DAS GESICHT

DALE BAILEY

A fly alights on the table grooms itself, is gone.

Even now, after all these years, it is all the old man can do not to recoil. Even now, he remembers the flies. Even now, he dreams of them.

He looks at the woman across from him. She is young, impossibly so. His experience of aging—and he is now irrefutably old, born at the rag end of a long-dead century—is that he lives on unchanged while everything around him grows progressively younger.

His infirmities give this notion the lie. He looks at the world through a film of cataracts. Constipation binds his guts. But inwardly, he feels the same as he’d felt five decades ago.

Inwardly, he is terrified.

Udo Heldt’s words have lodged inside his head like fishhooks. Peel back the surface of the world and it’s all butchery, isn’t it? Everything. Butchery and filth and corruption.

What will this young woman—this Eleanor Farrell—make of the sentiment, he wonders. For it’s Udo Heldt who brought her here.

She’s come to ask about Das Gesicht.

She’s come to ask about The Face.

* * *

He’d nearly turned her away.

He’d spent more than fifty years trying to unlive it, disremember it, undream it from his dreams, and if he had not been entirely successful, neither had he wholly failed. He was eighty- eight years old. He’d spent the first third of his life chasing down his aspirations. He’d spent the rest of it running away from them. He’d renounced the calling that had summoned him across an ocean, to the broken shelf of a continent not his own. He’d forsaken the lush boulevards of Los Angeles for the grimy streets of Brooklyn. He’d abandoned the woman he’d loved.

No.

He did not want to think of Udo Heldt. He did not want to think of Das Gesicht.

“The film is lost,” he’d told her when she called. “It was never released. Why should it interest you?”

“It may not have been released, but it was screened. I’ve tracked down nearly a dozen oblique allusions to it,” she said. “Three or four diaries, a handful of letters in private collections. No one wanted to talk about what actually happened at the screening—but no one seemed to be able to forget it, either.”

“Please, Miss—”

“Farrell,” she said. “Look, Mr. King. It’s of historical interest, if nothing else. Lon Chaney was said to be there. James Whale. A handful of others. Pola Negri. Tod Browning. They were universally revolted by it. Chaney called it vile, Tod Browning blasphemous.”

“It was a long time ago. No one wants to hear those old stories.”

“I promise you. I’m not doing some Hollywood Babylon hack job,” she’d told him.

“You are chasing ghosts,” he’d said.

“Even ghosts should have their say.” And then, to his undoing: “You should give her a voice. After all, you loved her, didn’t you?”

She didn’t say her name. She didn’t have to.

There had not been a day in nearly sixty years that the old man had not thought of her. Not one. Not since the day in 1919 (had it really been so long ago?) when he’d strolled into a Berlin cinema on a whim. Not since he’d seen her in Küss Mich, a movie of little distinction, in a role of even less. The next day, he’d returned to the theater with Heldt. And when the lights went down, the director, too, through the cam ra’s eye, saw not the woman on the screen—not Catrin Ammermann, as she was then billed—but the woman she was striving to become.

By the time she took the role of the young wife in Der Verdammte Schlüssel almost a year later, Heldt had dubbed her Catrin Amour. But it was the man operating the camera—it was Heinrich König, it was the old man—who’d made her a star.

Now, in his dim, second-floor walk-up, with traffic whispering outside the curtained windows and dust sifting down on the tables and the antimacassars and the framed black-and-white photos that throng every surface—now that Eleanor Farrell has flown across the country to speak with him—now that her little cassette recorder is unwinding its reel, patient as the hours—now that Catrin Amour is dead and beyond hurt—now, he can say it. And why shouldn’t he? All her life she had been no one and she had wanted desperately to be someone. All the great ones are alike in that way, he tells Miss Farrell: they are forever chrysalids on the verge of a magnificent transformation. That is the secret of his profession. You do not shoot the woman in front of the camera. You shoot the woman she wishes to become.

“Alchemy, Udo called it,” he says.

“What was he like?”

How is he to answer that, the old man wonders. He remembers Heldt as a small, sinewy man, with a shock of dark hair and fervid, black eyes. He remembers his near-crippling limp, the legacy of an Allied round at Passchendaele. “I’m lucky to have a leg at all,” Heldt had once told him. “The fucking surgeon was a butcher. He should have cut the fucking thing off and handed me a crutch.”

The cinema was his crutch.

Only on the set did Udo Heldt know anything akin to joy—and even there, his fury infused every frame the old man had shot on his behalf. Der Verdammte Schüssel, his first film, ends with the gory decapitation of Bluebeard’s young wife, betrayed by the bloody key.

“Did you serve in the war?” Miss Farrell asks.

The old man nods. He’d been wounded in the first days of fighting, at Liège. Unlike Heldt, he’d been spared the endless horror that followed: the gas, the artillery, the grenades, and, most of all, the vast wasteland of barbed wire and landmines between the rat-infested trenches, where Lewis guns spat out death at five hundred rounds a minute, and flyblown corpses bloomed like roses.

Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.

Heinrich König had survived intact.

The war had scooped out Udo Heldt’s soul.

The old man falls into silent rumination.

Miss Farrell gets up to look at the photos. They stand by the dozen on bookshelves and end tables: flappers and vamps and innocents alike, icons of the silent era: Mary Pickford, Norma Talmadge, Theda Bara. So many others. The old man wonders if Miss Farrell sees herself among them. She is not a beautiful woman; she is pale and freckled, with a sharp nose and green, inquisitive eyes. But in the right hands—in his hands—the camera could be coaxed to love her.

Such is the alchemy of the aperture, the paradox of the eye.

Heldt was already musing aloud about these issues when he wrote Die Wölfe. They had storyboarded the film together. The old man can remember it almost shot by shot even now, though little footage survives beyond the scene that juxtaposes the hunter’s death against his wife’s garden party, crosscutting his face, twisted in horror as he is torn apart by wolves, with those of the revelers, garish with laughter, and effectively dissolving the line between agony and exhilaration.

No one but Heldt could have conceived that sequence. No one but the old man could have shot it.

Miss Farrell runs her finger across the top of one picture frame. Lifts another one to her face.

“Clara Bow,” the old man says.

He can lay his hand upon any one of the photos, even in the dark.

“This is you beside her?”

“Yes.”

He studies her studying him, measuring him against the amiable rogue in the photo, with his unhandsome, equine face. He is no longer so tall. His jacket hangs upon him. His age-yellowed collar sags at the neck. His tie is too narrow.

It has been years since he’s entertained a caller.

“You came to Hollywood in ’21,” Miss Farrell says, placing the picture back on the shelf, angling it into something proximate its original position. He will have to adjust it when she is gone.

“Yes,” he told her as she takes her seat across from him. “Sol Wurtzel at Fox had seen Die Wölfe. We came together, the three of us. Udo would have it no other way.”

They’d crossed on the Hansa, an unhappy time. The old man, Heinrich, had been in love with Catrin Amour, of course. He’d been in love with her from the moment he walked into that Berlin cinema. But she had eyes only for Heldt. Somewhere along the way he’d become ihr Liebhaber, her lover, her Svengali. Catrin believed that he’d made her a star, little understanding that he could not have done it on his own. He needed the camera eye. The camera needed the man behind it.

They were alone upon the deep when everything went wrong.

Catrin Amour came pounding at Heinrich’s stateroom door well after midnight, in some cold, de d hour when the ship rolling gently through the swells lulled the soul into a sleep like death. Waking, he’d thought there’d been a disaster—a boiler that had blown out the hull, an iceberg collision, the Titanic torn asunder as the frigid deep engulfed her. It had been a disaster, of course, but a purely personal one that would cleave not the ship, but their little trio, along fault lines none of them had before acknowledged.

Catrin was incoherent, sobbing. There had been an altercation. She could tell him nothing—she would tell him nothing—beyond that solitary admission, and he could have read that much in the bruise blossoming upon her cheek. He found her some ice, put her to bed, and spent the rest of the night pacing the tiny stateroom, torn between fury and fear.

Catrin awoke toward dawn. Ignoring his protests, she let herself out into the corridor. She had to see Heldt. She had to apologize. She had to make things right.

Heinrich thought it had ended there.

But late that afternoon, Heldt found him alone on the foredeck, leaning against the railing and staring out over the heaving, black water. The sky smoldered. The wind coming in across the waves whipped their hair. The air smelled of brine.

They stood there for a long time, the old man at a loss for words.

Finally, Heldt said, “Something happened to me in the war. I never told you about it. This was in the summer of ‘17, when the advance had ground to a halt. We spent most of our time hunkered down in the trenches, smoking and playing cards, while the boys behind us lobbed shells at the enemy lines. It was a gloomy day, and the night that followed was black as sin, moonless, with lowering clouds and gusts of icy rain. You couldn’t see much beyond three or four feet.

“It was after midnight when we went over the top. It was chaos, Heinrich. You could hear the intermittent boom of the sixty-pounders and the chunk of the Lewis guns chopping rounds into the mud. Tracers slashed green streaks through the darkness. When a shell dropped, the sky would light up a smoky crimson, revealing the hellish doomscape around you: men screaming and dying, their bodies dancing grotesquely in the blizzard of .303s. And everywhere the stench of gas and gunpowder and the miasma of rotting corpses that had not yet been recovered—that might never be recovered.

“And then I heard the whistle of a descending shell. The night exploded around me. I squeezed shut my eyes, I took a breath—

“—and I was staring up into the flawless blue vault of a bright morning sky. I hurt—everything hurt, Heinrich—but I was whole. I’d survived. The explosion had driven me back into a deep pit in the wasteland. The stench of the place was unbearable. I haven’t the words to describe it.

“A constant, low hum filled the air. It was the buzz of flies, Heinrich. Thousands of them. Dense, whirling clouds of them, their bodies glistening black and green when they came to rest upon me. I still hear that loathsome insect drone. I will see the sheen of their eyes until the day I die. I’d fallen into a pit of corpses, and the flies had come to feed.”

The old man cannot bring himself to share the details that followed. Eleanor Farrell is already looking at him in dismay. Yet he can’t help recalling Heldt’s description of the flies gathering around his eyes, of the flies clogging his nostrils and worming their way between his lips.

The rest, though—

“I lurched up,” Heldt had told him. “Waving my arms to keep them away, I staggered toward the rim of the pit. I began to climb, clawing my way through mud and snarls of barbed wire and decomposing bodies.”

He’d been almost to the top when the hand had closed around his ankle. Slipping to his knees, Heldt found himself staring down into the countenance of a wounded Tommy. Half his face had been shot away, revealing a complex ligature of muscle and tendon, with here and there a white grin of bone. His eyeball lay exposed within its shattered orbit. Flies massed everywhere upon this broken visage. They sipped at the wells of his nostrils and devoured the raw flesh that strung his jaw. They squirmed into the crevice beneath his eyeball to glut themselves upon his brain. “Kill me,” the Tommy whispered. Heldt reached for the blade sheathed at his belt. It was the only thing to do. It would be a mercy. And then he had a nightmare vision of his companions in the trenches—men who’d eaten and gambled and battled alongside him—Dreckfressers like himself, mud gluttons conscripted into a war they’d never chosen to fight, gunned down by British machine guns. He turned away.

“Lassen sie schlemmen,” he said. Let them feast.

He kicked loose the Tommy’s hand and clambered up out of the pit. He’d made it safely back to the German line by nightfall.

The Hansa plowed on through the murky water.

“Why did you tell me this?” Heinrich had asked at last.

Heldt stared out at the sea. “That is when I learned the true nature of all things. Peel back the surface of the world, and it’s all butchery, isn’t it? Everything. Butchery and filth and corruption.” And then Heldt met his gaze. “There is nothing I will not do, Heinrich. Nothing.”

Miss Farrell’s little recorder winds the tape tight, and snaps off. She digs a fresh cassette out of her bag and gets the machine running again.

“What happened in Hollywood” she asks. The old man snorts.

“Hollywood was Udo Heldt’s undoing,” he says. “In the end, Hollywood undid us all. Der Verdammte Schlüssel and Die Wölfe were widely admired. But they were not the kind of films Sol Wurtzel could make at Fox. He’d thought Heldt could be tamed, that his enormous talents could be channeled into more conventional pictures. But Heldt could not be tamed. He was a great filmmaker, but what made him great was that he had an unflinching vision. Strip him of that vision, and put him to work making romantic comedies—”

The old man laughs.

Not that Heldt would make romantic comedies—or any other movie Wurtzel sent him.

They reached a stalemate: Heldt made no films at all.

Catrin and Heinrich, meanwhile, both found work quickly enough. Catrin’s star never reached the heights it had risen to in Germany, but she was well-known and well-paid; in the days of silent film, language and accent were no barrier to stardom. Soon she and Heldt were living in the Hollywood Hills—unmarried, igniting the kind of small scandal that kept her safely in the public eye. And Heinrich’s skills were much in demand. His work was never less than professional, often excellent. He worked with most of the stars of the era—

—here Eleanor Farrell glances around at the photos once again—

—and the ones he didn’t work with he met. But Der Verdammte Schlüssel and Die Wölfe nagged him. With Heldt, he had been great. He wanted to be great again.

By this time, the wounds inflicted on the Hansa had healed—imperfectly, true, but well enough that Catrin, Heldt, and Heinrich spent many long evenings together, hashing over the latest Hollywood gossip. Catrin contrived not to mention the occasional bruises that shadowed her face, and Heinrich contrived not to notice them. Udo drank, and late at night, when Catrin had retreated upstairs to bed, he talked film.

He had seen everything. He saw every picture that came out of Europe. He screened all of der Blödsinn, the drivel—his word—produced in Hollywood. A withering critic, he scorned even the best films, reserving the occasional kind word for Heinrich’s work on otherwise worthless pictures, and for Murnau and Wiene and some few other Germans in their darker modes. “But even they flinch when they come hard up against the truth,” Heldt would say. Heinrich did not ask what he meant by truth. He remembered all too well their conversation aboard the Hansa. He would not forget the horror of the Tommy’s fate. He knew that he’d been obscurely threatened. Butchery, filth, and corruption—these words lingered in his mind.

But Heldt had still more to say on film in the abstract. Commercial pictures, with their neat plots and their happy endings, were a perversion of the cinema, he argued. The image may tell a story. It may coax and manipulate. It may deceive. But it must not lie. It may be a fiction, but inside the fiction there must be truth. “The biggest lie cinema tells,” he said, “is embedded in the very medium itself, is it not—the paradox of the moving image, which is still, and the still image, which moves.”

So it went, Heldt’s talk of pictures and paradoxes—so it might have gone on forever, the old man supposes, but for what happened on Monday, October 13, 1924. The date is scored into the old man’s memory. It was the night Udo Heldt destroyed Catrin Amour’s film career; it was the night Das Gesicht was born.

Catrin would never speak of what had happened. All the old man knew was that a hammering at his door once again woke him deep in the blackest hour of the morning. Swimming up out of the depths was very much like waking that night on the Hansa—a sense of confusion resolving into the certainty of disaster: icebergs, torpedoes, exploded boilers, something beautiful shattered and devoured by the deep, a world consumed by a war that would not end.

It was Catrin, of course. Heinrich’s forebodings as he pulled on his dressing gown proved correct. Heldt had carved open her cheek. A doctor was summoned. The police were not—Catrin wouldn’t permit it. It was clear to all of them that her career in pictures was over.

For a few weeks, they all waited for something to happen. Nothing happened. Heldt showed up neither in anger nor remorse. The picture Catrin was about to start shooting was quietly recast. The few rumors in the press were swiftly extinguished. The studios kept the gossip columns on a pretty short leash in those days. Catrin Amour, it became known, had tired of acting. She had chosen a life of seclusion. She might well go back to Germany.

In the meantime, her slashed cheek healed into a puckered scar. The doctor had done his work as well as he could. So had Heldt. Catrin stayed on with Heinrich. He and Catrin were companions, nothing more. They never shared a bedroom. This was Catrin’s decision, not Heinrich’s.

“I loved her very much,” the old man tells Miss Farrell. Miss Farrell says nothing. What is there to say?

The reels of her tape recorder continue to turn, eating time. The old man clears his throat. “Then I ran into Heldt again.

I was eating lunch at the counter of the Musso & Frank Grill, when he slid onto the stool next to me—”

“Why don’t you move on down the counter?” Heinrich had said. Heldt didn’t bother responding. “I want you to shoot a picture for me, Heinrich,” he said—though by this time the old man had started calling himself Henry king.

“I asked you to move on down the counter.”

“Just think about it,” Heldt said, and then he moved on down the counter, and out the door onto the street.

The hell he would think about it, Heinrich told himself.

Yet he thought about little else. He thought about Der Verdammte Schlüssel and he thought about Die Wölfe and he thought about the trivial picture he was working on now, and the feather- weight of a director, who barely knew which end of the camera to point at his actors. Heinrich might as well have been directing the picture himself. He supposed he was.

He mentioned the encounter at the Musso & Frank Grill to Catrin, who took little interest in the business these days—or anything else, for that matter. They rarely talked, and when they did talk, they said nothing of consequence. Heinrich had once told her he didn’t even see the scar when he looked at her. She replied that she saw nothing else. But when he said that he’d run into Heldt, a light came into her eyes that he hadn’t seen for months. He realized that she was still in love with him.

Which is how, a few nights later, they wound up at Heldt’s house—though, of course, it was really Catrin’s house, too. That night Heinrich learned that she didn’t seem to resent anything Heldt did or wanted from her. It was her money that had paid for it, just as it was her money that Heldt had been subsisting on during their time apart. But Catrin didn’t resent it. It turned out that she’d even consent to go back in front of the camera for him. And it turned out that Heinrich would consent to stand behind it.

But what was the project Heldt had in mind?

He wanted to work inside the paradox, he said, where the still picture and the moving one meet. And then he went on to describe the film he had in mind. Das Gesicht, Heldt called it. The Face. It sounded like the most static—and least interesting—picture Heinrich could imagine. It would, nonetheless, be the most difficult challenge Catrin would ever confront as an actress. She would need to do the impossible. She would need to remain utterly still—utterly—for an hour and more.

And Catrin was not alone.

“Technically, it was the most difficult challenge I ever faced, as well,” the old man tells Eleanor Farrell. “Together, the three of us would make a great film—or we would fail. We made a great film, Miss Farrell. Thank God, it does not survive.”

“You will want to know how it was done, of course. Does it matter? Would you understand if I explained it? Alchemy, Heldt called it. But Das Gesicht—there is alchemy, and there is alchemy.”

The old man shakes his head.

“Did something happen on the set of Das Gesicht?” the young woman asks.

“Nothing unexpected, Miss Farrell. I was present for the entire shoot—a single day, but a trying one. The finished film looked like a single take, but such a long take was, of course, impossible. It is impossible even now. Like all films, Das Gesicht was an illusion. Like all films, it was constructed in the editing room.”

“What happened at the screening, Mr. King?”

The old man sighs. He doesn’t answer for a long time.

* * *

“I wondered even then who would be interested in such a film,” he says when he finally resumes. “Technicians like myself, perhaps, who would want to know how we had pulled off the illusion of the long take. And there would be interest among Hollywood’s aristocracy, who would wonder if Heldt’s new film—privately financed and shot in a rented studio—could possibly live up to the achievements of Der Verdammte Schlüssel and Die Wölfe. But as for a real audience? The film had none. There would be no release. It was art for art’s sake, I suppose: an expression of a single man’s private obsession. He insisted that it would be his finest film.”

“And Catrin Amour?”

“She never spoke to me of it. She loved him, of course, as I loved her, perhaps to a greater and in a different degree. She loved him enough to surrender up her ruination for his art. As far as I could tell, she did so without ill will or regret. I never asked her why. Any such inquiry seemed to me somehow obscene. So we shot the film and retreated to the editing room, painstakingly matching up and splicing shots. The details”—the old man shrugs—“they will have little interest to you. You wish to know of the screening. You wish to know of the film itself. You wish to hear about Das Gesicht.”

Eleanor Farrell does not respond.

She lets the silence spin out, trusting, he supposes, that he will come to it in his time. And he will. Having come this far, what can he do but unburden himself? And so, slowly—haltingly—he begins to speak.

Between the three of them—Heinrich, Catrin Amour, and Udo Heldt—they put together a select guest list: James Whale and Tod Browning and Lon Chaney were there, as Miss Farrell had said. But there were others, Barbara La Marr, Sol Wurtzel, Louise Brooks, and Nita Naldi. The great cinematographers of the day, G. W. Bitzer and John Arnold. Others. Perhaps twenty- five people, no more. The old man cannot recall them all, not after all these years. Heldt’s greatest regret was that the German directors he respected—Murnau, Wiene, Lang—would not be present—though he told Heinrich that he hoped to take the film to Germany, as well.

And so they gathered in a small screening room on the Fox lot. Heinrich was there, of course. And Catrin Amour came, too. Udo Heldt escorted her in just as the lights were going down, her face artfully veiled to reveal the unmarked arc of one high cheekbone—and to hide the scar that Udo had slashed into her face on the other side. The men murmured, standing to greet her. She merely nodded and let Udo lead her to her seat in the gathering dark.

The room fell silent but for the whir of the projector as it cast out its light upon the screen. The title came up, white on black—

—Das Gesicht—

—and dissolved into darkness. Then the screen brightened to reveal an image of a woman’s face—Catrin Amour’s unmarred face—in medium-close profile and to the right of center, so that it commanded the screen without overwhelming it. She was beautiful, the old man says. Not even the tiniest imperfection was visible, not even a pore. There was an audible intake of breath at this vision: Catrin Amour, her lips relaxed into an enigmatic half smile, her hair falling in dark waves around her shoulders. Everything about the image was utterly still. If you saw it as the audience saw it, if you saw it here before you, the old man says, nodding at the pictures that surround them—if you saw it before you now, you would mistake it for a still photo—until the woman blinked. And when the woman on-screen did blink—when Catrin Amour blinked at last—someone laughed in the darkness, mirthlessly, a release of tension, nothing more.

And still the image held.

What at first was confusing—was this a moving picture at all?—became gradually mesmerizing, because the image both fulfilled and defied every expectation. It lived entirely in the paradox of the moving image.

If you have ever spent a long time living with a child, the old man says to Eleanor Farrell, you may have had the experience of looking at a photo from many months in the past and feeling a moment of shock, an instant of cognitive dissonance, for the child before you is palpably different from the child in the photo—yet the change has happened so gradually, right before your eyes, day by day, that you barely notice it until confronted with her image from another era.

This was the experience of watching Das Gesicht. The image appeared never to move. You only occasionally awakened to realize that the angle of vision had changed: you were no longer looking at Catrin Amour in pure profile but from a subtly different perspective, as though the camera was tracking slowly, impossibly slowly, in an arc around her. It was a still picture. And then you realized that the still picture had been a moving one all along—and thus the paradox was exposed. Catrin Amour blinked, and you awoke from your trance to realize that she was no longer as she had been.

The film ran an hour. That’s how long it took to describe that arc around Catrin Amour’s face, how long it took the viewer to progress from perfection into imperfection, from the unscarred face to the horrifically mutilated one: Udo Heldt’s not very subtle metaphor for his vision of the world as he had shared it on the Hansa: Peel back the surface of the world, Heinrich, and it’s all butchery, isn’t it?

In the moment the scar was fully revealed, you could feel the mood of the audience shift: This was the masterpiece of the man who had made Der Verdammte Schlüssel and Die Wölfe?

The old man pauses again. He is a long time gathering his thoughts.

This time Miss Farrell risks a question. “That was it?”

The old man recognizes the implication in her voice. She too has been duped. She has traveled all the way across the country for this revelation? This was Das Gesicht? The old man is briefly tempted to answer her in the affirmative.

But he has come too far to stop now.

“No, Miss Farrell,” he says. “There is more.” He doesn’t wait to hear the follow-up question. He plunges on. “Chaney was right. It was a vile picture. It was a blasphemous one.” He takes a long breath. “What you must understand, Miss Farrell, is that I was there—I was there on the set of the film. I was there in the editing room for weeks. With my hands I shaped the illusion of the unbroken take. With my hands I created the trickery. I had seen every frame of that footage, including the many, many feet we left on the cutting-room floor, a hundred times or more. And what I saw next, I did not see on the set. What I saw next, I never filmed.”

What the old man had seen next—what they had all seen next—was nothing more, and nothing less, than a fly emerge from Catrin Amour’s left nostril. An optical illusion, a speck of dust on the print, a flaw in the film, Heinrich thought. And then the camera, a camera he had been operating, moved in for a tight shot—a shot he had never taken. And in this new shot, a second fly emerged from Catrin’s nostril. It took flight and landed on the scar Udo Heldt had carved into her cheek. A third fly followed.

Another. And then another.

She might have been a mannequin, the woman on the screen was so still. Then her mouth bulged grotesquely, as though she were going to vomit, and flies boiled forth from within her. She spewed them out in handfuls, in clots, in seething mouthfuls; she spewed them out by the hundreds. They massed on her neck and chin, launching themselves intermittently into the cloud that swirled around her. And still they came, streaming out of her mouth and nostrils in swarms. And Catrin Amour—the Catrin Amour on the screen—remained utterly unmoved.

Flies began one by one to land on the camera lens, blurring the image of das Gesicht—of the face—into a spume of bodies, engorged with putrescence. They probed the air for the carrion stench of food. Heinrich flinched from the scrutiny of the enormous compound eyes—from the filth and corruption that lay exposed before him, the sordid truth inside the lie. At last, the loathsome creatures obscured the image of das Gesicht’s defiled beauty altogether. Catrin Amour was gone. The screen writhed with insectile turmoil an instant longer—

—and then it went abruptly black.

For a heartbeat, silence reigned.

Catrin Amour began to scream. Someone fumbled on the lights, plunging the room into chaos. Some few of the audience—Lon Chaney among them—sat in stunned horror. Most reeled blindly toward the doors. In the back row, someone retched. Heinrich stumbled in Catrin’s direction, shoving people aside.

Udo Heldt was already there, tearing away Catrin’s veil.

Heinrich lurched to a halt, snatching at the back of a seat to support himself.

He could no longer see Catrin’s face.

He could no longer see anything but scar.

* * *

Eleanor Farrell says nothing.

The daylight behind the curtains has faded, draping shadows over the photographs surrounding them: still images that move now only in the old man’s imagination, that speak only in his memory.

The old man wonders if she believes him. He wonders if he cares.

“Saying it was true,” the young woman says at last. “How could it have happened?”

“I don’t know,” Heinrich König says. “I know only the things I have seen, Miss Farrell. Whether they are true things—” He shrugs. “The camera also lies.”

She pauses, clearly unsatisfied with this response, but what is he to say?

There is mystery in the world.

“What happened next?”

“You know the rest. I destroyed the print. I destroyed the negative. I destroyed everything. I did it that night. And when I was finished, I drove east. I was done with pictures.”

“And Catrin?”

“I left her to him, to my shame. I did not return to Los Angeles for her funeral after the suicide.”

“Yet you loved her.”

“I loved Catrin Ammermann. I loved the woman she was striving to become. I loved the dream of Catrin Amour. But after Das Gesicht, I could not see her any longer. I could see only the scar she made in the world.”

“And Udo Heldt?”

“He died in a car accident three years later, Miss Farrell. You know this. The fact is readily available.”

“I don’t know how you feel about it.”

“Do my feelings matter?” he asks, and when she does not answer, he says, “I did not grieve Udo Heldt. I am glad his movies—our movies—are gone from the world. I repent the finest work I ever did. I repudiate it. I disavow Der Verdammte Schlüssel and I disavow Die Wölfe. If I had been able to destroy them, too, I would have. I take comfort that only fragments survive.”

“But—”

The old man reaches out and touches a button on her recorder. The reels grind to a halt. Into the silence that follows, he says, “You are still young, Miss Farrell. Forget Das Gesicht. Find a hap-pier illusion and hope that it is true.”

And then, slowly, the old man stands—a difficult process but, he reflects, not one that he would willingly surrender. He supposes that he will soon have no choice in the matter.

He straightens his tie and glances at Miss Farrell. He wants to give her the foolish advice that old men call wisdom, but he has already indulged himself sufficiently in that respect: perhaps she will forget Das Gesicht and perhaps she will not. He hopes so—for in unburdening himself, he understands, he has burdened her. And he has given Udo Heldt’s picture new life. He would give her something else, if he could. Perhaps he will not have to adjust the angle of Clara Bow’s photograph, after all.

She hesitates for a moment when he extends it to her. “Mr. King, I couldn’t—”

“Please, Miss Farrell. Let me grant you a brighter memory for your visit than the one I have already given you.”

She gazes at the photo. “It’s inscribed.”

“Yes. I was new to America when that picture was made. She was kind to me.”

“Okay, then.” The young woman tucks the photo into her bag. She smiles—she is more beautiful than he had thought—and thanks him. And that is enough. He sees her out and then he is alone in the dark apartment.

He sits quietly, listening to the traffic outside, and looking at the photos that surround him—mementos of a life he’d surrendered more than five decades ago. He’d led several other lives in the interim, but it is that first one—the life he’d shared with Udo Heldt and Catrin Amour—that matters.

After a time, he eats sparingly—a can of soup, nothing more—and then he sees himself to bed.

Sleep is a long time coming. He keeps thinking of the films he made with Udo Heldt. He keeps thinking of Das Gesicht.

He disavows it. He disavows them all. He lays very still.

In the darkness above him, a fly cuts circles in the air.