Chase Your Shadow (16 page)

Haflidi seemed to have understood the point that if Pistorius was like him and Pistorius could be anything he wanted to be, then so could he. But while Pistorius was special for Haflidi, it was his mother and grandmother who needed him most. The ever-deepening relationship with the South African hero proved of more immediate benefit for the two adults than for the child. He was their crutch more than Haflidi’s. ‘I sometimes think,’ Ebba confessed, ‘that Oscar helped me more than he did Haflidi. Oscar gave me moral strength and he and his mother were my guides.’

Ebba’s mother, Sigga Hanna, put it more bluntly. At the end of a long dinner at her home in Reykjavik she confided just how important Pistorius had been in her life. ‘You have to understand,’ she said, ‘Oscar is what has saved me from insanity.’ What did she mean? ‘I mean that when I heard the news after my daughter had that scan I felt despair rise up. Oscar saved me from that.’

Needy of his strength, Ebba and Hafthor decided to relocate their family to South Africa for six months. ‘We would never have thought of going there had it not been for Oscar. We wanted to absorb his world,’ Ebba said. ‘He was very patriotic, always speaking of how beautiful his country was, how much he loved it, how he adored Mandela, whom he said he was so proud to have met once.’ When she told him they planned to go to South Africa, his delight was tempered by his knowledge of the dark side of South Africa, of which he rarely spoke to foreigners. He feared that if they came they might fall victim to crime. Seeing that it was entirely due to him that they wanted to spend time in his country, he was alarmed by the responsibility
these Icelandic innocents had thrust upon him. They should not base themselves in one of the big cities, he told them, and most certainly not in Johannesburg, where he was raised, or Pretoria, where he now lived. He proposed they choose Stellenbosch, a gentle university town in the Cape winelands, 900 miles south of Johannesburg. That should be safe for the kids, he told them. Ebba and Hafthor did as they were instructed, spending a happy time in Stellenbosch with their two children from October 2010 to April 2011, cementing their bond with Pistorius by experiencing life, albeit a somewhat sheltered version of it, in his home country. Just before Christmas, Ebba and Sigga Hanna, impatient to be with their hero, flew north to see him.

‘It was lovely. We ate with Oscar and his lovely girlfriend Jenna at his home in Pretoria,’ Ebba said. At which point her voice abruptly trailed off.

‘It was the home where the accident happened . . .’

The vivaciousness drained from her eyes and her look darkened as she recalled the moment when she first heard the news.

‘It was an e-mail on my phone. I let out a cry and sank to the floor with the phone still in my hand, reading and re-reading the message until the horrible truth of it sank in. I was on my knees sobbing – screaming, I guess – as I repeated over and over and over the same question, “What kind of a destiny is this? . . . What kind of a destiny is this? . . .” ’

She sensed she was having a nervous breakdown. ‘My body just gave in. My nose was blocked. I suddenly had a high fever. And I cried and cried all day long.’

Not for Reeva Steenkamp, whom she had not known, but for her friend. Pistorius’s own mother had been spared the horror of this moment, but Ebba, who in her mind had fused Pistorius with Haflidi, made the anguish Sheila would have felt her own. ‘I cried because I was able to put myself inside his skin. I could feel what he was going
through, I could feel that he was dying, a slow-motion death that would go on every day, day after day after day, for the rest of his life.’

The drowning sensation she had felt at the moment she learned of her son’s deformity returned. This time it was not the photograph of Pistorius but the ghost of his mother who came to the rescue. How would she have responded? By the end of the day Ebba had found her answer. It was not the random chaos of the universe, it was not a blind and brutal destiny that was to blame. Sheila Pistorius had never surrendered to so helpless a thought. No, the mysterious ways of Providence were at work once again.

‘He is very strong and something very good will emerge,’ said Ebba. ‘He is extreme, a man who lives on the extremes, and he will do something extremely good. He will do something special, though he is completely broken now. He destroyed two lives, not one. But some good will come of this. It will require more courage and determination than he has shown ever before as an athlete. He will need a lot of courage to forgive himself and to try to have a good life in spite of it. But I think maybe in a strange way it was supposed to be. Things happen for a reason.’

Haflidi came back from school on the afternoon of February 14, 2013 and found his mother crying. ‘I told him he must not be angry with Oscar. He had killed his girlfriend by accident, he thought it was an intruder.’ To which Haflidi responded, ‘It was an accident, so I can’t be angry with him, can I?’ Ebba, still crying, wrapped her son in her arms.

There could have been no other explanation possible for Ebba; there could have been no other explanation possible for Haflidi. Some people, millions of them around the world, chose to believe he had deliberately killed Reeva Steenkamp; others chose to believe it had been a terrible mistake. For Ebba and for her mother it was never a
matter of choice. Over the course of eight years, from four months before Haflidi emerged from Ebba’s womb, they had invested their faith and hope in him. The two Icelandic women needed to believe he was telling the truth about what happened that night. To suspect he might be lying was not an option.

9

Nor is the goddess unknown to me who mixes a sweet bitterness with my love.

CATULLUS
,
POEM 68

E
VERYTHING COULD
have turned out so differently for Pistorius. What if he had not broken his wooden legs on that particular day when he was fourteen? What if his grandmother Gerti had phoned the number of another prosthetics specialist? What if Francois van der Watt had not happened to be there at that precise moment to pick up the call or, even, had obeyed his father’s wishes and stuck to farming? What if those two big players in the rival school team had tackled him less hard instead of injuring him so badly that he was forced to abandon rugby for running? His athletic triumphs and his fame, the money he had made and the beautiful women he had met all had their orgins in a succession of haphazard connections. As had the catastrophe that would define the rest of his days. He had battled so hard to shape his destiny and had risen so high – yet here he was, awaiting trial for murder.

His life’s great, most implausible piece of luck had been to find his métier in running. In other sports he had played, especially team sports like rugby, he had depended on others. He was one more cog in the machine. Here, reliant only on himself, he could impose a measure of
control that was unavailable to him in any other area of life. Running, the purest form of athletic competition, eliminated almost entirely the random elements of fate that had caused so much disruption and unhappiness in his life, from the condition he was born with, to his parent’s divorce, to his mother’s death. If he trained right and ate right, he would improve his times; the harder he pushed himself, the readier he was to overcome physical pain, the greater his success would be.

Initially, running had been an escape from his sorrow at his mother’s death; in time it proved an escape from the turmoil to which he succumbed when he fell in love. On the track he could empty his head of everything save the single-minded task of improving his speed or winning a race. Off the track he fell under the spell again, no longer self-reliant and alone. Someone else entered the equation, a person with her own distinct temperament and history, whom he tried to wrestle into his image of female perfection in the same way he sought to transform his impaired body into a perfect running machine. Rarely less than enraptured, his ceaseless pursuit of the one woman who would make him complete was as consuming as his hunger for sporting triumph.

He bet all on romantic love and disappointment was his reward. One woman left – Nandi, Jenna, Vicki – and another took her place, but the pattern repeated itself time after time. From petulant possessiveness to frantic dependency, to hysterical fear of loss. No one could ever quite measure up. He had moments of light when he saw that he was driving himself – and them – mad, but he could not help himself. Jealousy ate him up and he saw rivals everywhere.

He floundered as other men did, only more so. The love stories of the human race were awash with variations on the same banal themes; but he was a man of extremes who had no legs, which gave a uniquely
corrosive character to his insecurities about love and sex. Far more than he let on, he felt embarrassed when people saw him without his prostheses on; when it came to revealing his naked stumps to a girlfriend for the first time he battled to mask his anxiety. With his artificial legs on he was a six-foot athletic Adonis, described in magazines as ‘South Africa’s sexiest man’; take them off and the transformation was drastic. He was not tall, he was dwarfish; he was not fast, he was slow; he was not brave, he was scared; he was not strong, he was weak, his balance so precarious a child could knock him over. The Blade Runner and the private Oscar Pistorius were in perpetual conflict. Laying himself bare before an attractive young woman made him laceratingly aware of the strange and vulnerable figure he cut in the contrast between his powerful upper body and the thin, often blistered stumps where the lower half of his body ended. When a new girlfriend first set eyes on the strange disabled figure he cut, the fear of rejection – possibly of hurt or ridicule – consumed him.

But even if that obstacle were successfully negotiated, there remained another doubt. What if she was with him only for his fame and money?

Whether a relationship was long or short changed nothing. When he was twenty-four he had what another man his age might have regarded as a fling with an older woman, divorced with two children. But that was a high-stakes drama, and proved too much for her. She left him and, inconsolable, he turned to an older male friend for advice. The friend, who knew the woman, told him to forget it. There was no going back. He had been too suffocatingly demanding for her. The answer to his troubles lay not with the women he fell in love with, his friend scolded him, but with himself. He was too young to be enduring so much unnecessary anguish. He should aim for the sky in his running, not in love. Not yet. Love will come, the friend told
him, but meanwhile focus on your running, have fun with girls but don’t fall for them madly every time. Don’t be such a crazy romantic.

But he paid no heed and he kept swinging, in one relationship after another, from wedding-bell bliss to operatic despair.

His friend spoke sense, but lacked the courage to tell him what he really thought. It was banal, he figured, it was crassly obvious amateur psychology, but no less true for that. He was falling in love each time with women whom he saw as a reincarnation of his mother. His frustrations came from their failure to match up to the saintly maternal ideal, his jealousies and possessiveness from the panic that they would abandon him, obliging him to endure again the grief of his life’s most irreparable loss.

The last woman on whom Pistorius projected his dreams before meeting Reeva was a sweet and innocent girl called Samantha Taylor, whom he met through Facebook – which her mother Trish would use to attack him after he shot Reeva. They found they shared the same birthday, November 22. He was twenty-five and Samantha was seventeen. On and off, the relationship lasted eighteen months.

It was only after meeting Reeva, after Reeva’s death, as the murder trial loomed, that he realized how misguided he had been in falling for Samantha. Not just because she had not been in Reeva’s class, but because of what he learned from his lawyers in August 2013, six months before the trial began. They showed him the list of 107 state witnesses who would be testifying against him and Samantha’s name was on it. The woman with whom he had once thought he would be spending the rest of his days, as he thought he would later with Reeva, was now assisting the police and prosecution, who sought to see to it that he spent many of the rest of his days in jail.

It was perplexing for him to recall that at the end of September 2012, barely more than a month before meeting Reeva, he had gone
on a trip with Samantha to the Seychelles – a free trip sponsored by an airline and a hotel chain – where, under palm trees at the edge of the Indian Ocean, they had declared their feelings for each other – in public, before a TV camera, for a South African show called
Top Billing
about the lives of the rich and famous. As he gazed into her eyes, she told the interviewer how much ‘fun’ Pistorius was; how she couldn’t keep up with him, he was so full of energy. She gazed into his eyes as he replied, ‘Sam’s special’, ‘She’s very caring’, ‘She understands me’. Drinking in each other’s amorous burblings, he blushed, she blushed, the interviewer told them they were blushing, and then they blushed some more.

But behind the image of love’s young dream that the couple presented for the cameras there had been all kinds of trouble. In the early days it was because he had a divided heart, fearful of letting go his previous passion, Jenna Edkins, afraid of wholeheartedly committing to his new one, Samantha. On discovering he was still seeing Jenna, she sent him a text message threatening to end it all. His reply, also from his phone, was thick with regret. He confessed that he had been ‘playing’ with her emotions, that he had been ‘a coward and lonely’ and, yes, he had gone running back to Jenna. But she deserved better, he hated himself, he knew that she, ‘Sam’, was the only one for him. He swore that he would spend the rest of his days making it up to her, if only she would give him a second chance. Which she did. Whereupon he dropped Jenna and for a while he and Samantha were at peace. ‘You’re the love of my life’, he wrote to her. ‘You all I dream of. You all I want. You all I need.’ He called her his ‘little butterfly’.