At the heart of the story is a rural schoolteacher who, in 1944, leaves his native Bessarabia as the Red Army advances with heavy fighting. The gentle, cultured Sebastian Radu has every reason to avoid meeting the so-called liberators. And not just because one of the new regime’s first measures will be a background check, and Radu will have to write “noble” in the “social origin” field. The point is, our protagonist already has some experience dealing with representatives of the “new world.”
