“I don’t know what stories you’ve heard. Naturally I had many affairs. But it was all right, your father wanted it.”

“That’s very strange.”

“I’m serious. He encouraged me. I hope you will forgive me for saying that your father was a little neurotic. The first-generation Freudians, you know, were not properly analyzed. It gave him pleasure that I had affairs. He wanted to be the husband of the woman who had the most admirers.”

“And you?”

“I couldn’t help it, my dear,” Kamilla tells her sadly. “I went to the best psychoanalysts in Budapest and they told me that I had to have affairs to prove to my mother that I could have all the men. When I was a child my mother told me that I was so ugly no man would want me; therefore, you see, I had to make every man desire me, even though I had the most wonderful husband. This was the tragedy of my life. You can’t imagine how much I suffered. I was in analysis for fourteen years. We can’t change our nature,” she sighs. [...]