The horror coming slowly, tensed like a predatory animal. A new idea of Grau’s, necessitating a new set at this late date: nothing but the shadow of Nosferatu on the wall of the stairs, mounting with dreadful slowness, then more quickly, an awful quick-footed walk, fingernails dripping, until it pauses beside the door. The hand and fingers extending elastically along the wall. In the room Ellen shrinks before the monster we still don’t see, except for the black shadow of his hand spreading across her white body like ink. She jerks her head down in anticipation of his touch, as her husband had. The shadow fist seizes her heart. And then in the darkness, on the very side of the frame, obscenely unobtrusive, the Nosferatu feeding.

The shooting done. A week’s rest. The unit comes back together one last time to view the rough projection before the final cutting begins. Grau, Wagner, Galeen, Wangenheim, Greta—all of this is now a memory to them, like a party they found puzzling and absorbing but not pleasant.

Galeen torments me with an article in the Berliner Tageblatt, reading for the group: “Of all the film directors, Murnau is the most German. A Westphalian, reserved, severe on himself, severe on others, severe for the cause. Outwardly grim, never envious, always alone, his successes and failures arising from the same source, each of his works complete, authentic, direct, logical, cold, harsh, and absolute, like Gothic art.” Much hooting. Grau suggests it sounds like an obituary.

We view what we have. Some pleasures—the opportunity to render fluid human time, so painful in its rigidity, to arrange and rearrange it, our small triumph over the inexorable. Again struck by how often the camera could see what I couldn’t feel. In that negative footage of the vampire’s carriage driving through a white forest, ground mist that we barely noticed during the shooting has photographed black. Drifting along before the horses’ onrushing hooves, a ghost smoke or dream-vapor, like pestilence itself.

Long stretches of footage so bad no one will comment. Enduring them, I begin to tell myself I can still do what I set out to achieve; yet the faults in the work are mine alone.

In the darkness, Spiess’s absence is more comfortable and familiar. The more he pursued me, the more I restrained my passion for him. This sense of never being at home, with anyone, grows stronger the older I get.

More footage. My concentration dissipates. I remember living in a series of hotels, when I was very small, before Father bought the estate. One small old hotel in particular, by the sea, a little room full of sun in which you could smell the apples and the waves.