"students in the class did not like their teacher. She was a tyrant, serious, alienating. She taught English, but mostly the language of all that lives and gaves students the skeleton of abstract rules. After a 'student's suicide by jumping from the roof of the building where she lived, the teacher remained as sealed and anonymous as she had been. Thirty years later, the the narrator called her former pupil about the riddle of the life of Elsa Weiss. Looking back, she received advice on life lessons themselves. But what was the lesson? What the teacher taught?" -- cataloger's rough translation and interpretation of cover.