...of freedom

On the first morning after their flight, when they awoke in a small hotel in an Alpine village and realised that they were alone, cut off from the world where all of their lives had been spent, she experienced a feeling of liberation and relief. They were in the mountains, marvellously alone. Around them unbelievable silence reigned. Tamina welcomed that silence as an unexpected gift, leading her to reflect that her husband had left his homeland to escape persecution and she to find silence; silence for her husband and for herself; silence for love.

[The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Kundera, M.]