After all, what I love in a woman is not what she is in and for herself, but the side of herself she turns towards me, what she is for me. I love her as a character in our common love story. What would Hamlet be without the castle at Elsinore, without Ophelia, without all the concrete situations he goes through, what would he be without the text of his part? What would be left but an empty, dumb, illusory essence? Likewise, Lucie without the Ostrava outskirts, without the roses handed through the barbed wire, without the shabby clothes, without my own endless weeks of despair, would probably
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