Grau had been the one who approached Murnau with the idea of Nosferatu. Murnau had invited him to go ahead with the attempt to raise money. The idea of that creature of the shadows—twenty-one or -two, beetle-legged, long-faced, with the hands of an arboreal animal—as a successful film producer astounded him.

On his pad, Paul drew a long, narrow face with fangs.

Murnau said he didn’t know where to begin. He told her that Grau was forever having to restrain himself from hugging someone. He had visionary ecstasies of the sort associated with high fever.

This was the sort of thing Lasker-Schüler always heard about herself.

Was he genuinely connected to the spirit world? she asked.

He owned his own copy of the Malleus Maleficarum, Murnau told her.

She was delighted with the prospect of the utterly rational Murnau having to wrestle with a spook-chaser.

They were quiet during the saucer-rattling noise of the elevated S-Bahn. Murnau looked around for Agnuzzo.

“And what about you?” he asked. “How have you been doing?”

She outlined her latest legal wrangle, involving an attempt to secure a small inheritance from her father. Her father had been a prosperous banker from Elberfeld. She traditionally spoke of her youth as a lost paradise of peace and security, yet was fond of relating that as a four-year-old she’d climbed onto her roof from a third-floor window and called out to passersby below, “I’m so bored!”

While she talked, he exchanged a smile with her son. Paul was happy here, left alone to draw and think, away from the boys with their leather balls and fistfights.

You’re thinking of your own life now, he reminded himself.

“Speaking of Spiess,” Lasker-Schüler remarked apropos of nothing.

“You know he’s moved in?” Murnau finally replied. Everything about where this was headed seemed tiresome and unproductive.

He gave her the short version. He’d been alone since Mary Degele had died. The house was too big for one.

“It was sad about Mary,” she said.

He agreed. In the last years, he told her, there’d been a heartbreaking aspect of guilt to her despair, as if something she’d left undone had caused Hans’s death.

Lasker-Schüler was silent.

They both looked at Paul, having forgotten how much the subject still hurt him.

Spiess was painting the study and both bedrooms, Murnau explained. As part of his agreement for living there.

How was it for him, being there? she asked.

His old apartment had been uninhabitable, Murnau told her. Piles of drawing pads, laundry, soup pots and grills, loose tools, enigmatic and unmatched bicycle parts. His canvases, finished and unfinished. His easel toward the end had straddled the sink.

“And how is it for you?” she asked quietly. Meaning: how was it having him in Hans’s house?