Said by a Vietnamese fighter to one of his captives, this is perhaps the best-known quotation from that dark period. Throughout that first year of Elisabeth’s imprisonment, Josef Fritzl was showing his daughter how hard it was going to be to live.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Birth

  In the early days of her imprisonment, she does not comprehend the hopelessness of her situation. For the first two years she thinks only about escape. Plotting and scheming, watching and listening; all she needs to do is catch him off guard. Then she pictures herself grabbing the keys, unlocking the doors, scrambling through the corridors, bolting up the stairs, like a cat into daylight. She has a life to be getting on with. A future: a job, a husband, children. They are there on the outside, just waiting for her to show up.

  In the very beginning, during those first few terrifying days of late August 1984, she had lived in a state of total bewilderment. But almost immediately after the shock had worn off, when she had gathered herself enough to grasp where she was and who had done this to her, she had made a decision. She was going to fight him. She had turned eighteen in April. And with her teenager’s faith in the future, it had not occurred to her to think that he would want to keep her there for more than a few days. And then, when days had become weeks and weeks had become months, still her optimism had blinded her to the possibility that, eventually, months could turn into years. The cellar was an intermission as far as she was concerned. In her mind it had no permanency. Soon this will pass, she told herself. Soon this will be over. That he should want to keep her down here forever was completely beyond her understanding.

  Always, in these early days, her mind was working on some plan to escape. How hard could it be? Back then the possibilities seemed infinite; there were locks to be picked, secret tunnels to be unearthed—maybe she would discover in the ceiling a patch of discoloured mortar that would—what’s this?—magically come loose in her hands, and then with a plastic knife she would chisel a hole, bore up into the apartment above.... Other people had managed it. Famous cases. Every now and again there were reports of such things on television. Prison breaks. Inexplicable disappearances. Harry Houdini, the “Handcuff King,” escaping from straitjackets and chains. He has left a chisel here. “He,” as she would always refer to him. “He,” or much later, when it became plain that she had no hope of escape, “Papa.”

  Although she lived in a state of almost constant pain, crying about what was happening to her, terrified of what the future held, anxious that the wounds he had inflicted on her body would not heal and would become infected, none of this distracted her from her purpose. She knew him well, after all, better than any other member of his family did. And fighting her father was what she had been doing for most of her life. It was what she was used to. Father and daughter had been engaged in this battle ever since she had turned eleven. He wanting to get close. She pushing him away. And yet never quite able to leave. Or else leaving, and after a while coming back again, despite everything she knew about him, everything he’d done.

  Words and deeds that contradicted each other. “I’m your father. Lie still.” And then, after it was over—when for days she would refuse to speak—he would wrongfoot her again: “Why do you hate me?” The sincerity on his pouchy hangdog face. “Is something wrong?” It was very confusing, his knack of being able to undermine everything she thought she knew about herself with a single word or gesture. “Oh! Lisl’s in a bad mood again! That’s my daughter. Selfish and sullen as usual.” He had been obsessed with the idea—a complete fantasy—that she was on drugs. Or that she was going off the rails and it was his paternal duty to rein her in. Often she would doubt her own memory. Had it really happened the way she remembered it? She would see him and all her confidence would just go.

  And now this. Ridiculous as it sounded, she had been abducted. Not by a stranger, not by a lunatic who stalks the street in search of his victim. No, surely the most grotesque aspect of her predicament is the fact that it is her own father who has taken her and now keeps her in this hole. She remembers how, as a young girl, her parents often warned her about the dangers that lay outside the house: the threat of the unfamiliar, the unpredictability of the unknown, anonymous men lurking late at night in bars or on street corners. “Don’t talk to strangers,” they had told her. “Make sure you’re home before it gets dark.” Far better to be at home, where the strong, protective walls of the house could keep at bay the incalculable dangers of the world beyond. Home, where it was supposed to be safe. But who had warned her of the dangers of home? Because, going back as far as she could remember, the threat had been there, biding its time, not on a street corner, but right there beside her, inside the house; a threat that appeared in a guise that seemed neither dangerous nor unfamiliar. Her father. The most familiar thing of all. Who had protected her from him? Her father is both commonplace and mysterious. Ordinary and yet unsettling. She has his eyes and many of his mannerisms.

  In the early days of her imprisonment, the fight between father and daughter takes many forms. Constantly they are trying to outwit each other. Traps are laid. Promises are broken. No sooner has one strategy failed than another is put in its place. In the beginning she flies at him in her rages, but when, chained up as she is, she realizes it is useless, she meekly promises to obey him. And then, in May 1985, nine months since she had last felt the sun on her face or breathed fresh air, he removed the chain from around her waist, and for several days there was a duplicate chain there—a chain of pinkish-brown blister-scars—and not long after he removed the chain she went back on her word. Scratching his face, determined to win. She continued to fight him, and each time he retaliated so violently that there were times when she feared for her life. A big, hulking bully of a man with densely cartilaged fists, grown powerful from physical work. He didn’t hesitate to use them. He would punch her in the face, in the stomach, come at her like a wrecking ball. There were times when, after a beating, she would lapse into prolonged illness. Just lie there for days, shaking and feverish. And once or twice, when she got so sick that he started to worry that he would lose her, he came to the cellar carrying a bottle of aspirin. She would see the pills and her thoughts would turn immediately to drugging him. Collecting the pills, grinding them up into a lethal dose. Slipping the powder into a drink. Poisoning him. Killing him even. She was not above murder. Her hatred was so intense she would have liked to attack him with a knife. But the knives were all made of plastic, and the pills ... Each time he brought her the aspirin he would count them out one at a time, parsimoniously, as if they were pennies. Then, handing her a glass of water, he would make her swallow them in front of him. Always he would sit very close. He was vigilant. Both of them were at first.

  For a year she slept with one eye open all the time, looking for her chance. Determined to be brave. In the darkness that sometimes stretched out for days, sometimes for weeks, she mentally prepared herself to face him again. No matter what state she was in—whether she was starving, or shivering with cold, or stuttering with pain, or all three at once (the word the prosecution would later use to describe her physical condition during those first few years in the cellar was “pitiful”
)—she remained on her guard. Counting down the days. Because the situation she now found herself in was like a war. She spent much time preparing and revising her battle plan. Plotting. Not that it’s easy to think straight when you are groping about in the dark, deprived of air and light. Not that your mind doesn’t play tricks on you when, living among mice and rats that you can hear but cannot see, you inevitably start to wonder: How big are they? How many? As you wake from a half-sleep, the sight of a spider hanging in what appears to be empty space between ceiling and wall immediately suggests the possibility that the cellar may be inhabited by many other creatures: bedraggled, faceless, unnameable creatures, drawn by the dark and the moisture. The invisible threats of the cellar. Far worse than the pain. Always this terror of the unknown. Because the worst thing that can happen to you in the cellar is not the physical deterioration of your body; it is the inroads the cellar makes into your mind. She cried often then. It was a continual process of pulling herself together.

  For a year, two years, she fought him. Then, in August 1986, something changed. Her body felt different. Her body no longer felt like her own. When her period didn’t come, she knew that she was pregnant, a secret she could keep from her father for no more than a few weeks. Her period didn’t come and, because he was as captivated by the mechanics of her body as he had always been captivated by the workings of the drills, the metal-working lathes, the concrete block-making machines that he had spent his entire career working with and designing, he noticed the difference almost right away. He could tell, he said, because her body temperature was up, the same as it had been with his wife. And he was pleased. Upstairs in the house, during what he regarded as the happiest years of his marriage to Rosemarie, a new child was always the source of great joy. A new beginning. He saw no reason why it shouldn’t be the same down here in the cellar. He was pleased that his daughter was pregnant and told her she should be grateful. A baby is what every woman wants, he told her. He has given her the gift of a child.

  For two months her body does what it is supposed to. But in the tenth week of her pregnancy—she is twenty years old and it is November 1986—she miscarries. And from then on she is no longer the same. She miscarries, wretched, filthy, frightened, and, although she survives the shock physically, she is altered.

  Winter approaches. Cold grips the cellar. The scuttling noises of vermin are more frantic now than in summer: Starved, they are bolder now, their presence in the cellar more intrusive. One day, with a broom, she kills a rat; it measured twenty centimetres, she will later tell the prosecution. And the presence of this matted, dead thing beside her makes her panic. In sudden bursts of fright she will leap out of bed and rush this way and that in the room, meet with the iron door, claw and hammer at it, and then run back and throw herself at the wall, over and over again, until she is so exhausted she can only collapse on her bed and wait for the scuttling sounds to resume.

  The temperature drops, then drops again. Pipes freeze and groan. Where there used to be condensation, a furry coating of frost clings to the brickwork. Her body aches dully. Even wrapped in blankets, her hands and feet are numb. In the cold the cellar seems to contract, to shrink into itself, less visible than ever, and more difficult to find, clasping her in its grip. One of hundreds of thousands of cellars in Austria: Who will think to search for her here?

  For the first time she lapses into hopelessness.

  Now she sleeps a lot and wakes up no longer caring what time it is. What difference does it make? If you live without sunlight, does it matter if it is five in the afternoon or two in the morning? When there is no sun to guide you. When the chronology of your waking life is marked not by numbers on a clock but by the movements of your own metabolism. Years could pass and nothing would change. She would grow older, or die, but the cellar would stay the same.

  Christmas comes and goes again. Snow crunches underfoot; roads are salted and gritted; children heave stones into the Ybbs for the sheer pleasure of watching them plunge through the thick layer of ice that has formed on the surface. Then the thaw sets in, making way for spring. The skies turn from gray to a light, powdery blue. Hats and scarves are packed away. In the garden, where her father has planted cherry and apricot trees in an attempt to persuade his wife to make jam from the fruit, neat clumps of swollen buds burst chaotically into flower. Soon it is summer, with its languid weekend excursions to the lakes. Days spent living in shorts and T-shirts. Long evenings at a picnic, or at a Heuriger, a wine tavern, for a glass of wine, maybe two. The heat of the sun still imprinted on arms and faces many hours past dark. Then it is autumn, with its extraordinary smell, not unpleasant, of root vegetables flecked with soil and harvested fields burned down to the stubble. For miles around, columns of smoke rise from bonfires, spreading into the air. Pumpkin season. For an entire month the compact, orange flesh finds its way into every soup, goulash, and strudel. Leaves curl and fall. The winds begin again. The first snows, thick, soggy flakes of sleet that barely touch the earth before melting. Then thicker flakes. Then the dead, white silence.

  Another year has passed.

  She remembers how it is outside but cannot see it. Cannot smell it. Instead she eats and sleeps and, in between, her father descends to the cellar: buoyant when she is compliant, brutal when she is not. The rapes carry on. Twice a day. It has become his routine, his lifeboat. Purging himself in the cellar. Up aboveground, there is no more peeping or spying. No more sexual assaults. There is no need.

  When he is not there, she observes her shadow dancing on the wall; it is like another person with giant arms and legs. Or dwarfish, with a squashed head and plump little deformed legs. It is her body, but she has become afraid of it. Ever since the pregnancy, even her own body seems to be turning against her.

  It is the same with her mind. All the assumptions she had about how her life was supposed to unfold, she must now review and discard. Now she regards hope, for so long her ally, as her enemy. Hope is a joke. Hope is dangerous for someone in her situation. There are only so many disappointments a person can take.

  And all the while her depression deepens. All her thoughts are turning black. She gropes for an explanation. She fumbles around for a solution. But there is none. No remedy, either, for her loneliness. How will it end? Will she die here? Many times the thought has occurred to her to kill herself. She has wanted to cut her throat with a knife, but he has made it impossible. Is it a sin to take your own life when your life is no longer your own? Would death now be preferable to death ten, twenty years in the future? Her terror of waking is accompanied by an equally terrible fear of sleep. The specter of another pregnancy. The fear of giving birth. The dread of what would happen after the birth—because another pregnancy, she now knows, is unavoidable. Her father refuses to use contraception: “That is nothing for me,” he tells her. It will happen again. The horror of raising a child here. What would she tell it? How could she explain?

  Alongside her doubts about whether she will ever escape, other doubts have crept up on her, a whole army of doubts: questions and fears that terminate in a fundamental uncertainty about who she is. “Was there something wrong with me?” She has lived in the cellar for more than three years. How can she be sure that she is not in some way to blame? The punishment fits the crime. What was her crime? Why had she been forsaken? There is no precedent. No example in history from which she can take comfort. This has never happened to anyone else before, ever.

  If in the early days she thought of herself as a prisoner, now she knows that really she is a slave. A slave with a slave’s habit, she has noticed, of deluding herself that she is choosing to obey when, really, she is obliged to. A slave who lives in a hole. “Hole”: prisoners’ slang for solitary confinement. But her “hole” is worse than any prison cell. And within the hole in which she lives there is another hole, a noth ingness, growing inside her. An unwillingness to keep up the fight. When her father rapes her she no longer feels much. There is no room for maneuver.

  “Pos
ttraumatic shock” is the wildly inadequate technical phrase the prosecution will later use to describe the psychological state she now lapses into, a condition whose symptoms include confusion, memory loss, hallucinations, nightmares, flashbacks, and a psychological detachment from both one’s surroundings and physical self. It is a severing, a disconnect. A waking sleep. Her clothes are rags. And inside the rags is a person going through the motions. Half human, half marionette is her body now; he does with it what he likes. Many years in the future, under cross-examination by state prosecutors, he will explain that in his daughter he had found an ideal partner. He desired her and she could not escape. He could have sex with her and she could not refuse. He had given her life and would think of her always as his possession, not much different from the things that he owned, to do with what he pleased. Like the house, he would knock her down and build her back up. In the cellar she belonged to him completely: “A person all to myself.”

  Now her hopes dwindle. Now her aspirations grow modest; not to be beaten is enough. One day she wakes up and realizes she has lost the ability to cry. The tears won’t come. Christmas Day 1987 marks the turning point. Her will is broken.

  By January 1988 Elisabeth is pregnant again.

  Some time in the early 1980s, before he had locked Elisabeth in the cellar, Josef had bought himself a gun. Guns are legal in Austria and manufactured there, too: The Glock 9-mm semiautomatic pistol, for example, is Austrian-made. Any Austrian citizen who is deemed reliable—that is to say, any adult over age twenty-one without a criminal record or a history of alcoholism, drugs, violence, political extremism, psychiatric treatment, or carelessness—is entitled to own a firearm, and to purchase a gun you need only apply to the federal police. Josef had bought two guns; the first was a rifle that he kept on a shelf in his workshop, and the second was a 22-mm Bernadelli pistol. He kept the Bernadelli in the marital bedroom—“for protection,” he would later claim, although it is difficult to know what he thought he was protecting himself against. The threat was surely imagined. Amstetten, with its sleepy police station and its loosely knit community of law-abiding citizens, was an exceptionally safe place in which to live. Break-ins and burglaries were almost unheard of, and when they did occur they were splashed all over the front of the Anzeiger. It is the kind of place where dropping litter on the sidewalk or crossing the road before the red man has turned green counts as a vulgar offense, not only in the eyes of the law but among the local people themselves.