It’ll be his duty throughout this project to rein in my impatience in the same way.

Our watchword will be simplicity, achieved through the fullest possible realization of our technical resources. Our ambition is to photograph thought.

Principal technical work at the studio began yesterday. I announced the time for the next day’s organizational meeting and pep talk as six a.m. It seemed to fit the overall fanaticism of the company. The assembled stagehands answered in one voice, “Jawohl!”

After dinner, a walk in the park to clear my head. Sandri accompanied me.

The police have taken notice of my preference for exotic young house-servants. Sandri is an especially intriguing Malaysian. Each house-servant lasts only a few months before he aches to return home, wherever that might be—Borneo, Java, the Solomons. I pay their way. In the meantime, they build up a savings to take back with them. Many have families.

There have been awkwardnesses. Frau Reger has been rigid with disapproval since this practice started. But she runs the household and her loyalty is firm. She hasn’t offered her resignation, and I haven’t requested it.

Last night I found him looking through these journals. He was stretched out in my morning robe across my bed, paging around. Later I found in the margins next to some of my sketches peculiar patterns of lines and circles.

The city still frightens him. When we have time together, he wishes to visit the park. He likes to inspect new areas and follow different paths, which in the Grunewald is not difficult. We periodically pass the Morals Police, who devote a sizeable part of their force to the city parks. They travel in pairs, lingering by shadowy thickets or resting amiably on benches. They’re instructed to proceed with the greatest circumspection, since for them “a hundred omissions are preferable to a single error” in terms of accusations.

Nevertheless, there’s always a tremor when they fall into step behind us.

When we went by car to the Friedrichstrasse to buy a new hall carpet, he was fascinated with the prostitutes. I was astonished at the speed with which he recognized them; I’m never really sure. The odd restraint of the Berlin prostitute creates a tension of not knowing which itself is perversely exciting. The slow walk alongside, the willingness to catch one’s eye, and yet the seeming lack of interest: perhaps that young girl is only window-shopping? The siren with carmine lips and Egyptian eyes turns out to be a mother with three in tow; the sprite from a children’s book turns out to be soliciting. After the war some of the younger prostitutes wore widows’ veils, and refused to stay in certain districts, so that everywhere the streets were suffused with a pervasive erotic ambiguity.