 Men, women, and war. Jelena Panic is a young woman in Belgrade in the early 1990s, during Serbia s war with Croatia; she s making a book of her grandmother s diaries from the end of World War II. She takes up with Bogden, a young soldier recovering from war wounds. He helps her with her grandmother s story, a tragic triangle involving her effete and well-educated husband and an uneducated major, a Chekist who has, perhaps, the power to save a political prisoner who is the grandmother s friend. As Jelena wonders which man was her grandfather (the Chekist or the husband), Bogden recovers from his wounds and must decide whether to return to the front. Jelena pleads; duty calls.