In Weisse Sandwüste von Neumexiko she played a cowgirl. First thing, they’d asked, “Can you ride?” “Of course,” she’d answered. Never been closer than roadside ditches in time of war to any horse in her life, but she needed the work. When the moment came to saddle up, it never occurred to her to be afraid of the beast pressing up between her thighs. It was an American horse named Snake. Trained or not, it could have run away with her, even killed her. But they pranced the screen full of the Sagittarian fire, Gretel and that colt, and her smile never drew back.

Here is one of the veils she has shed, a thin white scum, a caustic residue from one recent night in Berlin. “While you were asleep, I left the house. I went out in the street, without my shoes. I found a corpse. A man. A week’s gray beard and old gray suit….” It was lying still and very white behind a wall. She lay down beside it and put her arms around it. There was frost. The body rolled toward her and the wrinkles stayed frozen in the cloth. She felt its bristled face rub her own cheek. The smell was no worse than cold meat from the icebox. She lay, holding it, till morning.

“Tell me how it is in your land.” What woke her? Boots in the street, an early steamshovel. She can hardly hear her tired whispering.

Corpse answers: “We live very far beneath the black mud. Days of traveling.” Though she couldn’t move its limbs easily as a doll’s, she could make it say and think exactly what she wished.

For an instant too she did wonder—not quite in words—if that’s how her own soft mind might feel, under the fingers of Those who…

“Mm, it’s snug down here. Now and then you can pick up something from Them—a distant rumbling, the implied silhouette of some explosion, conducted here through the earth overhead… but nothing, ever, too close. It’s so dark that things glow. We have flight. There’s no sex. But there are fantasies, even many of those we used to attach to sex—that we once modulated its energy with….”

As the dizzy debutante Lotte Lüstig, she found herself during a flood, disguised as a scrubwoman, proceeding downriver in a bathtub with rich playboy Max Schlepzig. Every girl’s dream. Name of the movie was Jugend Herauf! (a lighthearted pun, of course, on the then popular phrase “Juden heraus!”). Actually, all the bathtub scenes were process shots—she never did get to go out on the river in the bathtub with Max, all that was done with doubles, and in the final print it survives only as a very murky long shot. The figures are darkened and deformed, resembling apes, and the quality of the light is peculiar, as if the whole scene were engraved on a dark metal such as lead. Greta’s double was actually an Italian stunt man named Blazzo in a long blonde wig. They carried on a romance for a while. But Greta wouldn’t go to bed with him, unless he wore that wig!