The Currency of Paper

by Alex Kovacs

  In more than thirty years, Maximilian only had to suffer through two different occasions on which his neighbours attempted to speak to him. In 1961, Mick Prior, of Number 48, remarked that the weather was particularly nice, an observation to which Maximilian responded with his customary silence, keeping his eyes firmly focused upon the stretch of pavement lying immediately in front of his feet as he made his escape, never giving his interlocutor the slightest satisfaction as to whether this remark had indeed been overheard. In 1974, Nigel Wilkinson, of Number 56, saw Maximilian getting out of his car, and took it upon himself to mutter a “hello,” only to be greeted by eyes darting towards and then away from his own with equal rapidity. After that, there was to be no more verbal contact with any of Maximilian’s neighbours. Either they didn’t notice him at all, or they were perturbed enough by his manner to think better of it.

  Which is not to say that a number of people didn’t wonder who he was, what he did, why he did it and so on. But these persons were never to uncover a single definitive fact about him beyond those that were already obvious, such as the numbers of his address or the placement of his nose relative to his eyes. Rumours circulated, but were no more than speculative fictions. Everyone was far too busy pursuing their own life to be bothered with Maximilian’s wraithlike form traipsing through the neighbourhood at odd hours.

  It was only during those lost moments of life, those pale and lethargic hours when people find themselves attempting to kill flies with glowing cigarette ends, or idly leafing through the pages of magazines, that Maximilian’s neighbours pondered again the mystery of who he might be, sometimes even turning their heads to stare at the exterior of his bungalow, as if doing so might enable them to tear away the outward layers of his domain and reveal whatever lay within. But such speculations were short-lived.

  In the period following his first moving into the bungalow, almost every single weekday came to follow the same pattern for Maximilian. He would wake up at 5 A.M. and consume a breakfast consisting solely of soybeans, perform his ablutions, and then leave the bungalow to pursue one or another of his projects. Lunch and dinner would usually be eaten in restaurants, but always in modest or lowly establishments, and then late in the evening Maximilian would return home and practice zazen for an hour inside his one entirely empty room, sitting cross-legged on the floor and staring at a blank white wall for an hour whilst attending closely to both his posture and breathing. Afterwards, he would read for a while, and then go to sleep. Nothing other than a terrible emergency could break this routine. He would feel lost, even nauseated, at the prospect of making do without it—consumed by an overriding sense of displacement and confusion.

  Saturdays would see him dealing with all purely utilitarian chores and administrative activities. Cleaning, shopping, and exercising took most of the day. Afterwards, once evening had descended, he would avoid all revellers and go for long walks along the city’s back streets, solemn undertakings that might last until dawn, during which time Maximilian would contemplate the previous week’s labours, considering how they might be improved, made more efficient, more productive. Staring into the shadows and illuminated windows he came upon, he would seek solutions to his various predicaments.

  Sundays were reserved for reading. He experimented with many different reading venues and positions: cafés, trains, bathtubs, rooftops, and cemeteries; sitting, standing, leaning, suspended in a hammock, balanced against a wall on his head, but finally he came to the conclusion that he was happiest at home, lying on his back on the floor. Maximilian would stare at page after page for ten hours at a stretch, finding that this method allowed him to finish a threehundred-page book in a single day. Consequently, three-hundredpage books tended to become his favourites, and he found himself accumulating quite a few.

  From time to time, Maximilian wondered whether there was something wrong, even perverse, perhaps hypocritical about his reliance on routine. Yes, he did like to control every element of his domestic life, for every last detail to be planned, for every inch of his living quarters to be entirely under his control; and certainly many people would have criticised his lifestyle as being unhealthy, a subject worthy of mockery. But these doubts never lasted very long. Maximilian was content. This was how he wanted to live. The hypocrites were the ones who believed they were any different. (Not, of course, that he had ever actually conversed with any such people, nor been subject to their criticisms.) Most people’s lives were ordered to precisely the same degree. The difference was that he chose to order his life, quite consciously, and in a form that might be termed “idiosyncratic,” not at all on the model of “ordinary” life and its concerns.

  He never really asked himself why he had such a great need for solitude, feeling that there was no other way in which he could comfortably live. Social niceties would steal precious hours away from his work, leaving his creations neglected. A single sentence addressed to Maximilian—even those routinely fired in his direction by shop assistants—could throw him off balance and upset the rhythm of his work for the rest of the day. When he thought about the way in which most people lived, he could not help but recoil. The quotidian world sprawling about him in all directions was enormously depressing, if not terrifying. For him it was a place in which the imagination had been destroyed in favour of empty ritual; his rituals, by contrast, being heavy with purpose. He could not bear to open his mouth there, in that larger world. On some days even to walk down a perfectly ordinary street, populated with shops and traffic and pedestrians, would be enough to topple him into despair. After weeks of forgetting that the quotidian existed, he would come across a certain face or street corner and this would return him forcefully to the lives of others. So often he could separate himself from these lives, holding them at arm’s length, but when he could not continue to do so, however transient his lapse, it often felt as though the ugliness of everyone else’s realities had fallen upon him in some horrible, tumbling profusion, and he would retreat into himself once more.

  Concerning the Utmost Privacy

  (1961)

  . . . wind shrieking into the bare branches behind the black railings . . . the odour of creased green leather seats . . . families remaining entirely silent for the duration of their eating . . . low windows blocked by substantial iron bars . . . twisted leering shadows of doorways . . . short figures peering through keyholes with sly and malevolent glances . . . tiny rooms infused with dampness and the smell of yesterday’s fires . . . cold pale morning light seeping inwards . . . cracked and discarded fragments of porcelain buried amidst the bristling roots . . . thorns scratching the interior shapes of bones . . . lighting the gas stove with the tip of a greasy match . . . flakes of silt rising from the bottom of the canal . . . the needs of the body treated as a matter of simple common sense . . . nights as dark as the inside of a needle . . . an air of lacklustre apathy and indifference . . . the clanking and droning of machinery . . . the low steady drone of empty conversations . . . insipid voices that always sound as if they were reciting rows of statistics . . . thin ice formed across the surface of pavements . . . cats slinking amongst the dark masses of vegetation . . . paranoid intimations of gestures possibly threatening . . . inchoate mumbling and blurting of curses . . . men in suits walking through the gardens of the crematorium . . . dead hair falling onto the floors of barbershops . . . a rusted nail jutting out from a plank in the scrap-yard . . . any concrete enterprise becoming too dismal to contemplate . . . the talkative young married invoice clerk at £9 10s a week less stoppages . . . the decent fellow who is dull and righteous . . . the landlady with her just-got-out-of-bed voice . . . the priest who preaches about expressions of charity . . . the pretty young woman swinging her shopping basket . . . the little boy obsessed with punishments and driven by a desire to escape . . . the spinster woman who gives fierce scowls of disapproval . . . the pensioner who writes out occasional invoices for the local builder . . . the respectable woman on a night out at the theatre . . . the beggar with
no teeth asking pedestrians for cigarettes . . . the deadly and contagious lack of energy . . . a single faded notice board displaced by building subsidence . . . an unknown figure entering through a narrow doorway . . . parcels of greaseproof paper secured with elastic bands . . . salt-coated lips being moistened underneath the glare of strip lighting . . . red plastic carnations displayed in a brown glass vase in the window of an undertaker’s . . . soapy plates stacked up beside the sink basin . . . silence settling over the rectangle of red-brick administration buildings . . . clanking steps of black leather shoes upon the polished floors of corridors . . . hands flicking through large steel filing cabinets . . . classrooms brimming with the confusions and hatreds of puberty . . . blank and inert faces passing each other in the streets . . . blurred dashes of grey and brown . . . leaves shivering against the white sky . . . the rough and bleary smell of a garage . . . curtains taken down from the windows . . . drone of organ music ringing from the interior of a church . . . lunatic eyes staring upwards from the floor of the slaughterhouse . . . blood seeping into a transparent glass tube . . . diesel fumes drifting across an expanse of tarmac . . . dark pools of water gathered in the gutters . . . the tang of oil and dust hanging in the dark air . . . the silent labyrinth of empty Sunday streets . . . layers of old posters peeling away from a brick wall . . . towering grey monuments . . . stark emblems of power . . . hints of evil lurking within the folds of certain faces . . . the military precision of working through the daily routine . . . the clamminess of the insides of coat pockets . . . hot steam issuing from an aluminium spout . . . the need to appear established and resilient . . . newsprint smeared black across bare fingers . . . the odour of gas leaking onto the stairwell of the boarding house . . . sour curdled milk left in the jug placed upon the tea tray . . . pricking a finger on the pin of a cheap broach . . . tension spreading through the stomach muscles . . . lone stragglers lurching through the night streets . . . patches of lichen spreading over stone walls . . . a tide of men and women flooding every day towards the labour exchange . . . streets that have been fashioned and moulded and regulated by money . . . the same products in the same shops purchased by the same people . . . the din of arguing voices in suburban living rooms . . . a pool of brown sauce beside a heap of fried eggs . . . rain streaming and plashing from tall umbrellas . . . running a finger idly down the arm of a chair . . . a soft issuing of poisonous yellow smoke . . . tourniquet and compress applied over the femoral artery . . . standing still and immobile and ugly . . . car headlights twisting and turning through smog . . . a mannequin stripped bare in the department store window . . . words that receive only the most perfunctory nod of the head . . . backs stooped downwards towards the floor . . . chiming cash registers pushed open by tired fingers . . . a tongue sliding across the edge of an envelope . . . carving slices of cold meat for white dinner plates . . . scratched-out faces in a black-and-white photograph . . . moths fluttering around a broken clock-face . . . shoulders bowed by some unknown burden . . . dregs gathered at the bottom of a white cup . . . glint of coins hidden underneath the floorboards . . . resentments that breed for years and become resident in minor details . . . gazing morosely through an open window . . . tossing back and forth underneath cold coarse linen sheets . . . drifting imperceptibly from one location to another . . . a passive acceptance of the amusements of the day . . . an obscure anxiety descending . . . bodies slumped forward over narrow desks . . . squalid habitations secretly returned to day after day . . . penis and testicles drooping and greying . . . pulling out weeds from underneath the flowerbeds . . . once again going complacently through the motions . . . white tablets dissolving inside a glass of water . . . wet prickles of skin rubbed against the rough surface of a thin towel . . . examining dirty fingernails in a pool of light . . . a single sheet of blotting paper on top of a neat stack of documents . . . appalling absences and silences and dreams . . . secret feelings of shame lingering within false expressions . . . forms of teasing that vaguely conceal searing criticisms . . . the heavy and stifling air of nearly empty libraries . . . a wastepaper basket filled with crumpled balls of paper . . . grubby and disordered bedrooms . . . a glass door clouded with fingerprints . . . clouds of black dust hovering in circles . . . commuter trains shunting back and forth in the fog . . . acid-yellow glare of light thrown from a shop window . . . a lone figure diminishing into a blot at the end of an alleyway . . . radio voices echoing against the ceiling of a room . . . the cold dirty water of the municipal swimming pool . . . decaying teeth examined in morning mirrors . . . a shrunken bar of soap left on the side of the bathtub . . . scraping of chairs and table legs against the floor of the refectory . . . attempting to remove a stain from a pair of trousers . . . silent mouths amidst the throng of twitching faces . . . paint peeling away from iron railings . . . buttons fallen from heavy black coats . . . rubbing a dirty cloth over the surface of a trolley . . . stubby fingers grasping the ends of a pipe . . . neglected plants withering on the windowsill . . . dirt spattered across a pair of worn-out leather boots . . . blisters and bruises eased into the warmth of a bathtub . . . bitter flavours gathered in the back of a mouth . . . the constricting and malevolent influence of a society that is in essence corrupt . . . the ever-present likelihood of widespread annihilation . . . the planning and building of identical rows of houses . . . the anodyne pronouncements of advertising rhetoric . . . continuous attempts to impose a false objectivity . . . hoping for a knighthood and a seat on a major board . . . decisions taken from an industrial-relations point of view . . . obeying all commands of seniority . . . opinions that are absolutely final and decisive . . . the progress of a briefcase from one location to another . . . all the usual pastimes and distractions to hide behind . . . drinking glasses of port in upholstered armchairs . . . mink coats and cocktail parties . . . the talk of the town that amounts to so very little . . . falling into a permanent state of degradation . . . the fashioning of a fastidious brutality . . . the achievement of efficiency at any price . . .

  The Faded Glamour of Certain Stairwells

  (1962–1988)

  One day he began to film the city.

  At first this was entirely for the pleasure of the act itself. The instinctive, childlike desire to record, to take pictures. However, soon, and not without a sense of inevitability, his filming led Maximilian towards the creation of an epic work, a project that would last for more than a quarter of a century.

  Drifting around the spaces of London, he would film dead alleyways, abandoned buildings, battered shop façades, crowds of faces. From these beginnings he gradually began to develop a structure and, eventually, a narrative of sorts.

  Soon he became fascinated by the medium and began to attend many weekday film matinées, often sharing the cinema with only five or six other people, languishing amongst the voices of actors echoing against the walls, his feet sinking into the thick carpets, exotic vistas flickering before him. He lost himself on these occasions, forgot about everything else that mattered to him, drifting through the avenues of time.

  Prior to his purchasing a camera, he had never been an advocate of the cinema, believing it inferior to both literature and the theatre. He had thought it was a medium founded entirely on the principles of commerce, propagating illusions and fantasies entirely for the purpose of profit. Later, in the 1960s, it seemed to him that the medium was entering a new phase of its history; many directors were learning to express themselves in highly innovative and startling ways, and it did not take long for him to begin to think of the cinema as the most exciting art form of the moment.

  Within a few days of commencing his own filming he began to understand the extraordinary range and power of the medium, the many creative possibilities it presented to him, its frightening and intoxicating relationship to memory, to the movements and spirals of time, the subject shared by all films.

  Encountering his destiny in the shadows thrown from empty shop windows at dawn, in the eyes of children and the movements of cats,
within the improbable conjunctions of places and objects that he forced together in acts of appropriation, it seemed remarkable that it had taken him so long to discover the extraordinary convulsive beauty of images in motion. Their capacity as media for the recording of emotions had passed him by for so long; now he found himself succumbing to cinema as if it were an opiate, from which a complete withdrawal would be forevermore impossible.

  Always a voyeur of sorts, in discovering the cinema Maximilian had also discovered the finest available means of glutting his appetite for the knowledge of other lives, and so he took to filming people round the clock, but always from a position of strict secrecy, concealing his camera in his car, or inside a shopping trolley laden with goods, or behind a windowpane in a darkened hotel room. Ultimately he saw that he could only guess at what lay behind the faces he filmed, as his camera drifted through the crowded streets, where so many people passed by, oblivious to his activities, disappearing within the measure of an instant.

  Eventually he found himself becoming haunted by the faces of the elderly in particular, the fabric of creases and lines that they lived within, the deep indentations drawn into their foreheads, the many thin rings circling their eyes; sometimes he felt certain that he could detect evidence of psychic wounds there, terrible fears and discomforts—things, in other words, that he felt he could do nothing whatsoever about; a state of affairs which sometimes pained him immensely.