Lessons

Roland reflects on how historical events and fate can bring people together. He recalls how he met Alissa in 1977, in his 20s, when she was teaching a German class at the Goethe-Institut that he had enrolled on in a bid to improve himself. At the time Alissa was engaged and Roland had been going out with a medical student named Diana who had wanted to marry, but from whom Roland had started to pull away. Roland describes how in his 20s “the only happiness and purpose and proper paradise was sexual” (160) and how he drifted between jobs, feeling a general dissatisfaction with ordinary life and the idea of settling down. He believes that his affair with Cornell meant that he was always pursuing some unrealizable dream in relation to other women.

In 1979, Roland started seeing a French journalist living in Camden, Mireille Lavaud, whose father was a diplomat in Berlin. Roland had joined her when she was visiting her father in East Berlin and met some of Mireille’s friends there. He struck up a bond with two of those friends, Ruth and Florian, when they showed him their collection of Western rock music. Despite arguing with Mireille about the wisdom of it, Roland returned to East Berlin two months later to smuggle in Bob Dylan and Velvet Underground albums and copies of Animal Farm and Hard Times.