Lessons

Content Warning: The source text depicts a nonconsensual sexual and romantic relationship between a minor and an adult.

Roland describes a recent call from Inspector Browne telling him that Alissa had got the ferry from Dover to Calais, then stopped in a hotel where they had once stayed. He also receives a fifth postcard from Alissa, saying that she left him because she knew “motherhood would’ve sunk me” (73). She also states that she is returning to stay with her parents in the North German town of Liebenau but that Roland should not try and contact her. This leads Roland to recall an argument between Alissa and her mother in 1985, after she had gotten pregnant, over Alissa not inviting her mother to their wedding.

The memory of this argument leads Roland to recount the story of Alissa’s mother, Jane, a story garnered from her journals, which he had read during a visit in 1984. Born in 1920 in the Southern English village of Haywards Heath, Jane had become a typist for a literary magazine in London in 1943. In 1946 she convinced an editor on the magazine to pay her to travel to Munich and write a piece on the White Rose anti-Nazi student group that had been based there.