Chase Your Shadow Read Free Page B

the insteps were not convex but concave, in the shape not of an arch, but of a boat. Instead of five toes, he had two. His devastated parents saw right away that no human being could ever stand, let alone walk, on feet as narrow and twisted as these.
    Sheila Pistorius was born Sheila Bekker, a fairly common surname among the 40 or so per cent of the white South African population who defined themselves – in a country where everyone felt historically compelled to have some sort of tribal affiliation – as ‘English-speakers’. Sheila did not work outside the home. Henke Pistorius, her husband, was a businessman, an erratic one prone to dramatic ups and downs, but at the time of Oscar’s birth he wasdoing well, providing his family with the abundant material comforts of white, upper middle-class life in apartheid South Africa. They lived in a large home, high up on a ridge in the suburb of Constantia Kloof, in rich, dynamic Johannesburg, forty miles south of Pretoria, the South African capital.
    Henke belonged to the majority white grouping in South Africa, the Afrikaners, who had their own language derived from the Dutch colonists who had begun settling in the Cape in the seventeenth century. He took pride in his people’s history. He liked guns, as many Afrikaners did, and was given to making solemn pronouncements before his Calvinist God. A defining moment in Afrikaner history, as every Afrikaner child learned at school, was the Day of the Vow. On December 16, 1838, Afrikaner trekkers who had emigrated from the Cape, outraged, among other things, by the British colonial rulers’ abolition of slavery, had fought a decisive battle against a large army of Zulu warriors. Vastly outnumbered, the trekkers had made a vow that, in return for God’s help in obtaining victory, that date would be honored by them and their descendants as a holy day of worship. The trekkers were victorious, 470 of them armed with guns defeating a Zulu army of ten thousand, armed only with spears.
    It was in the spirit of that historic vow that Henke made a vow of his own within minutes of his son’s birth. Just prior to the birth he had told the obstetrician that he did not mind if it was a boy or a girl so long as the child had ten fingers and ten toes. Now, having been the first to identify the feet’s deformity, Henke ceremonially held up the infant with both hands and declared, before mother, doctor and nurses: ‘This is my son Oscar and I declare before God that I shall love him and stand by him for the rest of my days.’
    In practical terms, standing by their son meant Sheila and Henke Pistorius had to make a choice between amputation of his legs andcorrective surgery. They consulted eleven doctors in South Africa and overseas. Some argued for surgery on both legs; some proposed amputation of the right foot and surgery on the left. It was the advice of one particular South African doctor that tipped the balance in favor of double amputation below the knee.
    The doctor’s name was Gerry Versfeld. Had Henke and Sheila Pistorius not chanced upon Dr Versfeld, a white man who at the time worked in a hospital in Soweto where only black patients were admitted, they might have lacked the confidence to go along with the most drastic option of all. Had the paths of Dr Versfeld and his infant self never crossed, the chances were that Pistorius would never have known what it is to run, would never have found fame, wealth and glory, and would never have met Reeva Steenkamp. The choice the parents made would plot the course of his life.
    Pistorius had always been grateful to Dr Versfeld, the orthopaedic surgeon who carried out the operation. He had climbed so high thanks to him, and for all the head-turning acclaim he received he never forgot the man whose appearance in his life a few months after he was born had compensated so amply for the freak deficiency of his genes, directing him towards global stardom when he achieved the miracle of running