“It must have been hard to combine an acting career with motherhood,” I said. “All those rehearsals and performances.”
She shook her head. “That wasn’t so much the problem. I just couldn’t act anymore. I couldn’t do it.” She lit another cigarette. I imagined her on stage, speaking someone else’s words, her heavily made-up face in the bright light. Before today I couldn’t have imagined it. I remembered what she’d said on our walk about being a different person before she got married.
“I thought it would come back; I thought, give it a few weeks or months and it would come back. But it didn’t. My craft, the thing I was good at—it was gone.” She opened her palms a little, as if it were vanishing then and there. As if to show they were empty. “The emotions, the empathy. The ability to get inside another person, to feel their love, their despair.” She paused and looked down at her firm white fingers, lying open on the photos of old Bad Heim.
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