Chase Your Shadow

by John Carlin

  She would remain the voice of his conscience for the rest of his life and it was uncanny that she should have come up with a metaphor so prescient – and unspeakably sad that she should not have lived to see her son run and compete and cross the finishing line in first place, all over the world.

  She spent the last fifteen years of her life trying to ensure his life would not be the vale of tears it seemed predestined to be, but she could not spare him the tragedy of her own death.

  Eight years after her divorce, eight years of maternal self-sacrifice and constant struggling to make ends meet, Sheila Bekker fell in love with and married an airline pilot. Pistorius had had mixed feelings when the relationship began a year earlier, but he grew to like and trust his mother’s suitor and felt that if she was happy with him, he should be too. The wedding took place in November 2001. Within a month she fell ill. The doctors found that she had a severely damaged liver, but they got the precise diagnosis wrong. They thought she had hepatitis and prescribed medicine accordingly. She reacted adversely to the drugs, was hospitalized and rapidly declined. Henke’s reaction revealed that he had his faults but that he was not an ogre, that, as some of the female members of his family in particular would say, there was a loveable and decent side to his nature. His relations with his ex-wife had always remained superficially cordial. He had abandoned her and she had been deeply hurt, but for the sake of the children, as she would tell herself, she never let any ill feeling show. Now that Sheila badly needed help, Henke sought to provide it, turning to his old friend Gerry Versfeld for advice. They discussed the possibilities of a liver transplant and Dr Versfeld put him in touch with experts in the field. But it was too late.

  When it happened it came as a surprise, for, true to character, she had not told her children how ill she was. Pistorius was in the middle of a history lesson in his second year at Pretoria Boys High, on March 6, 2002, when Bill Schroder came into the classroom and told him to come out immediately and meet his father at the school gates. He and his brother, Carl, jumped into Henke’s Mercedes and he drove off at speed, more distraught than they had ever seen him, to the hospital. They made it to her bedside with ten minutes to spare. Other family and friends were already in attendance. But it was a wake more than a farewell. She died without recognizing them, in a coma, tubes riddling her body, at the age of forty-four.

  Pistorius was fifteen and it was as if he had lost a part of himself. Grief-stricken, and for the one and only time in his life questioning his faith in God, he briefly sought relief in marijuana. He was rudderless and, for all practical purposes, an orphan. The spasm of paternal attentiveness when the emergency had arisen remained just that. Until he started running seriously two years later he saw his father at most once every six months. Going to live with him was not an option; boarding school now became the closest thing to a home. In the holidays he would stay with his mother’s sister, his aunt Diana, or with his uncle Arnold’s family who had adopted his younger sister Aimée as their own. Aimée had moved in with her father in Pretoria after her mother died, but that had lasted barely two months. Unhappy sharing a roof with her father, she conveyed a discreet message to her uncle Arnold and his wife, Lois, through their daughters, that she would like to come and live with them. They agreed and she became a member of their family, a fifth daughter. She was still living with them when Reeva died.

  Aimée and Carl cried at their mother’s funeral, but their brother did not. After he returned to school following her burial he told very few of his classmates what had happened. But the next morning he woke up in floods of tears. Losing one’s mother at fifteen is sad enough in any circumstances but for Pistorius she had been his life’s crutch and moral example. She had shaped his personality, his strengths as well as his weaknesses, and even when she was no longer present she would continue to steer the course of his life to a degree that would only become fully apparent much later, after the next great disaster struck.

  There was another side to her character, apart from the drinking, that Pistorius preferred to forget but that left a deep imprint on him. Sheila was terrified of crime. She lived in fear of an intruder breaking into her home, often jumping up in bed when she heard a sound in the middle of the night, then rushing to the phone to call the police. She would wake up her children, take them into her bedroom, lock the door, and wait until the police arrived. Her fears were not unfounded. When Henke left, the family had moved not just to a smaller home but to a rougher neighborhood. There were several break-ins at her home, to which she responded by taking an ominously extreme precaution. Every night she went to bed with a loaded pistol under her pillow.

  5

  Stone walls do not a prison make.

  RICHARD LOVELACE, TO ALTHEA, FROM PRISON

  CAGED INSIDE the home of his rich uncle Arnold during the year-long wait for his murder trial, the sounds, images and smells of that night tormented Pistorius. He would gladly have given up all the riches and every last ounce of the glory he had earned to turn the clock back and undo what he had done, but it was irrevocable. He had fired those gunshots; he could not unfire them.

  There were occasional moments of respite from the horror of memory, when he was able to shut off the screams inside his head and repress the nauseating stench of blood in his nostrils, but the remorse never left him. He had one consolation: knowing that his family understood, forgave and would stand by him, no matter what. His uncle Arnold and his wife Lois, their four daughters and sons-inlaw, other uncles and aunts, Carl, and, most of all, Aimée – they, along with other members of the extended but close Pistorius family, were always ready to sit silently with him, prodding him gently towards the understanding that his old life had gone forever and he had to find the strength to build himself anew.

  Before Pistorius, no one could have imagined that a double amputee would rank among the fastest 400 meter runners in the world. Thanks to the celebrity he had gained, the little-known discipline of Paralympic sport, which he had ruled over from the time he won his first gold medal at the age of seventeen, had come to grip the public imagination. Thanks to him, the world at large had learned to regard disabled athletes – and, by extension, all disabled people – with a new respect, and they in turn had begun to view themselves with a new dignity.

  Running had shaped his public identity and raised him to impossible heights. But he knew that from now on his fame and reputation would be defined less by his triumphs on the track, or by the good that he had done, than by the tragedy of that night. Reeva’s death by his hand had seemed to have destroyed any possibility of ever resuming high-level competition on the world stage. That part of his life was over. What he had to do now was to learn to live with a sorrow that was more implacable than guilt.

  He also needed a new purpose in life. One was ready to hand.

  Now the shadow of the trial loomed, his task was to prepare himself for it with as clear a mind as he could muster. But in order to manage that he had to imagine an existence beyond the hell he had inhabited since Reeva’s death. To that end, Pistorius’s lawyers encouraged the family to help him visualize a favorable legal outcome and to start contemplating the outline of his rehabilitation after it. The lawyers admitted they were anxious about how he would perform in court, fearing he might fall apart when the critical moment came to take the stand and face cross-questioning by the state prosecutor. It was impossible for Pistorius to imagine how he would hold himself together in the face of the evidence of what had happened that night, but he owed it to his family to try.

  They had all understood immediately that there was no question of him going back to live alone at the home where he had shot Reeva. When his uncle Arnold invited him to stay at his place, where his younger sister had been living for the last ten years, he did not think of turning down the offer.

  There he suffered, but in some style. Arnold Pistorius lived in a mansion perched on the hills of Waterkloof Ridge, where the rich people of Pretoria and the foreign ambassadors lived. Hi
s home stood out in the stately neighborhood. While other residences were built in a gentle Mediterranean style, with pastel walls and terracotta-tiled roofs, his was a forbiddingly sturdy, red-brick pile, with the air of a military compound. A waterless moat and a sentry box manned round the clock by security guards defended the front of the property. A sign by the entrance gate announced the name of the house, ‘Bateleur’ – after a breed of African eagle that preys on snakes.

  Arnold Pistorius liked to say that he lived in ‘an African house’. Originally a church minister’s home, he and his wife Lois had spent a decade supervising its reconstruction, carefully selecting the hardiest stone, brick and wood the continent could yield and hiring the finest local craftsmen to assemble it all. On the second floor were the bedrooms, reached by a manorial wooden staircase; downstairs, a large entrance hall, lounge, dining room, study and kitchen. Sculptures large and small of giraffes, elephants, leopards and baboons adorned each room; paintings on the walls depicted scenes from the African bush. High windows on the ground floor at the back of the house looked down onto a large swimming pool in the shape of a cross, and beyond that, across a valley, on a hill three miles away, could be seen South Africa’s most imposing architectural landmark, the Union Buildings, seat of state power since 1910.

  Arnold’s seat of power inside the house was the room in which he conducted his business meetings – a dark study, with brown leather chairs, where he kept a collection of antique guns and, rearing from a wall, a big-game trophy, the head of a black buffalo. For Arnold, it served as a statement of his proud Africanness, of his authority as the ruler of a traditional Afrikaner household, and as a symbol of his material success. In his early sixties, he was a lean, tall, white-bearded man, ramrod straight, who never tired of saying that to be an Afrikaner gave you as much claim to be an African as if you were a Zulu, Xhosa or any other of the darker-skinned peoples who called the southern tip of the continent home. His family had inhabited Africa, he would say, since long before the forebears of most American families had arrived in the United States.

  Arnold Pistorius had done well in modern, post-apartheid South Africa. Rather than cower and cringe and consider emigrating to Australia, as some other white people had done when Nelson Mandela took power in 1994, he had seen democracy as an opportunity. Mandela had not sought revenge against the Afrikaners, apartheid’s inventors and, for twenty-seven years, his jailers. Mandela had calculated that, in the interests of peace, not only the Afrikaners but white people in general should be allowed to keep their money and, in the interests of prosperity, be encouraged to invest it in the country of their birth. Arnold Pistorius took Mandela at his word. A black aspirational middle class, a concept quite alien during the apartheid years, was newly rising, and Arnold bet that building shopping malls for them would be good business. The bet worked and he made a great deal of money, much of which he invested in game reserves in the Kruger National Park, where the animals evoked in the sculptures of his home ran free.

  To his nephew Arnold gave the run of his big home, which included access to an indoor cinema and a spacious gym equipped with all the latest apparatus, where he worked out with frantic enthusiasm. But where he lived now, since what they referred to in the family as ‘the incident’, was not in the main house but in a large apartment – or ‘cottage’, as Arnold called it – located at the bottom of a long, steep flight of steps beyond the swimming pool, next to a pond with three resident swans – unfriendly beasts, Arnold would warn visitors, liable to bite anyone who came too close. The cottage, resembling a hotel suite of the type his nephew used to frequent on his triumphant world travels, consisted of a bedroom, a large living room and a bathroom. Within the limits of his uncle’s property Pistorius enjoyed five-star luxury and, with the cinema, the pool, the gym and a permanent staff of servants on the premises, five-star amenities. But he was a recluse now, a virtual prisoner. The athletics track at the high performance sports center in Pretoria where he used to train was out of bounds. Before, he had sought public attention; now, he shunned it. Before, the fans mobbed him; too many now would turn their backs on him. But he did need company, constant attention, as if he were a small child again. The three women closest to him provided it: his aunt Lois, Arnold’s elegant wife; his cousin Maria, who was four years older than he and lived in the house next door with her husband and child; and, most devoted of all, his younger sister Aimée, whom he had adored from the day she was born, on whose pristine little feet he had fixated when she was a baby and he was just three years old, whose company he craved every waking moment in the first weeks after the shooting. Aimée, worked as an analyst for a South African investment bank, where she had a reputation for quick-mindedness and a talent for finance surprising to her colleagues in one so young.

  Good-looking, as both male and female members of the Pistorius clan tended to be, his sister, cousin and aunt would take turns to sit silently with him, to talk when he needed to talk, to hug him when he wept, each filling the role of his absent mother.

  A fourth woman in whom he sought comfort was his paternal grandmother, Gerti Pistorius, who, as family photographs of her wedding in 1943 showed, had been an extraordinary beauty, of Scandinavian descent. Her husband, who was also still alive, had been a dashingly handsome man. The pair set a family standard for glamor that their famous grandson had matched. Gerti Pistorius had always doted on the legless boy wonder, cherishing the moment years back when he was very small and had appeared at her home wearing his artificial legs for the first time shouting, ‘Grandma! Grandma! Look, I’ve got toes!’ She had been as proud as anybody of his achievements, filling the walls of her home with photographs of him careering down the track in his one-piece Lycra suit and carbon-fibre blades, or posing on the podium with a gold medal draped around his neck. Always elegantly turned out, even at the age of ninety, she lived in Pretoria, as she had always done; but when she saw her grandson now it was not to celebrate but to console.

  Occasionally the sense of imprisonment would overwhelm him and he would risk a sortie into the outside world. He would drive to his grandmother’s, or to lunch at an Italian restaurant with Aimée or Maria in a small shopping center nearby, a simple place with Formica table tops and plastic chairs, where the staff remained welcoming, ready to shake his hand and to go along with the charade that nothing was amiss. Urged on by his cousins’ husbands, muscular men who would sweat alongside him at his uncle’s gym, he would sometimes attempt some pretence of normality by eating out at a fashionable place called Koi, his favorite Japanese restaurant in Pretoria. A couple of times during the year’s wait for the trial he was unable to resist the temptation to flee his cage and attend a party or visit a bar with the fast set he used to enjoy mingling with in Johannesburg. Each time, however, he regretted it because the news would inevitably reach the media, who would seize on these excursions to portray him as a man cold-bloodedly at peace with the crime he had committed. More often he would go for long drives in the countryside in a white Audi he owned. Driving had always been more than a practical matter. It was a release for his nervous energy. He drove very fast, composed at the wheel, but he never went on these drives alone now; always he had a family member by his side. Sometimes he would pluck up the courage to stop and have a drink or a meal, if the place seemed sufficiently remote and discreet. It was a risk, though. There were times when strangers, spotting him, had verbally abused him.

  Whatever Pistorius did, in or out of the house, he was rarely left alone. And while his family tried to keep smiling, and sometimes he smiled back, his gloom was contagious, his presence ghostly, unable to forget for long the misery and disgrace he had brought on the people he loved. They could no more ignore his shame now than they could fail to enjoy his triumphs in the past. He was as needy as a sad little child. They called him not Oscar but ‘Ozzie’, as his mother had done. Sometimes he would sit on a brown leather chair in the study with the head of the big buffalo, and rest his own head on Lois’s or Aimée’s
chest, lying there quietly, not saying a word, as they stroked his hair. He could not bear to be on his own; nor did those who loved him want him to be alone. God and family – that was the Pistorius family motto.

  Arnold Pistorius had assumed the steady, patriarchal role in the family tragedy. Although he was as affected as the others by the disaster of Reeva’s death, he sought to rise above his own grief by bringing his upright Afrikaner Calvinism and ordered business mind to bear on his nephew’s predicament, identifying priorities and endeavoring to make the best of a cruel lot. In the early days after the shooting he took it upon himself to play the part of family spokesman, striving to get the balance right by expressing condolences to the Steenkamp family, explaining that Pistorius was ‘numb with shock and grief’, forcefully denying the charge that Reeva’s killing had been intentional. ‘We have no doubt,’ he told a battery of TV cameras, ‘that there is no substance to the allegation and that the state’s own case, including its own forensic evidence, strongly refutes any possibility of premeditated murder or, indeed, any murder as such.’ He had even taken it upon himself to phone Reeva’s mother, June Steenkamp, as a preamble to exploring whether his nephew might talk to her personally. But she had not been responsive. ‘I’ve got nothing to say to you, and I don’t want to hear anything that you’ve got to say,’ she had told Arnold. ‘I’m very sorry that I’ve troubled you, then,’ he replied, before she put the phone down.

  Arnold made it a point to be present – and, as he saw it, in charge – whenever Pistorius’s lawyers or communications adviser came to the house for meetings. The legal fees were going to cost a fortune, and while Pistorius had sold off racehorses and other assets he owned to make the payments, his income had dried up and part of the financial burden of maintaining him now fell on his uncle. That, for Arnold, was not the most difficult part. He could not help but notice how his nephew’s hands would tremble, presaging tears and a withdrawal from his surroundings – how he would sink into a black hole of despair, all too often dragging family members into it with him. His depression had become their depression, for they could not avoid putting themselves in his place, imagining what they would be thinking if they were in his skin. Never mind the money – Arnold’s harder, and more delicate, mission was to orchestrate the family’s strategy to nurse Ozzie back to a modicum of mental health. That was an urgent priority. It meant protecting him from the temptation to commit suicide.