He smiled as if the trace of someone were the same thing as his presence.

Hans had had to absorb his hypochondria, his sulks, his domestic crises. They once went round to shops for half a day to replace some missing Brazilian coffee.

Hans had called Murnau’s sore throats symptoms of the basic untruthfulness of his life.

The three military boys stopped by on their way out. They expressed their sorrow that Lasker-Schüler hadn’t risen to their offer. They would’ve shown her a good time.

She thanked them and asked them to please go away.

The two of them waited for Paul. Talking about Hans made her visibly more impatient with Murnau. He knew she blamed him for Hans’s presence in the Army in the first place. She’d tried to talk him out of joining up when she’d first heard what Murnau had done. After Hans had been killed, she’d responded to one of Murnau’s distraught letters with, So now it’s Murnau the Ascetic, cut off from the world. Even his best friends cannot understand his grief. Well. Get over it. Everyone goes home to his dead heart.

She seemed to be reading his face. “I always meant to ask you,” she said. “Did you know what his last letters to me were like? Did he ever write to you about suicide?”

He looked at her. He was without speech. The door had swung open onto a plain.

“I thought you’d known,” she said. “I thought you’d known about it.”

Something blocked the light. Someone was standing over them, sweating.

Agnuzzo. When Paul came back to the table, the two of them stood looking at one another.

Agnuzzo asked for forgiveness. First one cab, then another had broken down. Who were the mechanics who maintained such wrecks? He’d nearly run the last hundred meters.

He turned to Lasker-Schüler, extending a hand, and said he was honored.

She pointed at him, looking at Murnau. “Who is this?” she asked.

Murnau had his hands on each side of his head to hold it where it was. The café righted itself. “This is Herr Agnuzzo,” he said with some hoarseness.

Agnuzzo explained that he had the privilege of having invested in Herr Murnau’s most recent film.

Lasker-Schüler stood, her eyes lowered as if in shyness. Paul looked at her, waiting. “And my lips parted in shy hesitation,” she recited. “Like poisonous flowers that do the devil’s bidding …” She ran her palms up Agnuzzo’s shirtfront, took a collar in each fist, and pulled. Buttons pinged around the room. Agnuzzo’s shirt was opened to the sternum. “Sodomite!” she called. “Creature of Darkness!” She let him go, then retrieved her rucksack, crossed her arms against his taint, and left the table with Paul.