101 Detectives

by Ivan Vladislavic

  It’s the same for this daredevil, she thinks. Here within reach of the summit, he is most likely to fall. There is no art to it either. It’s physics. He must have an exit strategy. Perhaps he and the policeman are discussing this very thing, as now both of them are shooing the helicopter away like a scavenging gull.

  She sees a cameraman there, hanging out of the door of the craft in a harness, and realises that he cannot be generating the pictures she’s watching on the screen, as she supposed. There are cameras elsewhere. Everywhere.

  The pilot misunderstands the signals, he thinks they’re summoning him, and the helicopter’s nose dips and comes in closer. The climber clings to the glass with his little cape flickering. Any moment now he’ll be peeled from the surface like a leaf and flung into space. On the rooftop people are waving and shouting into handsets. At last, the helicopter lifts up into the blue. The camera sees it off to a distance, and then turns back to the rooftop to show the main characters in close-up: the policeman at the railing, looking down, the climber on the ledge, looking up, and the Chief Risk Officer, looking ahead. The people in the square below, who are no longer the audience, have been forgotten.

  The climber reaches into his resin bag with one hand and then the other, and rubs his thumbs over his fingertips as if he’s thinking about money. Bracing his feet against the frame on either side, he scuttles up the glass to the top of the window. Then he reaches with his right hand for the ledge above.

  The storyteller is back at her post. Ten minutes have passed while she waited for the man to fall past her window. Still nothing. The blades go on churning the air outside, but in here it is silent.

  She jiggles the mouse to waken the monitor. Then she deletes the title and first line of her story and types: The Exit Strategy.

  She considers the phrase. Every storyteller she knows has spun a tale out of it. Once it was a platitude in business and politics, now it’s become a principle, a philosophy – one she should apply in her own life and work. You must know when to get out, when to disinvest, to sell, to liquidate, to terminate, to retrench and fire, to decommission, cut your losses, save your bacon.

  It’s beyond her job description to shut the computer down, but there’s a power button on the monitor. She presses it and it collapses to black.

  There are pens and pencils in her briefcase, clasped in elasticised loops like cartridges in a bandolier. She chooses a 3B pencil, opens her notebook to the first page and writes: Exit Strategy.

  If everyone now requires an exit strategy – relationship counsellors, rugby coaches, foreign-policy makers, urban gardening experts, marketing managers, military commanders, surgeons – it’s because the concept is crucial. The crux. Going in is nothing: pulling out is the hard part. You have to know how, why and when to put an end to things. To stop, cease, desist from.

  What in God’s name is that?

  She goes quickly to the window. It’s a handprint on the outside of the glass, a powdery impression of a palm, four fingers and a thumb. A left hand, she thinks, inverting the print in her mind. She sees him there again, crawling over her window. The good man. She raises her own left hand, thinking as she does so that it will not match, she’s done this before or has seen it done, a failure of logic or imagination that led to disappointment. And it does not match. So she raises her right hand instead and presses it against the print, which it matches perfectly, and this consoling symmetry lifts her feet from the floor, she feels herself rising, going up.

  ‌Mountain Landscape

  Dear Ms Williams,

  re: Pierneef

  Thank you for your letter of the 5th. I appreciate very much your ongoing involvement with the Company’s collection, and especially your proposal for the redeployment of my Pierneef.

  I read Prof. Keyser’s article, which you kindly attached, with interest. It was thoughtful of you to highlight specific passages for my attention, and those were well chosen indeed, but I took it upon myself to study the entire paper. As you know, I have no particular knowledge of art, but Claudia Fischhoff, whom you might have come across in your dealings, is always encouraging me to educate myself. Claudia advises me on my modest private collection and has given me some valuable tips in the last few years. My only regret is that I started so late.

  Your view that my Pierneef does not send the right sort of message about the Company is persuasively argued. However, I must take issue with certain of your conclusions. I hope you will humour me – and forgive the shortage of footnotes!

  It may interest you to know that the painting in question was not hanging in the boardroom when I took over as CEO five years ago. Then the wall was graced by a photograph of Tokyo Sexwale and the lads of Free State Stars hoisting the league trophy. It was an appropriate choice for the boardroom – the Company’s logo is all over the stadium – and I would have kept it, even though it doesn’t quite measure up to the picture of Madiba in his springbok jersey at Ellis Park. But one day, not long after my appointment, I was browsing through our annual reports, familiarising myself with the corporate history, when I came across a photograph of my predecessor, Janus van Huyssteen, in front of a painting. And naturally I became curious as to its whereabouts.

  I’m ashamed to say that I did not recognise a Pierneef in those days (you wouldn’t catch me out now). I had to show the photo to Claudia and she brought me up to speed. She even photocopied a couple of things for me to read, just some facts and figures, nothing as penetrating as Prof. Keyser’s article. Between you and me, I think Claudia had decided to take me under her wing.

  The very next day, I set about looking for the missing Pierneef. At first I suspected someone might have walked off with it. A casualty of the transition. Fortunately, I thought to ask my personal assistant, Miss du Toit, who has had a long association with the Company. When in doubt, ask the secretary – another one of those things they don’t teach you at Harvard Business School. Bless her, she remembered exactly when Mr van Huyssteen had the painting of mountains taken down and the photograph of soccer players put up instead. That dusty old thing! She pointed me towards a storeroom on the nineteenth floor and there it was, Mountain Landscape, jammed in between a filing cabinet and a three-legged chair, among piles of stationery and cleaning equipment. Nothing but mops, brushes and brooms. It would have made your hair stand on end to see everything jumbled together like that. There was a second canvas, a frisky little nude by Battiss, with the handle of a vacuum cleaner practically poking through it. A minor work, in my humble opinion. And some photographs of board members, and my predecessors at the helm of the Company, not to mention some captains of the ship of state – but let’s not go there, as they say. I had the Battiss hung in the reception area on the top floor, as a thank you to Miss du Toit, and the Pierneef brought up to the boardroom. (By the way, ‘frisky’ is Claudia’s word, not mine.)

  You may wonder why I did not think to ask you about my painting. That’s exactly what I would do today, of course. But at the time I had no idea you were in charge of these things. I’m afraid my learning curve had not even begun to ascend.

  I have spent some time looking at Mountain Landscape. Occasionally, I bring a cup of tea in here, turn my back on our much-envied city panorama, and simply gaze at that square of paint on canvas. There are golden foothills, soaring peaks in purple and mauve, storm clouds advancing or retreating. I get quite lost in it, in its wide open spaces, its ‘echoing solitudes’ (to quote Prof. Keyser). It is full of silence and grandeur (and this really is a phrase of my own). Afterwards, when I return to the present, to find that I’ve spilt tea in my saucer or dropped biscuit crumbs on the carpet, I feel as if I’ve been away to some high place where the air is purer. I feel quite refreshed. I cannot speak with authority – one day at the Louvre will hardly atone for a lifetime of ignorance – but I suspect that this capacity to refresh the senses and the spirit is one of the marks of great art.

  I have also spent some time looking at other people looking at my painting. F
rom my vantage point at the head of the conference table, I often see my colleagues’ eyes grow misty as they stray to the wall over my shoulder. I think I can say that Mountain Landscape is a compelling work, that it commands attention, and not just by its location in the scheme of things. The attention of my board members was not nearly as prone to wander when the wall was occupied by Mr Sexwale and his players.

  Without meaning to, I see I have made two arguments in favour of my Pierneef. Let me introduce a third by saying that I cannot agree with Prof. Keyser on the painting’s style. I think it is the ‘style’ she refers to (you’ll correct me if I’m wrong) when she says that the painting has a ‘mannered, otherworldly quality’ and that it ‘denies the humanly specific in favour of a dehistoricised abstraction’. (My spellchecker does not approve of ‘dehistoricised’ but I’ve copied it down exactly.)

  Just after Mountain Landscape was put back in the boardroom – the photograph of Tokyo is now on ‘permanent loan’ to the staff canteen – I had occasion to entertain Leo Mbola of Telkom. And the first thing he commented on was my painting. He said that he recognised the scene as part of the Winterberg range near Queenstown where he grew up. To Mr Mbola at least the painting captured a specific place rather than an abstract somewhere-or-other. He even offered to show it to me if I ever come down to Queenstown for a long weekend – and I might take him up on the offer. I know from the photocopies Claudia made me that Pierneef was fond of long, solitary trips in his car, simply taking the open road and stopping to paint whatever caught his fancy, but I have no idea whether he was ever in the vicinity of Queenstown. Is it important to know whether this mountain of his exists in the world? Would it change our appreciation of his art? I cannot say.

  But I do wonder what kind of person Pierneef was. Did he strut about like a king or was he a simple man you would have walked straight past on the street? He certainly had a special way of seeing things. Perhaps he was a bit of a dreamer? Or a man of peculiar habits? On a business trip recently, I read something about Vincent van Gogh in one of those airline magazines. The name of the author would have come in useful now as a footnote. I suppose someone like Prof. Keyser is in the habit of storing up the bits and pieces one might need to argue the case for or against. There’s a lesson for me. Anyway, this article said that Van Gogh was a coffee addict. Apparently he used to drink twenty-four cups of coffee a day. Can you imagine! If I have so much as an espresso after lunch, I know I’ll be up half the night with my mind racing. Twenty-four cups! The journalist mentioned this fact in passing, as a mere curiosity, but I think it explains quite a lot about how Van Gogh saw the world, about his ‘style’. If you look at Starry Night, for instance, and imagine that you’ve had twenty-four cups of coffee since breakfast, it doesn’t seem so strange after all.

  I am returning Prof. Keyser’s article to you with this letter. It is a photocopy of your photocopy, which means that the parts you highlighted in red for my benefit now appear as grey speckles, whereas my highlights are in green. I have made some notes about this and that, which I won’t go over here. But please look especially at the last page. Whereas you drew my attention to the point about ‘dispossession’, I wish to emphasise ‘the proprietorial gaze’, which occurs in the previous paragraph. This is the crux of the matter, I think.

  Will you allow me one more anecdote? Last week, Eddie Khumbane of Spoornet dropped in to discuss some very interesting developments in the transport sector. We had met before in the conference environment, but this was his first visit to our HQ. It turns out he takes quite an interest in Pierneef – he had all the facts and figures you could ask for. So the two of us, rank amateurs but passionate ones, if I may say so, talked art when we should have been talking shop. You would be amused to know that he called Mountain Landscape a ‘prime piece of real estate’. He stood there with his hands behind his back, gazing at the painting as if he owned it, and not just the painting but the mountains themselves, the lofty reaches of the Winterberg. You would have thought he’d read Prof. Keyser’s article. If you could have seen him, I think you might agree that the impression made by Mountain Landscape is not at odds with our corporate culture.

  All things considered, it seems to me that the Willie Bester street scene you had earmarked for the boardroom might be better suited to the lobby, the western wall I think, where it will catch every visitor’s eye, and for the time being I’ll keep the Pierneef here with me.

  Sincerely,

  (Signed) H.K. Khoza

  PS According to Prof. Keyser, Pierneef could have learnt a thing or two from Joos de Momper. She says De Momper’s Great Mountain Landscape (1623), majestic though it is, has paths twisting through it, and on those paths are beggars, hermits, horses and dogs, and their presence makes all the difference. I cannot say whether she is right, because I haven’t seen the painting yet – I must still search for it on the internet. Have you come across this De Momper? He sounds like an Afrikaner, but as far as I know there were no Afrikaners in 1623.

  ‌Lullaby

  I saw them at the airport, the woman and her young lover, but I would surely have forgotten them by now if everything had ended well. You know how it is: unhappy endings sharpen the memory. So many things snagged in my mind afterwards, details that would otherwise have slipped away in the torrent of experience that courses through each of us without leaving a trace. One of their suitcases had split during the flight and the baggage handlers had sealed it with yellow tape. It was an old-fashioned case, not the hard mussel-shell you’re advised to use these days, a battered brown-leather carryall stuck with labels showing palm trees and hula skirts, like something out of Casablanca. The boy, the young man, wrestled it off the clanking conveyor and they laughed about the tape: the chevrons made it look like the scene of a crime. Their second bag went by, a backpack full of zippered pockets, clips and slings, and he chased after it, squealing with laughter again, and nearly knocked me over. The suitcase must be hers and the backpack his: luggage and gear. Two styles of travelling, two versions of the world. He tugged a wisp of red from the gaping case and pinned it with hooked thumbs across his hipbones, a lacy thong, barely there, and she snatched it away, pretending to be embarrassed, and buried it in her shoulder bag. Quite a bit older than him, I thought, but young enough to show those slivers of belly and back between T-shirt and sarong. Half the passengers were in Hawaiian shirts and Bermudas, signalling that their island holiday had already begun. The couple sharing my row had ordered G&Ts for lunch. In my suit, even without a tie, I felt like a grown-up among the kids, and it was a relief to get out of the terminal and into a taxi.

  My hotel was on the edge of Grand Baie. I knew the Coconut Palm well, a comfortable, touristy place close to a good beach and half a dozen restaurants. The exclusive resorts are more beautiful, but what’s the point when you’re on your own? Mr Appadoo at reception greeted me by name and asked how the new range was moving. Little touches like this make you feel at home, whereas chocolates on the pillow and the bedclothes turned down remind you that you’re not.

  ‘You must join us for sundowners at the Sandbar,’ Mr Appadoo said.

  ‘Thanks but no thanks. I’d rather take a dip, clear my head.’

  I was in no mood to break the ice with a gang of sun-deprived Europeans, self-basting Germans straight off their sunbeds, and Brits so pale they glow in the dark, all behaving like teenagers on a field trip. Been there, done that. They would let their hair and a few other things down before the evening was over. After the first free drink on the terrace there would be a string of others you had to pay for. Inevitably, someone would discover ‘Dancing Queen’ on the jukebox.

  I went to my room, meaning to change for a swim, but an invitation card on the dressing table distracted me. It showed a cocktail glass with a tipsy straw and a stream of bubbles that spelt out Willkommen! Bienvenue! The cartoon had the same outmoded charm as the leather suitcase at the airport. I did not have to be in Floréal before noon the next day. Perhaps a drink would d
o me good. On an impulse, I changed into shorts and a T-shirt and headed for the bar.

  The Sandbar was no more than a handful of wooden tables under thatched umbrellas scattered along the beach wall. Stehtische, the Germans call them, tables for standing at. Stairs went down to the sand; the sea was as flat and blue as a swimming pool, and so close you could leave your sandals on the grass and hotfoot it across to the water. Harry the barman had a counter with a sea view so that he could double as lifeguard. He knew some moves with the cocktail shaker and some jokes about Tom Cruise. He remembered my name too.

  A dozen people were swirling about under the umbrellas, moored to their drinks on the tables like boats to bollards. A spume of coconut butter and rum drifted downwind. The ice had not just broken but melted. In a rising tide of accented English the odd phrase of Italian or German bobbed like a cocktail olive or a lemon wedge. The whole place was charged with the reckless energy people from a cold climate generate when they feel the sun on their arms and sand between their toes.

  The complimentary cocktail was an extravagant thing in a hollowed-out pineapple, mainly rum and strawberry juice, I thought, with melon balls afloat like mines. Looking for a quiet corner, I went onto the terrace beyond the last umbrella, and there I saw them again, the couple from the airport, sitting on the same side of a table in the lee of a windbreak, pressed together, looking out to sea. They had their faces turned to the afternoon sun and their backs to the noise. Her hand was on his neck, rubbing the bristles against the grain.