The differences between the Self and the Other start to collapse. In Stoker’s novel, the woman from the village sees Harker at the window and identifies him as the vampire: “Monster, give me my child!”

Still no Spiess. Lunched with Galeen and Greta in Poczamok. Bathed in the river. Raspberries!

The publicity assistant back in Berlin sent Grau an article from the Literarische Welt, which he passed on to me: “Murnau has become a new kind of being who thinks directly in photographs. Murnau is a kind of modern centaur: he and the camera joined to form a single body.” An image lifted from Lasker-Schüler’s image of me as “made of leaf and bark / Of early morn and centaur blood.” The article ends by announcing that “Murnau teaches us to see the modern film; others will teach us to feel it.”

Still no Spiess. The headaches back. The doctors unhappy with my kidneys. Great pain while urinating. The crew sits about and waits. At times I’m ashamed of their confidence. What have I achieved so far?

A single day left to do scenes that should take three or four, which is always how schedules evolve. Wagner points out that for the negative footage the vampire’s carriage must be painted white so it will remain black. In the same way, Schreck must be clothed in white. Multiple disasters and new ideas make the last days on location a constant nightmare of clumsiness. Everyone falls over everyone else while the light slowly disappears. Four of us splash paint over the carriage in a fever. Grau fashions a white cloak out of a bedsheet. Eight in the morning becomes five in the afternoon.

In the night I dreamed of my father, the last time I saw him: on the platform of the Berlin railway station, standing amid the depressed and nondescript second-class passengers. I was leaning out the train window. For a moment we looked at each other; then the train moved off and he disappeared among the crowd. Then I was in a dead woman’s apartment, gazing at the remains of an unappetizing meal, the head and bones of some smoked fish. A sort of ghost meal.

I lay awake afterwards, and scribbled down an idea for a general shot: Hutter looks around the room, which seems to him utterly changed. The damp wallpaper, the stains on the floor, the rough furniture, the depressing well of the courtyard beyond. All these things exude a rank physicality, a bleak reality, a hostility directed at him.

INTERIORS

Spiess is gone. Frau Reger handed me his note a few minutes after I dropped my valise in the front hall. It was typed. Civilization, as I well knew, had become unbearable, and he’d decided to flee from it and build a new life in the South Seas, perhaps the Dutch East Indies.