According to my calculations there are two or three new fictional characters baptized on earth every second. As a result, I am always unsure of myself when it comes time for me to enter that vast crowd of John the Baptists. But what can I do? I have to call my characters something, don't I? Well, this time, just to make it clear my heroine belongs to me and me alone (and means more to me than anyone ever has), I am giving her a name no woman has ever had before: Tamina. I picture her as tall and beautiful, thirty-three, and a native of Prague.
I can see her now, walking down a street in a provincial town in the west of Europe. Yes, you're right. Prague, which is far away, I call by its name, while the town my story takes place in I leave anonymous. It goes against all rules of perspective, but you'll just have to put up with it.
Tamina has a job as a waitress in a small café belonging to a married couple. The café brought in so little money the husband took a job somewhere else and they hired Tamina to take his place. The difference between the miserable salary he earned at his new job and the even more miserable salary they gave Tamina was their only profit...
All she has left of her husband is his passport picture. The other pictures remain behind in their appropriated apartment in Prague. Every day she looks at the grimy, dog-eared picture showing her husband full face (like a criminal in a mug shot). It is not a good likeness. Every day she spends some time in a sort of spiritual exercise, trying to remember what he looked like in profile, then half profile, then quarter profile, going over the lines of his nose and chin, and every day she is horrified at new fuzzy spots where her memory hesitates about which way to go.
During these exercises she tried to evoke his skin, its color, and all its minor blemishes: tiny warts, protuberances, freckles, veins. It was difficult, almost impossible. The colors her memory used were unrealistic. They could not do justice to human skin. As a result, she developed her own special technique of calling him to mind. Whenever she sat across from a man, she would use his head as a kind of sculptor's armature. She would concentrate all her attention on him and remodel his face inside her head, darkening the complexion, adding freckles and warts, scaling down the ears...
Why do I picture her with a golden ring in her mouth?
M. Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
