Nosferatu

by Jim Shepard

  He was washed and dressed when Allmenröder finally straggled in, delighted to hear about his success. That evening at mess he toasted Murnau and two others who’d scored victories.

  The French pilots, he reported with annoyance, had singled him out for combat even before some of the greenhorns. The next day, he had his mechanic paint across his top wing Have You Forgotten Me?

  They flew more patrols. Without reinforcements, it was only a matter of time. Things came apart very quickly. One morning they lost three fledglings in a single swoop. Murnau had his tail shot off and crashed into a shallow stream. He rode back to the aerodrome in the back of a truck, the driver taking the turns at top speed while he looked out at the fog and black sky. The mist was broken from time to time by the flashing of the guns.

  Pilots began turning back from sorties. Their commanding officer was brought down into a stand of young birches so that the joystick dislocated his jaw and perforated his palate. On the third sortie of a cold and rainy day, Allmenröder broke left into a purple rain cloud while Murnau broke right, tracers spiraling past their wings, and Murnau never saw him again.

  He was disciplined after subsequent flights for continuing the search on his own, and was grounded as a disciplinary measure. Had they not been in such desperate need of experienced pilots, he would have been sacked.

  There was a service. Murnau was asked to speak. When his turn came, he said only that it was as if the heavens hadn’t consented to return his friend to earth. Afterwards he was told that he’d been inspirational. His response initiated another disciplinary proceeding.

  His Jasta was thrown into the attempt to stop a minor ground-offensive east of Verdun. Asked to fly protection flights and infantry-contact patrols, which meant essentially ground attack, he did so day after day without rest. No fancy acrobatics or stunt flying. Destruction was the goal.

  The French troops were butchered. They hid from him the way the moles he caught as a boy and tossed into his garden disappeared, as if into water. While he machine-gunned, he continued to consider this new way of seeing. In his journal he wrote, I am an icy scientist, and for me their war is a laboratory experiment.

  He crashed again, and again walked away from it. He pin-wheeled around a willow and ended on his head in a pile of sugar beets, branches and struts all around him. The control stick had ruptured his kidney.

  He was back from the field hospital in four weeks, no longer passing blood. But urination involved doubling over in pain.

  The aviators of Jagdstaffel 4 put on a New Year’s variety show. Participation was compulsory. Either because he was such an outsider or because they knew of his theatrical background, the officers of the mess listed him last on the program. He stayed in his quarters until summoned. The emcee introduced him as “That mixture of wandering Gypsy, total misanthrope, and cultivated gentleman, our own grandfather of the theater, Herr Lieutenant Dr. Murnau.”

  He went around the room extinguishing candles, leaving only the light from the fireplace. Then he mounted the platform. He recited “The Pianist of Death.” The fire painted the young faces of his audience. He gave the poem a strange intonation, half pathetic and half sinister. His audience was captivated. Officers drummed their fingers in time to the trum trum trum of the refrain.

  Outside it was dark and cold. For the poem’s final line he drew himself to his full height, stretched his arm toward the airfield, and cried, “There, on that bier, / Behold the last of my sons!”

  There was a storm of applause. He was shoved and pulled back up to the platform for an encore. With tears in his eyes and his back to his comrades, he recited “Three Old Troopers, Round the Hearth of Heaven.”

  He was assured afterwards that he’d never been more a part of the Jasta. The next day he made firm his resolution to desert. He would fly to Switzerland, crash his machine, and absent himself from this war.

  On the appointed morning, he remarked to the squadron blabbermouth before run-up that he was having trouble with his compass. Upon take-off, with his Jasta he headed west, and like his friend Allmenröder, he pitched into a cloud and was never seen again. He flew south-southeast, headed for Andermatt. He was over Switzerland in a matter of hours, flying over lofty woodlands and deep vaporous valleys.

  He descended through veils of mist. Moisture hung in the air. In some valleys lines of hedges bordered fields. He picked out a gentle downward slope at the end of which was a thicket. He brought in the Albatros with a calculated excess of speed, and bounced it along the snow until the thicket tore off its bottom wing.

  He switched off the engine. It sputtered and stopped. Nearby, he could hear a cowbell. The engine ticked and pinged as it cooled. He unfastened his seat harness and climbed from the cockpit.

  The snow crunched underfoot. To the south, he could see cleared fields and a village. Crows were cawing somewhere.

  Art’s many paths lay before him, unrestricted. He had to make up his mind, had to focus his ambition, in order to achieve peace and quiet in his sleep. He had to choose and stick to a path. He had to be hard. He had to hoard his sorrow. Existence would have more to teach, and he’d listen to its secret instructions.

  The war was drinking the blood of millions. Allmenröder was gone. Hans was gone. The war had taken his partner in sadness and, before that, his lover. What warmth he experienced from their memory felt like the last efforts of a solitary, struggling against the closing of the box.

  But he had his work, whatever it would be. Already he could no longer think what he liked; moving images substituted themselves for his thoughts. His experience in the Air Corps had exploded his old homogeneity of vision. From that day onward, he would be free of human immobility. He would be in perpetual movement. He would approach and draw away from things—rising up as if with aircraft—to fall and fly at one with bodies falling and rising through the air. He would re-create those moments of extraordinary power: the freeze of the dive-wind on their faces; the constant swallowing, at altitude, to stop the deafness; the smell of the varnish; the moonlight shining in their struts; the stars between their wings.

  BERLIN, 1921

  He was up all night. He imagined the wind making weathervane soup for the insomniacs. He was sitting at his desk in his study. There was a breeze. The night air filled the room.

  Hans was the anguish that pulled its plow through his sleep. After six years, Murnau was still a house in which the largest room was sealed.

  On nights like that he sorted through involuntary memories with a narcissist’s absorption. Mary Degele had claimed that in the old days on stormy spring nights, they could breathe the fresh sea air, blown all the way in to the city from the North Sea.

  One night years ago, a man had set up a telescope on the main street in Wilhelmshöhe, asking twenty pfennigs a look. Twenty pfennigs to infinity! Fourteen-year-old Wilhelm had had the twenty pfennigs. The moon had swum in the dark lens-circle.

  During Murnau’s flirtation with Veidt, Hans had sent him a cautionary parable printed on a stiff card: Unable to resist, a boy took a bite from a gingerbread heart he’d intended for his sweetheart. To restore its original shape, he was forced to take more bites, and more, each time to no avail, forming his gingerbread successively into a circle, a square, a smaller and smaller heart.

  Under some preliminary correspondence concerning locations, he found a buttered roll on its little dish. Somewhere along the line, he’d evolved into a man of strong opinions and solitary meals.

  Under the roll was his typed response to Film-Kurier’s request, for their Christmas issue, for an autobiography and “dream-list for a cinema of the future.” He was unhappy with the false jauntiness of what he had so far:

  F. W. Murnau, thirty-two years old, sighs like Alexander for more worlds to conquer. He rose from spear-carrier for Max Reinhardt to filmmaking in ten years. He first appeared in the Deutsches Theater in ’09, having won a scholarship after Reinhardt had seen him in an amateur production. He remained in the company until co
nscripted, working as assistant director whenever possible.

  As far as can be discovered, he has looked thirty-five and has been six foot four ever since he was twelve. Under Reinhardt his first roles paid three marks a week. His first star turn involved a battle-axe and a fantastic headpiece that obscured his face. Realizing there was little call for giants onstage, he threw in his lot with motion pictures. Since then he’s been secretary, travel agent, still photographer, publicity writer, film cutter, title writer, handholder, and actor; everything but the night watchman. He began attracting attention by knocking over sets, volunteering for jobs for which he was hopelessly unqualified, and generally treating the serious side of studio life with unconscious humor. He was fired periodically and always reported again the next morning. Soon it became clear that since he had no usefulness in any single area of filmmaking, he had better become the boss, and direct. All the honors heaped upon him since then would form a very small pile.

  And with all respect to Father Christmas, Murnau hasn’t any Utopian wishes to request; he has given up hoping for the perfect script, or the international star who doesn’t aim at being one, or the permanent company of actors at his disposal. But although such presents are beyond the bounds of possibility, Father Christmas’ magic wand could create the instrument which is much more important: the camera that can move freely in space.

  What Murnau dreams of, when he lays his sleepless head to its pillow at night, is the camera that at any moment can go anywhere, at any speed. The camera that outstrips present film technique and fulfills the cinema’s ultimate artistic goal. The first difference between cinema and photography has to be that the viewpoint can be mobile, can share the speed of moving objects. He wants, viewed through mobile space, the encounter of surfaces; stimulation and its opposite, calm; a symphony made of the harmony of bodies and the rhythm of space; the play of pure movement, vigorous and abundant. He wants new modes of expression corresponding to the art of the image-machine, and he seeks them with the utmost perseverance. He wants the camera to be both participant and observer, like the dreamer who acts and watches himself doing so. He wants to move from the geometry of the one-dimensional surface to the geometry that applies in depth.

  He wants to rid motion pictures of what does not belong to them, all that is unnecessary and trivial and drawn from other sources. That is what will be accomplished when films reach the level of art.

  Here then, Father Christmas, is Murnau’s dream: he is in an unimaginably modern theater, gazing spellbound at an immense screen. He sees projected a film by an unknown filmmaker that is awesomely beautiful, inconceivable, and totally unfamiliar. He cannot even imagine how it was composed. He’s not even sure he’s watching a film. He sees, illuminated there, the simplest and most elusive of miracles: the path to himself and his neighbors.

  Mary Degele’s old gardens were still dark. He had not maintained her fastidiousness about keeping after the gardener after her death. The trees emanated a calm, pre-dawn hush. Two clouds hung above them.

  He turned on his lamp. His kidneys felt swollen. He wrote himself a note: Be sure of having used to the full all that’s communicated by immobility and silence.

  He pulled over The History of Witchcraft and opened to the chapter on vampires. The house was quiet. He paged through engravings. The osculum infame, the kiss of shame: witches kissing Satan’s backside.

  For two days he’d been squabbling with Spiess, who wanted to accompany them to Slovakia. He claimed he could be of service. And he could keep Murnau out of trouble. One thing that was very strong in him was fidelity, he said. Promiscuity, too, but also fidelity.

  He wanted to go along on salary, Murnau supposed. Of course, Spiess said. He was doing so as an artist, not a companion. The argument had been suspended.

  He shut The History of Witchcraft. Work on something, he thought.

  He considered an idea for the shot of the spider that Knock would see from his madman’s cell. What about backlighting it? Backlight would eliminate the problem of the transparency of the web in frontal light. With a dark background the strands should become silver and distinct, like frost on a window.

  Fill-light from the front would be enough to give the spider definition. He made a note to call Wagner.

  He moved on to an earlier note concerning the number of suitable bedrooms required for the vampire’s attacks. Who was ever attacked by a vampire in the kitchen? The gowned figure, virginal and exposed, aslant on her bed or dreaming unaware at the window.… Voyeurism was the central thrill of the vampire-story. The heroine left to herself at night, with the vampire at the window, tapping to come in.

  Vampirism was something private and hooded, beyond the individual’s will to control. The arch—the cave-vault, the all-too-visible hiding place—should then be the visual leitmotif of the film. He made a few sketches.

  When he finished, only thirty-five minutes had passed and he was no closer to going back to sleep. He sat gathering wool for some minutes. Then he dug out of his desk Galeen’s treatment, which he hadn’t yet had time to break down systematically.

  NoSferAtu: A TaLe of HoRroR

  by Henrik Galeen

  The old peddler pulls his junk cart from house to house. He comes to a stop before a prim front door. Fortunate people must live here! A young couple opens the door.—“No thank you, we don’t need anything!”—But the peddler refuses to leave. Oh: the beautiful young lady shows interest in the trinkets! Quickly he holds up a ring: a jackal’s skull. Angrily the lady refuses. Again the trembling hand reaches into the boxes. An amulet: a bloated spider clutching a moth. The door begins to swing shut. No wonder, if he begins with death and spiders to a young couple in love! But now, now he has something else for the lovely lady. He holds up a brooch. The woman’s eyes glow. Her husband cannot refuse her request; he buys it. Both gaze upon a tiny portrait in crimson enamel: a pelican suckling her young with her heart’s blood.

  The peddler says, “The symbol of love, and here—” he rummages in the lowest depths of his boxes “—a little book, as a bonus.” He is already gone! The two, frightened, hold the book, on the cover of which are two entwined hearts, resplendent. A book for lovers? “Come, let me see.” Timidly they open it. “A Chronicle of the Death Which Descended Upon Our City in Anno Domini 1839, and Its True Cause.”

  The woman is furious and wants to throw the book away, but as if by the power of magic, a power which seems to radiate from the printed text, the eyes of both are fastened to it.

  In the little town of the narrow streets and crooked gables live Thomas and Ellen Hutter, a happy young couple. Everything is bright and sunny around them. But there is Knock, Hutter’s employer. And one day Knock produces a letter and speaks with disturbing intensity about a Count Orlok, who lives far away in Transylvania. Orlok wishes an address in their town, something “lovely and run-down.” Through the window Knock indicates the sinister ruins across from the Hutter apartment: “Offer him this!”

  Wanderlust! Hutter hurries home to take his leave of Ellen. He entrusts her to his friend Harding and departs.…

  He spends the night in a Carpathian inn before he calls at the castle of the Count. An old book falls into his hands. In it he reads of Nosferatu, the vampire, born out of the blood of the sins of mankind. He wants to turn back, but is no longer able to. And so he enters the castle the following evening. Misgivings swarm about him. Slowly the gates open. In the dark entranceway a figure stands motionless. Waiting. A tremor grips the visitor, but there is no going back. Behind him the gates close.

  In the morning he awakes in an easy chair. A wide hall extends around him. His senses swim. Where was he last night? Was not the master of this castle sitting across from him, in the other straight-backed chair? Were not marvelous foods steaming before him? Did not the master of the castle suck blood out of his hand and neck?

  The next night. He flees through the castle like one persecuted. Quickly into his room. No bolt on the door. He hides himself in bed. A
looming up of the world of horror, of frenzied murder and death, coming toward him, seizing him by the throat. A struggle. But as if the horror hears the terrified Ellen’s faraway cry for her husband, it returns, slowly, to its sepulchral night.

  But it is not exorcised. Its power grows. In the pre-dawn gloom Hutter sees an uncanny carriage in the castle courtyard, a black spectre carrying long, misshapen boxes, rough coffin upon rough coffin. Now he realizes: Ellen is in danger! And with the last of his strength he enacts his escape, down a sheer precipice.

  From the east it draws near. In Galicia, in Varna, in Constantinople, wherever the mysterious ship moors, rats appear, and Death rages. The corpses have marks on their necks which no one can explain. The Plague is coming. It is a race between Hutter and his destiny. He hurries from town to town, lashed by fear, as if he could outrun the horror. Only one person is composed: Ellen. Knock has been committed to a madhouse.

  The Death breaks out among the ship’s crew. One after the other is wrapped in cloth and dropped into the sea. The captain and mate are finally alone. Then it gushes forth—black, like a terrible upwelling—rats and more rats. And behind them, the Nosferatu. Insanity in his face, the mate jumps overboard. The captain lashes himself to the wheel, and standing thus awaits the unthinkable.

  The storm howls through the narrow streets of the little town. The sea stalks the shore like an enraged beast. A shadow overhangs the waves: a sail, a ship coming ever closer.

  The storm abates. Noiselessly the ship glides into the harbor. It is still. Rats clamber from its hold. A form with a coffin walks forth.

  In the madhouse Knock pulls himself up to the bars of his window, and murmurs: “The Master is near! The Master is near!…”

  Hutter arrives that very night. Ellen! Ellen! Finally he presses her to his breast. But then he looks into her eyes: the joy has died away. He doesn’t understand. Has the race not been won? Around her the glow of the room, but Ellen shakes her head, knowing that outside stands a form with poisonous rat’s teeth which has been watching their window for a long time.