Ivan Vladislavic - 101 Detectives

M. Benadie to Basil Liebenberg, Laingsburg, 1979

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Neville Lister, Göttingen, 2011

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Karl-Heinz to Norman Ortlepp, Göttingen, 1977

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Neville Lister, Amherst, 2011

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D. Skinner to A. Gomes, Amherst, c. 1981

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Prison release form, Johannesburg, 1980

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Neville Lister, Queens, 2011

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Jimmy (James P.) to José Carvalho, Queens, 1980

best kept alone

Sixteen hundred hours, Klopper thought, and wiggled his toes.

‘Tell me something, Bate: if these fugu fishes are so poisonous, how come they don’t poison themselves? Hey?’

Bate looked at the street. It seemed cold and grey, but that was because the glass was tinted. After a while he said, ‘So what’s going to happen to this guy?’

‘Who?’

‘The guy we’re waiting for, who the hell else.’

‘What do you think?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘We’re going to give him a medal.’

‘Very funny, Klopper.’

‘That’s me. Humour in Uniform.’

Bate turned his head slowly until he could see Klopper on the bed from the corner of his eye.

Fugu fish are best kept alone. They are more aggressive to their own species than to other fish. That’s what the magazine said. In Japan, Fugu rubripes is farmed for eating. The flesh is best eaten raw but it can also be fried or boiled with vegetables. Fugu fins or testes are good in hot sake.

on the way home (route 66)

On the way home we stayed in a motel off the interstate, another ten-dollar dive with red wall-to-wall and woodgrain wallpaper, and the room was so small you could lie on the bed and change the TV channel with your toe. Johnny Carson interviewed a man with a parrot that sang ‘I Left My Heart in San Francisco’ and it made us laugh until we cried.

We had breakfast in some Denny’s or Roxy’s the next morning. I remember how noisy it was, how loudly everyone spoke. It used to bother me when I first came to America, but I’d gotten used to it over the years. The waitress brought bacon and biscuits, and eggs over easy with Cheez Whizz sauce on the side, and coffee and cream, and kept up a barrage of questions and comments over the clash of knives and forks. ‘I’m sorry!’ ‘Coming right up.’ ‘Is that right?’ ‘Gotcha!’ She said, ‘You’re welcome,’ before I could finish saying, ‘Thank you.’ A reflex, exclamatory patter of pacification.

While the busboy was stacking the plates, he asked: ‘Y’all on your way to the Allergy Conference?’

‘No, we’re just going home,’ Mel said with a startled laugh.

‘Well, good luck with that!’

wayfarer (hobbema)

My favourite museum is the one in the Hague. I was very taken with the Hobbemas, until I found a sheet of paper in a plastic box on the wall that said all the figures were put in afterwards. Apparently Hobbema painted his scenes without any people and the Hollanders were quite happy with them like that. But then the paintings were bought and taken away to America, where the new owners had to look at the empty landscapes every day, and it bothered them that everything was so desolate. So they employed other painters to add little figures on the canvases and they thought that ‘populating the landscape’ and ‘humanising the world’ made it look kinder and safer. Some of the added-in figures were quite clear, but most of them were so small and hidden I hadn’t even noticed them before, to tell the truth. And the painters must have been amateurs because the figures weren’t very well done, which is one of the reasons why I didn’t realise they were there.

I was happy to get this information, because I am still building up my knowledge of the History of Art, but I must say it spoilt my appreciation of Art for a while. After that, whenever I saw a landscape I had to look under the trees and behind the boulders for someone lurking. I couldn’t get lost in the paintings any more. It was like that book Where’s Wally? (If you’ve got children — or grandchildren — you’ll know what I mean.) Luckily I’m past that phase now. But I can’t help thinking that those Americans of yesteryear were wrong. When I find a human being in these pictures, some little wayfarer going along a path through the woods, it’s no comfort at all. A terror comes over me that I haven’t felt since I was a boy and my heart aches for him, for us.

locked-room mystery

The square outside the window was empty. Along the avenue, the snow lay crisp and even. Scanning that blank sheet for signs of life, Hans Günther Basch remembered the dog-eared Ellery Queen on his bedside table, and thought about the enduring appeal of the locked-room mystery. How often the riddle turned on a footprint or its absence. There were no footprints beneath the window, a single set of footprints led away from the ledge, only two sets of footprints were visible in the snow. A locked-room murder did not always happen behind closed doors, of course. More often than not, it was out in the open and in full sight of the world.

striptease

The flight attendant brought me a packet of Supersnacks, which were tiny salted crackers in the shape of stars, boats and clouds, and also miniature pretzels, and mixed in with them a few sweet biscuits decorated with the face of a boy who may have been Tintin, and these childlike bar snacks made me think of the woman and her boots.

What a strange striptease we have to perform in airports these days, taking off our jackets and belts, emptying out our pockets, allowing strangers to frisk and fondle us. At the security check in Mauritius they made a woman put her boots through the X-ray machine. A women’s-magazine type, I thought, precise and pointed, in a short black skirt and black stockings, a belt with silver studs low on her hips, a modernist haircut, angular and sculptural. Her stiletto heels gave her that pony-and-trap gait of the fashion models. She unzipped the boots and stepped out of them, and was suddenly small. The stockings turned out to be leggings that ended in mid-calf just below the top of the boots. On her feet she had a pair of low-cut gym socks covered with pink motifs, smiley faces or Pac-Men. Between the leggings and the socks, her pale and naked calves. She padded through the metal detector in the silly socks, while the boots, the leather jacket and everything else went along the conveyor, and of course she looked like a girl who’d been dressing up in her mother’s clothes.

stuck in the lift

Her application for a higher office had got no response. A week passed without so much as an acknowledgement of receipt. She was on the point of writing again when she got stuck in the lift with four of her colleagues. The compartment had no sooner risen from the 11th floor than it shuddered to a halt and went dark.