The audience laughed affectionately. Apparently this was the sort of thing she did.

“Is that a street sign, Else?” someone called, referring to the arrow. There were boos and whistles and laughter.

“So often it’s the woman in whom awareness resides,” Lasker-Schüler said comfortably. “The man, stripped of his power, gazes on, inadequate.”

Laughter and cheers.

Her first piece was a dialogue with a wood grouse. Wilhelm made a list of things to do for the next day. On the floor in front of his mother, Paul described loops in the air with his glider. Then, in a clear, full voice, she recited: “Your sinful mouth’s my burial crypt / Narcotic in its sweetness, fragrant-lipped, / So that my virtues fall asleep. / I drink with drunken senses from its well / And will-lessly, sink into its deep, / With radiant thoughts descending into hell. / My lips are parted in shy hesitation, / Like poisonous flowers that do the devil’s bidding.”

After that, the two friends saw her whenever she read anywhere within reach. Their enthusiasm continued unabated for nearly a year. Each occasion was different. One recital in a gallery was accompanied by bells, flutes, and a man who made occasional gasping sounds; for another she stood in a deep box while an assistant continually poured dirt over her. Her voice was insinuating, breathy, and expressive. At the end of every reading she came over to them, leading Paul by the hand. Hans became the only person with whom the boy seemed at ease.

She and Hans exchanged poems, and she proclaimed herself prostrate before his talent. She began calling him “Tristan.” She dedicated poems to him, and was capable of producing one on the spot. Her first to Hans began In your blue soul / The night places her stars. In place of a hello, she took to reciting it with her eyes closed.

She was a bottomless source of gossip. She told spectacular and unlikely stories about the grandest figures. She interrogated Hans and Wilhelm about the True Place of Poetry and Theater in the modern world. She also held forth with intelligence and passion on Hans’s writing. Her encouragement gave him great hope, and her patronage generated public readings and the interest of reputable publishers.

She struck Wilhelm at first as one of those annoying café artists always on the hunt for shattering emotional experiences. But when he ventured to share that opinion, Hans ignored him.

Whatever her weaknesses—and some of the poems, they agreed, testified to a total softening of the brain—Hans maintained that at a time in which the love poem had become an endangered anachronism, she’d restored the form to great beauty.