I began my habit of house-servants five months to the day after Spiess’s departure. Soon after that, Lasker-Schüler asked how I dealt with the paradox of that sort of behavior and my supposed ongoing feelings for Hans. They were not, I told her, the same thing.

Yet the day she asked, I was up all night reliving what I’d done to Hans. The next morning, I arranged for the return voyage of the house-servant of the moment, a boy from Borneo.

Sandri has taken to leaving the house less and less. Recently he’s had to be cajoled even to walk in the park. He refuses all fish and now eats only fruit, the rinds and seeds of which he leaves scattered around the house.

Most of the time he sits by the gramophone, which he reveres, playing over and over again a record from America that fascinates him: “The Vamp of Savannah.”

I’m of two minds about this. He’s erratic enough that his presence in public generates anxiety. He accompanied me to meet a Swiss camera-manufacturer at a nearby hotel, and was instructed to wait near the front desk. After my business, I discovered that Sandri had been put out on the street. The hotel detective said that he’d noticed in the lobby what he’d considered to be a pervert. He wondered if a beating administered by the night manager in the garden out back would be appropriate. I said that if he made it his duty to beat house-servants, I would make it mine to see him off to Brandenburg for five years. He was unfazed. I returned home shaken. Sandri, too, was out of sorts.

Our second day at the studio. Eighteen minutes by car. The new driver is sour and not good-looking. The occasional fond thought for Huber, now off with the Freikorps harassing the French occupation troops in the Ruhr.

The Freikorps: what wicked fairy placed that gift in our cradle?

The approach to the studios in Neubabelsberg has a depressing aspect even on a sunny morning. The carpenters’ and costumers’ shops, the great hall: everything seems temporary and messily utilitarian, scattered across weedy and empty lots. Trash heaps and temporary storage piles surround the buildings. Memories of that wilderness of railway tracks and Hans’s kiss. In the distance, scrubby pines eventually give way to Potsdam.

On the next lot they’re filming Zur Chronik von Grieshuus. Fifty or so day-hires toil on a fortress wall, slopping its facade with mortar. The car drops me at my office opposite the carpenters’ shops, so my day can begin with the endless noise of saws, and the clunk and thunk of wood thrown about.