CHAPTER SEVEN
“What is it?” I asked Jakub the instant we were outside. “Why don’t you trust him?” Once again, I was out of my depth, but it’s amazing how quickly you can get used to living in a state of perpetual confusion. Hungary was so unlike the world I knew. Nothing I’d learned as an actress seemed remotely relevant to the drama playing out here. In the theater, reading between the lines meant going deeper into a character to find her motivations. Inventing a history that felt plausible and then inhabiting it on stage: challenging enough to do well, night after night, but the stakes were hardly life and death. Sooner or later the run would end, you’d discard the role, and step back into your ordinary self.
Reading between the lines was no exercise in make-believe in Communist Hungar
