One night when the performance was over and the audience of fifteen had slowly begun to put on their coats, August, who had silently come out to take a seat and watch the last few minutes, heard a young woman say to another woman: “It’s remarkable, but I think I could watch her night after night and never have enough. But I wonder how they manage. The man who runs this place is a martyr.” “Oh, but you know what they say,” her friend replied. “It seems this Hausenstein has a finger in more than one pie. I’ve heard he runs the Black Boot—and, my dear, I can assure you it is not a maison de souliers.”

August had a sensation that the wind had just been knocked out of him. At the same time, his heart was beating violently, blood was rushing through him. The figures were not the same, but he knew there had been something familiar about them: the extremely well-rendered flesh. Feeling a little dizzy, and with a strange tremor in his stomach, he set off in search of Hausenstein. The ticket woman at the Black Boot, who remembered August, seemed to evade his eyes; no, she hadn’t seen Herr Hausenstein recently. August was relieved to see that the artificial rose had been replaced by a bunch of real violets, rather drooped and faded in the warm, oppressive air. He bought a ticket and entered the smoky hall. Every seat was taken, people stood against the walls. Nothing had changed: the six automaton girls in their boots and stockings lumbered about the red-lit stage. Pushing his way past people standing in the aisle, who strained around him to see, August made his way to a little stairway at the left of the stage that led through a curtain to the door of a dressing room. The door was locked, but when he rapped it was opened quickly by a thin, flour-pale man in suspenders and shirt sleeves who was holding by the ankle a naked leg in a black boot. “I’m looking for Hausenstein,” said August, who saw that the room was empty. “Who the devil are you?” said the man, but August had already left. Perhaps he was crazy, after all it was only a rumor…. Out on the street he breathed deep, wiped the back of his hand slowly across his closed eyes, then set off for the Zaubertheater. He had not even locked the outer door: it could have been vandalized. In the dark empty theater, lit only by dim gas jets, he stumbled over the leg of a chair. “So there you are,” said Hausenstein, emerging from a wing onto the stage. “I’ve been trying to get hold of you. Rather careless of you to leave the—” “You make them,” said August, and sat down exhausted in the front row. Up on the stage Hausenstein appeared to freeze; August had the impression that he would move off jerkily, with a faint whirring sound. But Hausenstein was a far more convincing figure: his motions were superbly smooth, though with a telltale sense of brilliant contrivance. “I was wondering how long it would take you to congratulate me,” he remarked, stepping forward and sitting down on the edge of the stage so that his legs dangled a few feet before and above August. “Besides, I don’t precisely make them: I oversee. But you should have recognized my work—I’d know yours anywhere.”