“Have you noticed,” she asked, “how many of your films have involved a couple jeopardized by a third figure who’s sinister, ambiguous, and male?”

“I didn’t know you practiced film criticism now,” Murnau said.

“Don’t fight,” Paul said. They looked at him and apologized. Lasker-Schüler sighed.

Spiess’s nostrils had always been wet, she remembered. Whenever she ran into him, she was always telling him to wipe his nose.

They let it rest with that image. Whenever they seemed about to make eye contact, one of them looked away. Paul excused himself to go to the bathroom. Murnau by this point assumed that Agnuzzo wasn’t coming.

She asked about Slovakia. It was strewn with fortresses, he told her. It was the perfect place to locate exteriors for the Undead. The Carpathians were too far away. In one town there was an absolute Doré illustration of a ruin, and nearby were mountain ranges out of Friedrich’s early work. They were using as their guiding image for the project a portrait they’d found, all pallor and spidery hands, of a Celsissimus Princeps Esterházy. Justice was represented over his head by scales and a huge scimitar. The local inns were cheap. The cemeteries in the mountain villages had no walls and spread into fields or bordered the roadside.

“Do you remember,” Lasker-Schüler asked, “the fondness he had for that Arabic dish, with the eggs?”

“Hans,” Murnau said. She nodded. He’d loved eggs cooked all night in onion peel. It imparted to them the gentle flavor and color of the onion.

She said she’d known about them from the first moment she’d seen them together. Did he remember? Mary had introduced them in the back garden—here was her boy’s Frisian friend, the one everyone was always trying to get to smile.

An Adonis, Murnau said. Tall and slim, with northern features and beautiful red-blond hair.

A skinny overgrown boy, Lasker-Schüler said. Trying to bury his infinite inhibitions behind a mask of who knew what.

“Have you been working on my epitaph?” he asked.

“On everyone’s, in fact,” she said.

“Jussuf, Prince of Thebes!” one of the schoolboys called over. The other boys swooned away from him. “Come to my tent! My heart fetches roses from your mouth.”

She took no notice of being quoted. She said she’d told Hans, when he’d asked what she thought of his new friend, There’s a boy uninterruptedly at work upon himself.

“What did he say to that?” Murnau asked.

She shrugged.

“When did he ever judge anyone harshly?” she asked.

They looked off together toward the bathroom. “That’s why Paul loved him so much,” he said. “When someone said something cutting, he was always so helpless. He couldn’t speak that language.”

He experienced an unrelated visual memory: instead of replacing broken laces, Hans retied them. The fronts of his shoes looked like festivals of bows.