Late afternoons feature a stream of visiting strangers, as if on an incoming tide. Arranged by Pommer in hopes that the society pages might provide coverage. A baron, two bankers, a large Pole whom no one can place, a conductor from a provincial orchestra, and a dancing countess—all visit as if stranded with no intention of leaving. They’re all fascinated with Mayer, and frightened of Freund. The conductor is eager to discuss his theory of music-numerology with me because of certain structural patterns in my earlier films. Ufa executives also parade through to show their wives and mistresses how a big-time production is run. As if we needed any additional chaos. Still: “Keep smiling!” said the bird to the worm.… One of the visitors turns out to be the long-lost Lasker-Schüler, unsurprisingly in need of money. As far as my concerns go, money is no problem, but time is, and naturally she needs to explain in detail why she finds herself in such a state. She recounts a hectic series of recent affairs and claims that because of them, God has cured her with “the icy calm of not loving.” Mayer, in the room for this announcement, sighs like a steam-hoist and leaves.

She’s decked out in a fez and what looks like a chain-mail bustier. I ask about Paul. She answers that she’s putting art aside for a while, to devote herself more fully to human matters.

Paul, it turns out, has developed tuberculosis. She was forced to sell what little they had to pay for his rest cures. Meanwhile he announced that he wants nothing to do with her; in the spring, once he’s twenty-one, he wants to clear out and go round preaching with the Anabaptists or the vegetarians. She’s unsure which.

Her problem, she says, has always been that her heart has played the leading role in her life. She reminds me that as a very little girl she alarmed her mother one night by seeing her pulsing heart hanging dark red on the doorpost of her playroom.

I keep her feet moving toward the door. I’ll have my banker call her, I insist. He’ll arrange for whatever’s necessary. At the moment, though, an unavoidable bit of business—a crucial meeting, for which I’m already late—and she’s out the door. My assistant appears, ready to show her out.

I make my goodbyes. Will she be around once all of this monstrousness has ended, in the late fall? She will, she says, and leaves it at that.

Back in my office, with the door shut between us, I hear her dismiss my assistant: she can find her own way out. Once his footsteps recede, she asks herself: “What am I going to do?” There’s a pause. “What am I going to do?”

I open the door to call her back in, but she’s gone.