Nosferatu

by Jim Shepard

  On the ship, no living creatures. At the wheel, the dead captain, his throat torn. The logbook. Plague! The drummer goes through the streets and spreads the news. Windows are closed. But the horror is not vanquished. It rages in the city. A man without hope chalks crosses on doors, the sign: no one lives here any longer.

  Knock escapes from the madhouse. The anger of the masses turns on him.

  In the book that Hutter has brought back from Transylvania, it is written: “Only when an innocent woman makes him forget the first crow of the cock will he disintegrate in the light.” Ellen knows: it is not the Plague. In the ruin across the street it crouches, and every night its eyes stare across at her.…

  In the night she comes to a decision. Sends her husband away. Opens the window. Watches it approach. It seizes her. Hands claw her body. Hour upon hour passes: the unholy bliss of devils. Suddenly, outside, the first crow of the cock. The ghastly hands try to free themselves. But she entwines herself more tightly around her tormentor. And there: the sun!

  The horror rises up. Its limbs writhe and dissolve. It disintegrates in the light.

  In its place, a pestilential mist, which itself disperses.

  In the little room, the sun breaks through. “The knowing person has conquered the incomprehensible, at terrible cost.”

  Once again, the cozy corner in the little apartment belonging to the young pair. They have been sitting the entire night bent over the book, shaken by the tragedy unrolling there before them. The morning is already dawning!

  Both stare with unseeing eyes, dread in their expressions. But the husband gathers his courage and hurries to the window. Opens it! The young day gilds the crooked gables of the town!

  “Come, my love, let us enjoy the light—!” With a single motion he takes the book and brooch and flings both emphatically out the window. They embrace.

  Life has claimed them again!

  He spent a few minutes dealing with his despair at the amount of work still to be done. A few moments seemed inspired. Others seemed wrongheaded. Films born in the head expired on paper, only to be revived in the shooting and editing, like those Oriental paper flowers that bloom when placed in water.

  It was five-thirty. Below, in the kitchen, the teapot whistled faintly.

  He had breakfast with The History of Witchcraft. Frau Reger served, with an occasional glance at the illustrations. Her expression was that of a nanny who’d found her charge sitting in his own waste. Spiess remained asleep.

  Murnau was getting ready to leave when Spiess finally stirred. He usually made large, groaning sounds. It brought to mind animals at a water hole.

  Murnau had an appointment with Lasker-Schüler. One of the film’s backers had been balking at the lack of receipts and accounting. Why there was a lack of receipts and accounting wasn’t clear; on that point Grau was evasive. The backer was an entrepreneur of ladies’ shoes named Agnuzzo, who had recently let slip that he had for years been smitten with Else Lasker-Schüler. Grau had immediately used Murnau to arrange a meeting. A bad idea, since she detested that sort of thing.

  During the drive into town, Murnau brooded about Hans. The chauffeur was a beautiful and silent boy named Huber. The car was an American Ford, maroon and cream.

  He and Lasker-Schüler had been largely out of touch for over a year, for one reason or another. She always needed money. Her novel was still selling and her verse play had had a healthy run, but she was endlessly cheated, and spent money the way she did everything else, refusing to calculate the consequences.

  She and Paul lived in pensions and, occasionally, cafés. Often she was evicted from her table for failing to place an order. He’d heard she’d been caught with her hand on a financier’s billfold, and had escaped by claiming it had been guided by an archangel. She’d been arrested at the Zoo Station for being a public nuisance, orating for coins in what she claimed was Arabian.

  They had agreed to meet at the Romanische. On the opposite side of the square, the Kaiser Wilhelm Church was ringed with street peddlers. Traffic was bumptious and squawky. On the sidewalk, table artists dashed off caricatures in which everyone ended up looking like Conrad Veidt. Most of the customers were schoolboy bohemians, with the occasional young girl with her Modern Woman haircut and copy of Die Koralle thrown in.

  Lasker-Schüler was inside, in a telephone booth yelling into the receiver. He assumed he knew what she was up to. The week before, one of the Mosse papers had published a Where Are They Now? piece claiming that her destitution had reduced her to having Paul sell picture postcards from table to table. This looked like her way of negotiating a retraction with the features editor.

  She hammered the receiver against the mahogany booth and then shouted back into it. They didn’t know what they’d done to her! Now shithead tourists from the Ku’damm came round just to offer food. She was like a nature park.

  She calmed to listen to their explanation. She should kill them, she finally said. She should come to their bed at night and lay them open from chin to breastbone. She’d find their address. Did they hear her?

  A young English couple viewed the performance with delight. This was why they’d come to Berlin. Lasker-Schüler offered them a cupped breast.

  She slammed the phone down and stepped from the booth. She smiled. On the way over to him, she flopped down at a table from which three boys from military school had been staring. She moved her hand before one as if conjuring something out of his face. “O fortunate child,” she chanted. “I am an Oriental Daughter of Joy.”

  When she stood they hooted for her to stay. Murnau met her halfway to his table and she gave him a hug. She was damp with sweat and a foot shorter. “If it isn’t Ulrich the Helmet,” she said.

  For a while Hans had started in on her nickname game, as well. He’d called Murnau Bayard, the Knight Without Reproach.

  She looked lovely, Murnau told her.

  And didn’t Paul? she wanted to know. Paul sat miserably in the far corner, drawing.

  She loved him completely, she lamented, and yet she dragged him into these filthy holes.

  He was using a blue pencil on an oversized art pad. Hans had been so impressed with his talent and moved by his plight that he’d left a thousand marks in his will to further the boy’s training. The money had long since disappeared, only God knew where.

  She still had beautiful skin. She was wearing a leather cap, and the heat made her face shimmer with perspiration. Bracelets of turquoise and tourmaline jangled from her elbows to her wrists.

  What air the Romanische provided, submarine crews would have found insupportable. She pulled up a chair. Murnau pulled over another, for Agnuzzo. “Who’s that for?” she asked. “Hans?”

  “I’m sorry,” she said when he didn’t respond.

  Paul came over and joined them. She asked how Murnau had been sleeping. She’d written about him that his insomnia made him as dull as a block of wood and as restless as a forest animal. She had something for him, she said, and pulled from a rucksack beneath the table a leaflet advertising a lecture by a Dr. Knax on “Wanking as Mass Murder.” She was always teasing him like that.

  When he asked what news she had, she told him that the day before she’d experienced a transformation into a Negress from primordial times. On her body had been printed a message in an unknown alphabet.

  “The people behind us in line were alarmed,” Paul added.

  She wanted to know what it was like working with Grau. She didn’t much like him, and called him the Gateway to the Occult. Still, she was curious because he was intense and secretive and provincial. His paintings had a disturbing and sinister dissociative pith to them, like Kubin’s.

  Grau had been the one who approached Murnau with the idea of Nosferatu. Murnau had invited him to go ahead with the attempt to raise money. The idea of that creature of the shadows—twenty-one or -two, beetle-legged, long-faced, with the hands of an arboreal animal—as a successful film producer astounded him.

  On his pad, Paul
drew a long, narrow face with fangs.

  Murnau said he didn’t know where to begin. He told her that Grau was forever having to restrain himself from hugging someone. He had visionary ecstasies of the sort associated with high fever.

  This was the sort of thing Lasker-Schüler always heard about herself.

  Was he genuinely connected to the spirit world? she asked.

  He owned his own copy of the Malleus Maleficarum, Murnau told her.

  She was delighted with the prospect of the utterly rational Murnau having to wrestle with a spook-chaser.

  They were quiet during the saucer-rattling noise of the elevated S-Bahn. Murnau looked around for Agnuzzo.

  “And what about you?” he asked. “How have you been doing?”

  She outlined her latest legal wrangle, involving an attempt to secure a small inheritance from her father. Her father had been a prosperous banker from Elberfeld. She traditionally spoke of her youth as a lost paradise of peace and security, yet was fond of relating that as a four-year-old she’d climbed onto her roof from a third-floor window and called out to passersby below, “I’m so bored!”

  While she talked, he exchanged a smile with her son. Paul was happy here, left alone to draw and think, away from the boys with their leather balls and fistfights.

  You’re thinking of your own life now, he reminded himself.

  “Speaking of Spiess,” Lasker-Schüler remarked apropos of nothing.

  “You know he’s moved in?” Murnau finally replied. Everything about where this was headed seemed tiresome and unproductive.

  He gave her the short version. He’d been alone since Mary Degele had died. The house was too big for one.

  “It was sad about Mary,” she said.

  He agreed. In the last years, he told her, there’d been a heartbreaking aspect of guilt to her despair, as if something she’d left undone had caused Hans’s death.

  Lasker-Schüler was silent.

  They both looked at Paul, having forgotten how much the subject still hurt him.

  Spiess was painting the study and both bedrooms, Murnau explained. As part of his agreement for living there.

  How was it for him, being there? she asked.

  His old apartment had been uninhabitable, Murnau told her. Piles of drawing pads, laundry, soup pots and grills, loose tools, enigmatic and unmatched bicycle parts. His canvases, finished and unfinished. His easel toward the end had straddled the sink.

  “And how is it for you?” she asked quietly. Meaning: how was it having him in Hans’s house?

  “Have you noticed,” she asked, “how many of your films have involved a couple jeopardized by a third figure who’s sinister, ambiguous, and male?”

  “I didn’t know you practiced film criticism now,” Murnau said.

  “Don’t fight,” Paul said. They looked at him and apologized. Lasker-Schüler sighed.

  Spiess’s nostrils had always been wet, she remembered. Whenever she ran into him, she was always telling him to wipe his nose.

  They let it rest with that image. Whenever they seemed about to make eye contact, one of them looked away. Paul excused himself to go to the bathroom. Murnau by this point assumed that Agnuzzo wasn’t coming.

  She asked about Slovakia. It was strewn with fortresses, he told her. It was the perfect place to locate exteriors for the Undead. The Carpathians were too far away. In one town there was an absolute Doré illustration of a ruin, and nearby were mountain ranges out of Friedrich’s early work. They were using as their guiding image for the project a portrait they’d found, all pallor and spidery hands, of a Celsissimus Princeps Esterházy. Justice was represented over his head by scales and a huge scimitar. The local inns were cheap. The cemeteries in the mountain villages had no walls and spread into fields or bordered the roadside.

  “Do you remember,” Lasker-Schüler asked, “the fondness he had for that Arabic dish, with the eggs?”

  “Hans,” Murnau said. She nodded. He’d loved eggs cooked all night in onion peel. It imparted to them the gentle flavor and color of the onion.

  She said she’d known about them from the first moment she’d seen them together. Did he remember? Mary had introduced them in the back garden—here was her boy’s Frisian friend, the one everyone was always trying to get to smile.

  An Adonis, Murnau said. Tall and slim, with northern features and beautiful red-blond hair.

  A skinny overgrown boy, Lasker-Schüler said. Trying to bury his infinite inhibitions behind a mask of who knew what.

  “Have you been working on my epitaph?” he asked.

  “On everyone’s, in fact,” she said.

  “Jussuf, Prince of Thebes!” one of the schoolboys called over. The other boys swooned away from him. “Come to my tent! My heart fetches roses from your mouth.”

  She took no notice of being quoted. She said she’d told Hans, when he’d asked what she thought of his new friend, There’s a boy uninterruptedly at work upon himself.

  “What did he say to that?” Murnau asked.

  She shrugged.

  “When did he ever judge anyone harshly?” she asked.

  They looked off together toward the bathroom. “That’s why Paul loved him so much,” he said. “When someone said something cutting, he was always so helpless. He couldn’t speak that language.”

  He experienced an unrelated visual memory: instead of replacing broken laces, Hans retied them. The fronts of his shoes looked like festivals of bows.

  He smiled as if the trace of someone were the same thing as his presence.

  Hans had had to absorb his hypochondria, his sulks, his domestic crises. They once went round to shops for half a day to replace some missing Brazilian coffee.

  Hans had called Murnau’s sore throats symptoms of the basic untruthfulness of his life.

  The three military boys stopped by on their way out. They expressed their sorrow that Lasker-Schüler hadn’t risen to their offer. They would’ve shown her a good time.

  She thanked them and asked them to please go away.

  The two of them waited for Paul. Talking about Hans made her visibly more impatient with Murnau. He knew she blamed him for Hans’s presence in the Army in the first place. She’d tried to talk him out of joining up when she’d first heard what Murnau had done. After Hans had been killed, she’d responded to one of Murnau’s distraught letters with, So now it’s Murnau the Ascetic, cut off from the world. Even his best friends cannot understand his grief. Well. Get over it. Everyone goes home to his dead heart.

  She seemed to be reading his face. “I always meant to ask you,” she said. “Did you know what his last letters to me were like? Did he ever write to you about suicide?”

  He looked at her. He was without speech. The door had swung open onto a plain.

  “I thought you’d known,” she said. “I thought you’d known about it.”

  Something blocked the light. Someone was standing over them, sweating.

  Agnuzzo. When Paul came back to the table, the two of them stood looking at one another.

  Agnuzzo asked for forgiveness. First one cab, then another had broken down. Who were the mechanics who maintained such wrecks? He’d nearly run the last hundred meters.

  He turned to Lasker-Schüler, extending a hand, and said he was honored.

  She pointed at him, looking at Murnau. “Who is this?” she asked.

  Murnau had his hands on each side of his head to hold it where it was. The café righted itself. “This is Herr Agnuzzo,” he said with some hoarseness.

  Agnuzzo explained that he had the privilege of having invested in Herr Murnau’s most recent film.

  Lasker-Schüler stood, her eyes lowered as if in shyness. Paul looked at her, waiting. “And my lips parted in shy hesitation,” she recited. “Like poisonous flowers that do the devil’s bidding …” She ran her palms up Agnuzzo’s shirtfront, took a collar in each fist, and pulled. Buttons pinged around the room. Agnuzzo’s shirt was opened to the sternum. “Sodomite!” she cal
led. “Creature of Darkness!” She let him go, then retrieved her rucksack, crossed her arms against his taint, and left the table with Paul.

  Agnuzzo recovered his poise and looked at Murnau with delight. Murnau looked back, his hands still propping up his head. All aspects of Agnuzzo’s expression made clear that the meeting had been everything that he’d been hoping for and more.

  NOSFERATU, EINE SYMPHONIE DES GRAUENS

  EXTERIORS

  Six weeks of exteriors: the Carpathians, the Baltic towns of Wismar, Rostock, and Lübeck, as well as ocean vistas of Heligoland and the Frisian Islands in the North Sea. All shooting, exterior and interior, must be finished by November 1921. We begin here, in Czechoslovakia. Half the company has yet to arrive; those who have are filled with questions. Nothing of course has gone as planned. To add to the confusion there are my daily visits to foreign doctors, to say nothing of the visits of nurses to me. What time I have is often expended in elegiac dreams about H—. But already the film takes me from the soft anguish of idleness and drives me from any room where I cannot work.

  7/12/21. This is intended to be for the patient readers of Der Querschnitt the journal of a filmmaker’s progress: an ongoing chronicle, from rough notes composed day to day, of the trials and tribulations of this new project. I hereby pledge to do my utmost to prevent this diary from becoming a “melancholy school of posturing and dreary self-deception.” Frankness and clarity will be the goals. If I will not, cannot be truthful with myself here, where can I be?

  With this film, I will not aim at poetry. I will try to build a table. It will be for you to eat at it, criticize it, chop it up for firewood.

  It seems appropriate in this confessional form to chronicle the beginnings of my slide from the status of a young man of promise into the regrettable position of filmmaker. Early in 1914, with my career in the theater—specifically, with Max Reinhardt’s prestigious troupe—all but assured, I drifted into a moving-picture show to see the American D. W. Griffith’s Judith of Bethulia. I was mesmerized by the giant figure of the wine-guzzling Holofernes, who towered over everyone. Where had they found him? In some circus, I supposed. I mentioned this to Reinhardt, who laughed and told me that the same actor had visited Germany a year earlier, and was shorter than he was. He had been made to seem huge by Griffith’s camera. Reinhardt had had no idea how. He suggested I write to Billy Bitzer, Griffith’s cameraman. I was possessed by the trick, and would have, had the war not intervened. I was twenty-five and as curious as a field dog about everything having to do with filmmaking.