Nosferatu

by Jim Shepard

  After That, they’d decided to put off until their arrival in Tahiti.

  Flaherty’s younger brother, David, was traveling with Murnau. Eight weeks out of Mazatlán, they were reveling in the good weather after a week of uninterrupted rain. That week they had all been insomniacs. Their hands had turned white and wrinkled; their feet, when they undressed, looked like dead sea creatures. Only the caviar, preserved on ice, had raised their spirits. Each evening they’d huddled around warm tea and cold caviar, giving thanks for the French consulate in Mazatlán.

  Murnau and Flaherty were both unhappy refugees from FOX. Flaherty’s film on Mexican Indians had collapsed when Fox himself had taken it over. Murnau’s Four Devils and Our Daily Bread had the same sorry history. David had joked that they should’ve pooled their catastrophes and cut the release prints together to make Indian Bread.

  For three straight weeks, Murnau had watched despondently while the undercooked meat was pulled from the bones of his picture. He met with Fox and his Brain Trust in their private screening room, where they indulged in a ritual of mutilation and humiliation. He was unable to eat and suffered spells of dizziness. Faces he’d never seen before offered advice and made insulting remarks about his work. He held his tongue. What was wrong with it? Everything was wrong. He was doing the same old thing again; the film was too long; the peasants weren’t American; the story had no “zing.” The whole thing was too ponderous, Fox himself said; it was as though everyone was walking around in heavy boots.

  Murnau’s responses were not appreciated. He and Fox each took a turn with some invective. Then Fox suggested that his overworked artiste take a break and let the boys fiddle with a few things. Murnau remarked that he’d seen enough of the boys’ fiddling. He was banned from the screening room.

  Once more the gagmen had been set to work. Fox sent conciliatory memos. Murnau terminated his contract. The film was taken over by an honest man with no imagination and reissued under a different title. When Murnau wrote him with seven pages of modifications he thought might save the picture, he never received an answer.

  The day it had been taken out of his hands, he sought refuge by himself in a Mexican restaurant. The one other patron in the place—seeming to have a notion that the tall, freckled, miserable man occupying the opposite booth was distraught—had a pink-colored drink with a miniature paper hat sent over. The teetotaling Murnau removed the hat and lifted the drink every so often, in order to indicate his appreciation without sipping.

  Since the collapse of the film, his kidneys had resumed causing him great distress and any time in the sun made him feel faint.

  Then Berthold Viertel had come in with a familiar-looking blond boy in tow, whom he introduced. David had Hans’s mouth and hair, as well as a similar way of standing, like an adolescent wishing to seem barrel-chested. They chatted about Murnau’s work, which caused Murnau to perk up a little.

  He perked up a little more when he realized that David’s brother was that Flaherty. The patron who’d sent over the drink seemed discouraged, as though he’d missed his opportunity.

  Murnau had long admired Flaherty’s work. He asked an hour’s worth of questions, all of which David answered straightforwardly. Flaherty was still working on the Mexican film. For the first time, David was assisting.

  After leaving the restaurant, they walked to a deserted triangle of park and settled on a bench beneath a eucalyptus tree. The smell seemed to revive the discussion. Viertel sat quietly alongside the two new friends, content to listen. Sap on the seat slats ruined Murnau’s trousers.

  Flaherty turned out to be four years older than Murnau. Did the brothers have any new plans, for after the Mexican project? They did: David had been preparing to go away that very week to Tahiti, to assess the possibilities of filming a feature there.

  Murnau at that moment felt as if he’d become aware of great gears above them swinging together, the teeth sliding inexorably into place. Once he recovered, he described in a low voice how he’d dreamed of doing the same thing. This did not seem to impress his audience. He added that he’d read about the South Seas since discovering Stevenson as a boy. They smiled. His dizziness had returned. He’d had to call for his car.

  David left for Tahiti two days later, and Murnau hadn’t seen him again for three months. During that interval, he worked listlessly on new projects. Fox sent over scripts that had been defaced and rejected by other contract directors.

  The day after David returned, they ate alone in Murnau’s newest place in the Hollywood hills. The domestic staff had been instructed to prepare the meal and leave. The two men served themselves from a banquette. Pal sat in his wingbacked chair and kept an eye on both of them.

  The dining table had a view of Los Angeles. They reviewed the charts and drawings David had brought back. They laughed about his inability to eat for all of Murnau’s questions. For stretches Murnau just stared at the navigational map of the Tuamotus. He reminded himself of the Nosferatu peering over Hutter’s papers while his guest apprehensively dined.

  He told David about the yacht he’d bought, which he’d renamed the Bali. Other than that, he said, he’d spent the last few months making the round of kidney specialists. Hollywood, he concluded, was wearing him out. He was getting too old for this, now nearly forty-one, and had no heart left for battling the studio.

  Commiserating, David looked as if he recognized forty-one to be Methuselan.

  That look prompted Murnau to announce that he was going to the South Seas. There was a pause. He asked if David would accompany him.

  David, dumbfounded, answered that he was obliged to rejoin his brother in Mexico. Murnau had swung into action as his old persuasive self. That Flaherty’s film was at the point of being suspended was an open secret around the Fox lot; even Murnau had been privy to that news. So why shouldn’t they all join forces, then, and make a film after their own hearts, in Tahiti?

  David had had certain hesitations. Murnau asked: Shouldn’t brothers seize every opportunity to work together? He stayed at it, selling his enthusiasm far into the night. He himself, of course, had neglected his connections with his own brothers for years.

  The next day, they set off in his new red Packard to convince Flaherty, whose funding was stalled in Tucson. The doctors had been unanimous that the trip would be disastrous for Murnau’s kidneys. They proved correct. The pain became difficult before they’d left the city limits, and they had to make frequent stops. Murnau spent the night of their arrival in a clinic. In between, there’d been three days of the sort of good talk he hadn’t had in years, and excited planning. He told David about Hans: about his poetry, the intensity of their relationship, their estrangement, and Hans’s death in the war before that estrangement could be addressed. David knew some of the poetry in translation, from an old compendium of verses from the war dead entitled The Flower of German Youth.

  Flaherty had seized upon their idea. He visited Murnau that first night in the clinic and described with precision his idea of the most memorable images from Nosferatu and Faust, which he’d just seen. He’d particularly admired the vampire’s ship gliding into Bremen harbor, and the Devil’s pestilential cloak spreading over Faust’s little medieval hamlet.

  From his bed of pain, Murnau reciprocated by describing how exalted he’d been upon seeing Nanook.

  Flaherty was much impressed that Murnau had driven all that way in such trying circumstances to work with him. In seven days they’d worked up a proposal for a joint project and negotiated and signed a contract with a new company, Colorart, that had approached Flaherty. The new contract, in terms of freedom, was a dream; it stipulated no company presence on location, and the whole picture would be made on location! By the 18th of April, a budget of one hundred and fifty thousand dollars had been approved. Murnau and David would sail from San Pedro at the end of the month. Flaherty would leave a month later by steamship with the crew and supplies.

  Spiess was still out there, somewhere near where they were go
ing. Murnau had proof. Recently he’d been getting a series of “gifts” through the mails: badly wrapped seashells, carved bits of bone (one labeled “Sea-Monster!”), and lumpen charms and amulets. They’d been sent to Murnau’s original Los Angeles address. The last package featured a rough squatting figure with a head split in two, on the back of which was carved H.E.-D: Hans’s initials. It had been wrapped in a handbill advertising a showing of Dernier des Hommes: Der Letzte Mann, on which someone had scribbled in German How’s this for worldwide success—your name now known in Bali. Heading east. Hecate. Murnau had been pained by the reference to their schoolboy recitations: Hans as Medea, himself as Jason.

  In eight years he had made no progress on the question of Hans’s suicide. He fought the notion that no progress was possible. Lasker-Schüler had passed along a few letters Hans had written to her, and then she had refused any further help. In the letters, Hans mentioned neither suicide nor Murnau. Other old friends and acquaintances were less helpful still. Hans’s commanding officer had been killed in the Spartacists’ uprising after the war. Only Spiess remained.

  While Murnau had been waiting for David to return from Tahiti, a boy he’d hired to monitor Pacific shipping transactions had sent word that an “E. J. Spies” had been one of three partners at Papeari, east of Samoa, who’d been hoping to barter copra for a thirty-foot yawl. The other two partners had been listed as “Robert Dean Frisbie, writer” and “Ropati, speculator.”

  Spiess was his last hope of proving Lasker-Schüler wrong. It had come down to that. In one of the letters, Hans had mentioned writing Spiess. This was the last lead Murnau had. In any event, securing the proper cast and locations would mean travel among the islands. His plan was to comb the groups east to west for Europeans fitting Spiess’s description, and then to keep an ear out once shooting began.

  The Bali was long and slim, sixty-five feet by sixteen feet, drawing eight and half feet of water. She belonged to the Gloucester Fisherman class, with two sails and a fifty-horsepower engine. Below, beside the galley and the crew’s quarters, there was a dining room, a stateroom, a lavatory, and a pantry. She flew both the American and the German flags. On her stern Murnau had painted a blood-red heart.

  The Mainsail luffed and billowed above him in the darkness. The helmsman, Bill Bambridge, had one leg encased in plaster and leaned on his crutch like Long John Silver. He hadn’t spoken in hours.

  When Pal needed to defecate, he climbed up on the back deck and did his business off the taffrail in calm seas. In rough seas he sat around whining. At such times, David murmured his general disbelief at the dog’s presence.

  For Murnau the whole trip had been a blessed relief from physical infirmities. He’d rigged a collapsible silken canopy for the cockpit, and for long stretches he would close his eyes and relax his body and listen to the hissing rush of water along the hull. In his journal he copied a verse from the American Emerson: And the lone seaman all the night / Sails astonished among stars. When he dozed, he dreamt of their departure from San Pedro, and the California mud on the anchor flukes as it came up. When he woke, there always seemed to be an extra stillness in the air. The only sound was the musical liquid noise of their wake. In the east over the stern, the lower quadrant was the orange of embers, the binnacle lamp already dull against the coming brightness of the day. There were stirrings below. David climbed up the companionway and replaced Bambridge at the helm with a pre-dawn regard for silence. Pal gave himself a good shake and went below for water.

  Murnau stood and worked out the kinks. He was stiff and chilly. He stretched. He checked the stars to assure himself that he’d truly arrived at this place so far from what he knew, then headed forward. The breeze smelled of morning. He settled on the foredeck between the windlass and an open hatch, his knees pulled to his chin. Eddy, their Japanese cook, clanked around below making coffee. There was a clinking in Pal’s dish.

  That was how he was sitting, smelling coffee and flowers and the sea, when he sighted landfall: Taio-haie, on Nukahiva.

  The closer they got, the brighter the colors became. They needed new eyes for this. They were all on deck, their gaze on the scarped and shattered peaks that protected the inner loop of the bay. Around the bay, the white reefs were as delicate as lace.

  Pal was all the way out on the bowsprit. A white thread of a waterfall cascaded thousands of feet down the steepest of the cliffs to break into mist below. David informed them that it was Typee Falls, from the Typee valley.

  Around the black point of the escarpment, the panorama of the bay opened out. A file of houses lined the white sand behind coconut palms and thickets with crimson flowers. Murnau could make out cassi, frangipani, and the evergreen smell of oleander.

  David pointed out that he was weeping.

  Bambridge said, “He’s been weeping for the last fifteen minutes.”

  They beat in three tacks into the bay through the first smooth water they’d seen since San Pedro, six fathoms deep. They looked overboard to the bottom the way they might look down from a fourth-story window on a sunny day.

  A whaleboat piloted by a native guided them to their anchorage. A white-haired Frenchman in a military jacket and sailcloth pants announced himself as Harbormaster and Chief of Police, and brought them ashore.

  Murnau’s initial contact with the native population was with a few dockworkers. He was surprised at their sullenness. They distrusted Pal and stared without smiling as they went about their work. Most of the women were missing teeth. A hundred years before, the Frenchman informed him, the Marquesas had had a population of one hundred and forty thousand; now, thanks to the white man, a thousand were left.

  Their temporary quarters were overrun with ants. They napped instead on the beach, on shaded benches and tables. The unshaded sunlight was stunning. The Harbormaster drowsed where he sat, opposite Murnau, his hand still on his glass of lemonade. Pal crouched beneath a table with ears down and chin low. Enormous yellow flowers called burao fell heavily, as if from the heat, onto the sand; the sound was like a dropped cap.

  Still, Murnau was unable to sleep. He was beginning to understand how much time, patience, and work would be required to capture any part of the shattered and fugitive splendor of the islands. The land was not the issue. What he’d have to search for everywhere were men with the pride, the beauty, and the independence he’d imagined in their ancestors.

  No one on Nukahiva remembered Spiess. The Harbormaster remembered someone named Thun or Thule, whom he was sure had been a Dane.

  A week later they successfully negotiated the Passe de Fakarava, an emerald channel flanked by shoals. It was the last step involved in threading the treacherous Paumotos, listed on the charts as the Low or Dangerous Archipelagoes.

  Bambridge had worked the charts and Murnau the helm. At some points the coral shelves had glided by only meters from their hull. The shoals churned white water into the air. A fine mist soaked everything. Rainbows bisected their masts.

  Once back in open water, they congratulated themselves on their seamanship. Eddy took the wheel. Flying fish appeared off their windward side, following the ship.

  They took a ponyback trip over three-thousand-foot mountain passes into the valley of Typee to view the spot where Melville had been held prisoner. Pal was trounced by a wild pig. They made a pilgrimage to Gauguin’s grave at Atuona. On the gravestone someone had scrawled the painter’s words: All that your civilization gives rise to produces only disease.

  They were told that the sort of natives they were looking for might be found in Ua-Pou, close by to the south, since it was rocky and infertile and off the usual shipping routes. Sailing south-west to Takapoto, they witnessed the sobering industrial ugliness of the copra trade. They passed waterfront hovels of corrugated iron. On one of the nearby atolls, they had lunch and a paddle around the lagoon with Matisse the painter. He gave Murnau a tour of his makeshift studio. He was amused at Pal’s South Seas adventure: this German dog, on a tour of the tropics. Murnau talk
ed with him about the light and colors. David photographed them in a dugout with Pal and a native boy. Matisse wore a pith helmet for the photo, like Dr. Livingstone.

  Matisse was skeptical about their plans, though he thought the islands were full of legends well suited to a photoplay. He mentioned the pearl-fishers who dived despite the peril of sharks; a giant crayfish that was said to seize its victims in its claws and hold them to drown in a nearby lagoon; the wide-eyed conger that lived in the coral caves.

  He had run across no one like Spiess. But he’d just arrived himself, after all.

  He complained at length about the Chinese merchants.

  He gave Murnau a new hat with sombrero-like dimensions.

  He was the last stop before Tahiti.

  ****30 June. 11 p.m. Papeete, bathed in a sea of light, rising up out of the black water and a thousand beams.

  ****1 July. The first full day in Tahiti, and things could not be worse. The production is at a standstill. Flaherty met us at the quay and welcomed us to Tahiti. He asked after his brother’s asthma and announced that no money had been forwarded to meet them. The entire company has apparently lived on credit for the last two months.

  This we learned at or about midnight. Even Pal was exhausted. We were drawn up along the stern of someone’s monstrously large motor-yacht, the Dissolution. All its cabins were lit, and its occupants in the midst of a frenzied celebration of some sort. While we toiled to secure the Bali for the night in a moderate swell, Flaherty tried his best to provide details of the disaster over the noise from the yacht. Champagne glasses from its decks plunked into the water around us.