Crosby had been wonderful throughout. Half the time he’d had no tripod, his thin body trying to hold the top-heavy Akeley steady while Murnau directed over his shoulder. One day they’d gotten thirty shots in four hours, in a boat, on a pitching sea, with native actors, and broken cloud cover changing the light every two minutes. Crosby had been the hero of the expedition.

Murnau had told him, before the final falling-out with the Flahertys, that he thought Crosby’s name should go first in the credit titles. Crosby had answered that he thought Tabu should have special discredit titles: “This Film Was Made in Spite of—…”

The forgotten Pal was whining a ledge below because he couldn’t reach them. “I’m here,” Murnau called quietly to him. “I’m here,” he called again, this time in German.

What his art lacked, he knew, was passionate humanity. His love for the world was distant and severe. Three-quarters of his life had had nothing to do with what he’d accomplished professionally.

Even now he was with someone while being almost completely elsewhere. He was a boy, happy to run errands, buy bread, butter, greens, and his father’s tobacco. He was consulting his errand-list. He was carrying two kilos of weisswurst. He was holding his future before him, a magic box with a lethal surprise.

His father was talking. He was speaking to his son Wilhelm, and young Wilhelm studied his voice and reminded himself to value the lessons being offered. In the street outside, his brothers tossed balls and shouted. They splashed through the runoff after the rain.

Where was it his father was shouting from, telling him to bring the hose and do some watering, with everything so dry? Someone was crying. Someone had climbed the tree to pick a basket of cherries. Wilhelm ran over with the hose on his shoulder, but couldn’t find his father. In the garden in the heat, something was twittering. The breeze made small dust devils on the patio.

For the fourteen years since Hans’s death Murnau had betrayed him. He had betrayed himself by pretending he hadn’t. He had cherished his feelings for Hans as something sacred and untouchable and had worked to replicate them in a nearly endless stream of substitutes. He was a man of austere principles without principles. He was a man committed only to a personal art whose inner life never saw the light of day. When he considered the phases of who he had been, every step forward might just as well have been a retreat, and the line he traced of his own silhouette was ever more cloaked. Publicly he had lived a deception. Privately, too. To try to remember where he’d entered the shadows, or where the shadows had entered him, was pointless. The shadows had been there from the beginning.