She talked and they listened, usually in cafés, with Paul asleep in Hans’s lap, Hans stroking his hair. The poem, she believed, was nothing more than the poet’s faulty record of the poetic state; she caught her breath in images. She tried to seduce Hans with the straightforwardness of someone going to market. She worked to enlist Wilhelm’s help, and made use of Paul. Hans spent more time with her alone, at her request, and resisted her advances. They worked together on his poetry.

He’d come around, she told him. She admired what she imagined to be her own touching helplessness. By way of explanation, she said she’d noticed that even the roughest person was conquered by her fear.

Hans called her a child. She responded that she was always being called a child, and that making a child of someone was just as mysterious to her as making an angel of someone—it was like giving with one hand and taking with the other.

She didn’t want a friend, Wilhelm finally told him. She wanted an unconditional surrender.

Hans chose not to answer. Then he said that what they both connected with, when it came to Else, was that longing for a second face.

They received in the post a handbill announcing Hans’s inclusion in a New Poets reading series. Else Lasker-Schüler would introduce him.

Hans’s writing occurred at all hours, day or night. He was able to start and stop at will. He wrote in longhand, looping in his amendations neatly and scratching out deletions with a razor.

Wilhelm had been his primary reader since they’d met. When he’d arrived at Charlottenburg, Wilhelm had considered one of his other callings to have been verse. Hans had expressed admiration for one poem, and had not asked to see another.

The reading was to be held in a common room attached to a Lutheran church in Mariendorf. The night of the reading they splurged and rode the whole route by taxi. Both were silent. Too excited to speak, Hans shuffled his recopied poems in a folder on his lap.

Paul greeted them at the door, wearing a small blue bow tie and holding a carnation for Hans. He was delighted he had something to give.

Three other poets were also on the program. They waited in separate corners to go on. They posed.

Lasker-Schüler said that her husband and some friends were coming.

They sat at the front of a few rows of empty folding chairs. The audience looked to consist of some local artists and a church usher who was keeping an eye on things.

The husband and friends never materialized. Eventually, Lasker-Schüler stopped waiting and announced they would begin. She stood and welcomed those in front of her.