Ivan Vladislavic - 101 Detectives

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.

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.