The year is 1942, the setting: a city in the Tver region. Gelik, a very young lieutenant, and a girl named Ina were taken hostage by an insane divisional commander. By some miracle they managed to escape, but many years later, Gelik, during a conversation with a friend, suddenly realizes that the divisional commander’s madness was nothing but play-acting: he had foreseen that all attempts to escape from the war would be seen as desertion – all, that is, except raving madness and affront (tearing into battle and killing everyone in your path).
2008. Ina, now a very elderly woman, falls victim to a telephone prankster who begins terrorising her. Gradually his daily calls become a kind of drug on which she depends. She discovers that he knows something about her life, and the remarks he makes evoke distant memories: there was a time, long ago, when she was a reporter, and she seems to recall travelling to Afghanistan, where she fell in love.
