I’m a little boy again. We work in silence. Röhrig occasionally gestures as to where he wants something to go. I’m reminded of something Herlth said: that this work is a kind of intoxication for me, an enchantment with process that’s familiar only to the research scientist or the surgeon during an operation. I spend twenty minutes I could have spent more profitably elsewhere on my hands and knees beside a Lilliputian crossing signal. If my brothers could see this: our little theaters in Wilhelmshöhe come again to life. Röhrig maintains his silence but in his own way seems pleased by my attention. Herlth returns with sketches and his figures-notebook and draws him back to the more pressing problem of the skyscrapers. Their crew slowly assembles around them. I give up on the miniature weeds, my hands spotted with sticky glue and fibers.

By the camera shed, I have to negotiate the set of the back steps leading to the doorman’s apartment. The steps are more suitable to a line of heralds than a petit-bourgeois back garden. What are they thinking? In a pocket notebook I write, as I walk, Steps—???

Beside the shed is the field lined with parked cars and carts. Every so often, small boys are chased away halfheartedly by the retired policeman hired to oversee the lot.

Inside it’s badly ventilated. Some idiot has painted the corrugated roof black. Though large fans are blowing, everyone’s sweating like a horse anyway. Freund and his assistants are working on what looks like a child’s slide. All the exhausting preparatory work, without which the true work would be impossible! The camera operator is to sit on a greased wooden platform inside the slide. One of the assistants is testing it with a camera that’s long since been cannibalized for spare parts. Two others on the scaffold give him a shove, and he travels a foot or so and stops. They haul him back to the top, grease the slide more liberally, and give him a rougher shove. He flies off and bounces on the cement floor, the box frame of the camera flying apart like a prank substitute.

Freund huffs up the ladder for a look. His first assistant makes a quiet suggestion about raising the lip of the slide. Freund doesn’t answer, and instead sends his fourth assistant across the room for the toolbox. The boy is lanky, hard of hearing, and open-mouthed. We watch him hunt for the toolbox. He gets low to bring his head closer to the search. He drifts. “You know, masturbation is a dreadful thing,” Freund finally murmurs. The boy colors at our laughter.

I’m late for the last bit of casting, the role of the doorman’s daughter.