by John Carlin
‘We returned home and felt a little better,’ said Ebba. ‘Not good, obviously, but my darkest thoughts had gone. I no longer wanted to have a miscarriage.’ Her husband sat down at his computer and searched the internet to try and find out what the implications of fibular hemimelia would be for their son. Suddenly something caught his eye. He called his wife to come quickly and take a look. It was a photograph of someone they had never heard of who had been born with exactly the same condition as their unborn child. His name was Oscar Pistorius.
‘The photograph filled the computer screen,’ Ebba said, her face lighting up as she relived the moment. ‘It was the most wonderful thing! Oscar was crossing the finishing line, breaking the tape, winning the gold at the 200 meters Paralympic race in Athens. Seeing that picture changed everything! It captured a moment of triumph for him and for us it was the moment we moved not just from despair to hope, but to knowing our son would be just fine. I felt the purest relief and joy. My son would not just be able to walk, he would be able to run!’
The boy, who would be named Haflidi, had a role model even before he was born, his mother having decided there and then that there was more to the youth who appeared on the screen than a miraculous ability to run very fast. ‘He was beautiful, smiling and we could see in the picture he was a kind young man, and my husband sent my mum the link and I have loved Oscar ever since and our whole family has too. We became his number one fans, following every race he ran, learning all we could about his life.’
Ebba found her own role model in Pistorius’s dead mother. She saw Sheila Pistorius as a pioneer and guide who had marked out the path she herself should follow. Like Sheila, Ebba would never feel sorry for herself or her son; she would always regard him as being capable of anything a child with legs could do.
‘I often wanted her to be alive for me during that first year after Haflidi was born because there is no manual for raising a boy like him,’ Ebba said. ‘It must have been so difficult for her. She had no one to turn to. She lacked completely the example she became for me.’ Ebba understood better than anyone could have done how difficult it would have been for Sheila Pistorius to decide on the best medical response to her son’s condition during his first year of life. ‘There was no internet to find information and she had to go from doctor to doctor, hearing all kinds of different advice. There was even one doctor who told them they should amputate above the knees! They play God, some of these doctors, and it is hard for normal people to know when they are just talking nonsense. Oscar’s mother had to have been so strong and so brave to make that decision. In Iceland they certainly had no clue what to do. I saw the result of that one day when I saw a boy who was fourteen and had also been born with a problem in his feet. He had not been amputated and he was clearly handicapped, in a wheelchair. But I had the example of Oscar in front of me and that made it so much easier for me than for his mother. It decided the question for me completely.’
One thing was making the rational choice to amputate; another was dealing with it emotionally. As Haflidi approached the age of eleven months, the point at which – following the Pistorius precedent – the surgery would be carried out, she tried to keep outwardly calm, but inside she was in a state of creeping terror, unable to avoid picturing the moment when her baby would be strapped down unconscious on an operating table with a surgeon sawing off his feet.
And then she discovered that, weeks before the operation was due, Pistorius himself was coming to Iceland.
Ebba wrote him an e-mail introducing herself and telling him about Haflidi. He wrote back swiftly. ‘Hi,’ he said, ‘how can I help you?’ He could help, she replied, by coming round to her home for dinner. He said he would be happy to do so.
When he arrived in Reykjavik Ebba’s husband went to issue the invitation personally at an indoor sports facility where he was testing his new Cheetahs. Hafthor was ready to be amazed. Since winning Paralympic gold at Athens the young man who had already changed his life had been competing ever more seriously in able-bodied races. Just a few months before he had come sixth in the national South African 400 meters race. But nothing had prepared Hafthor for the spectacle that greeted him. Pistorius and Trevor Brauckmann were kicking a football back and forth. Pistorius was wearing his usual walking prostheses, their metal cores covered in flesh-colored plastic, moulded in the shape of real human legs, complete with ‘feet’ over which he wore normal trainers. What made Hafthor’s jaw drop was that Pistorius was not simply nudging the ball along the ground towards his companion, as he might have done with a hockey stick, but performing tricks. He would hold the ball on the ground between his two lifeless feet and, with a little backward jump, hoist it in the air behind him and over his head. It was the kind of thing Hafthor would watch his professional players do in training, but he had never imagined that a man born with the same condition as his son might be capable of the same thing.
When Pistorius walked into the house for dinner that evening Ebba said it felt as if she were meeting a rock star. It was the very term Reeva Steenkamp would use to describe him, and the qualities Ebba saw in him that day were also the gentler ones that would persuade Reeva to invest her love in him seven years later.
‘He was only nineteen then,’ Ebba said, ‘but he had a big, confident personality. He laughed a lot but he was also extraordinarily polite, with no pretensions. He held Haflidi in his arms, he played with our daughter Hannah. You could see he was one of those adults who is natural with children. I asked him if he would mind taking off his legs. He didn’t. He just took them off with no self-consciousness and let me stare at them. I was fascinated and so happy.’
Pistorius might have suffered a jolt on seeing in the Icelandic baby a vision of himself that he had never beheld before. That was him before the amputation, with the mangled feet and misshapen ankles. But if it was a shock, he gave nothing away. He looked so at ease with his new friends, and held the little child with such manifest delight, that Ebba’s infatuation with him only grew. She hung on his words as if they were the Sermon on the Mount. Especially when he talked about his mother, whom he described as his life’s guiding light and to whom he said he offered up a prayer before every race he ran. He told them she had made no concessions to his condition, treated him no differently from his older brother or his younger sister, and how grateful he would always be to her for that. He recounted his favorite story about her telling his brother to put on his shoes and him to put on his legs; he spoke about the letter in which she said that the real loser was the one who did not compete. And he shared with them his favorite aphorism, ‘You are not disabled by the disabilities you have; you are able by the abilities you have.’ He rejected the term ‘disabled’, he said; he preferred what he saw as the more accurate ‘differently abled’.
This was manna from heaven for Ebba. Years later, in that cafe in Reykjavik, she recalled the encounter with rapture. ‘The compassion he showed! The empathy! The kindness! Everything I had seen in that first photograph was confirmed, and so much more. In the flesh he exceeded my expectations. And he also drew from me something I did not expect: learning that he had no mum, I felt a strong impulse to mother him myself.’
That dinner, Ebba said, was a defining moment in her life. ‘It taught me the very important lesson that I should not be overprotective with my son and, most of all, sealed my peace with Haflidi’s condition,’ she said. And it gave her a mission: to be for her son what Pistorius’s mother had been for him. While not religious in the same intense way that Sheila Pistorius had been, Ebba sounded as if she were channeling Sheila when she said, ‘I think there is a purpose for Haflidi in not having legs. We don’t want him to have legs! I know that sounds a bit crazy but I want him the way he was supposed to be. Oscar told us that if he had a choice between legs and a Ferrari he’d choose a Ferrari! He has had lots of opportunities on account of having no legs. My son the same, even if he is not yet eight years old. He may not have legs but he has a big heart. You lose something but
get something else instead. You can’t have it all. If something is missing, you compensate, and people love him so much and are so kind to him.’
Including Pistorius himself, who visited Iceland again in the summer of 2007 and went to dinner with the family again, where he sat with Haflidi, now nearly two, on his lap and spoon-fed him, then posed for photographs with him, the two of them with their prostheses off, the famous athlete happy to play big brother to the kid with the same thin stumps as himself. Haflidi knew he was different from other people, but he was a confident, cheerful little boy, mature for his age, who would stand up before his class at school and give talks explaining his condition. Yet, Ebba said, he also grew up not considering himself disabled. Nor did she consider him so. ‘We would tell people, “No, our son is not crippled, no need to be sorry or sad. He will be like Oscar Pistorius – beautiful, brave, perfect.” I believe my son will do whatever he likes in life and I owe that belief to Oscar. He showed me that not having legs is no big deal, that if people with no legs can run then they can do anything.’
Haflidi himself showed no interest in athletic competition and always came cheerfully last in school races. But Ebba loved watching Pistorius run. She did so on TV or on the internet whenever she could, and she went to watch him live at the track. In May 2009 she, her husband, their two children and her mother, Sigga Hanna, traveled to Manchester to see him compete in the Paralympic World Cup. Before watching Pistorius race they spent a day touring the neighboring city of Liverpool with him. Anyone who did not know them would have imagined they were all part of the same family. Pistorius walked hand in hand with Haflidi and, all politeness, insisted on carrying Sigga Hanna’s backpack. The next day at the running stadium he had another gesture for his Icelandic friends. After winning gold on the track he clambered into the stands where the public sat, sought out Haflidi and hung his medal around the boy’s neck. At dinner, Pistorius and Sigga Hanna fought good-humoredly over who should pay and when they stepped out of the restaurant Sigga Hanna declared, only half jokingly, that she would like to adopt him.
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
EVERYTHING 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 h
is 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.