The narrator, lost along the Austro-Hungarian border, winds up in a village inn inhabited by strange individuals – a fur merchant, a painter with tuberculosis, a mysterious madam... He happens to notice a painting of a very young girl, which captivates him as much as it seems to fascinate the drunken man at the table next to him. Who is she? What is sacred about the painting? That’s what the narrator is determined to find out. With the help of Anna and Melle two strong yet fragile women, he works his way back to the eve of the fall of the Wall, in order to understand what happened to Idiane. Little by little, he pieces together the wanderings of the orphaned girl, who took shelter with a fur merchant before she was handed over to the Hungarian mafia. That’s when she met Ivan, a steady customer whom she falls for, and dreams of running away with... but what will become of their dreams of freedom? Will they join the flood of immigrants, some of whom manage to slip from East to West? An unbridled and carnal novel that traces the fate of characters crushed by the aftershocks of History, and who waver between despair and euphoria.
An eastern European setting and atmosphere, a spell-binding plot, pace and descriptions. A novel that is both captivating and ominous.