He brought his face close. He smelled like candlewicks. Murnau held his breath. Spiess licked his finger and glossed it gently over Murnau’s lips and back across his gums. He leaned in to Murnau’s ear and whispered something about a priestly rite.

“This is demonic,” Murnau murmured.

Spiess was already undressed. He said quietly that the more elevated a man was, the more he was influenced by demons.

Murnau didn’t tell him to stop. He’d always assumed that a certain feeling for beauty would serve him in place of virtue, and render him immune to the coarser solicitations. But he lay there in the dark enjoying what was happening, reminded of Medea with Jason: shame holding her still while shameless desire urged her on. Spiess freed him from his clothes as if unwrapping glassware.

Murnau left while it was still dark. He stood outside Spiess’s apartment in the frigid blue light, matting his hair down and smelling his hands. Someone’s milk delivery had shattered on the stoop because of the cold. He thought, The frivolous finds eloquence in relation to the important because of what it debases and destroys.

The next morning, Spiess met Hans on the way to Murnau’s apartment. Murnau heard them laughing as they came up the stairs. Spiess was saying, “Now where do we meet an original nature? Where’s the man who has the strength to be true, to show himself as he is?” as Murnau opened the door.

They said their hellos, and stood about in the entryway like spear-carriers who had forgotten their blocking. Hans had his hands in his armpits to warm them. “Today we celebrate the regeneration of the sun!” Spiess finally said, and crossed to the window and drew up the blinds. Hans, in mid-smile, saw Murnau’s face and understood.

If Murnau could have forgiven himself for everything else, he could not have forgiven his responsibility for that moment. What they both understood was how inevitable the moment had been.

He watched Hans’s contentment transformed into the damaged wariness of a child’s understanding that his loved ones weren’t motivated only by selflessness. Hans left the apartment and thumped back down the stairs.

Hans was billeted in various places, and it took him three months to answer Wilhelm’s letters. When Spiess made a joke about the Foreign Legion, Murnau nearly struck him.

We’re not forced into our mistakes by the maneuverings of outside agents, he wrote in his journal; our vices are capable of generating fantastic illusions and idiocies all by themselves.

To Hans he wrote about Lasker-Schüler, who had heard about his betrayal. He wrote about Marc, off at the front himself, and his insistence that the war was a clarion-call waking the sleeping and the lazy. He was still painting blue oxen, now on postcards.