Romania, in the early 1950s. A man is found on the doorstep of a hospital in the northern city of Iasi. Deaf, mute and illiterate, he carries no identity papers and is "frail as a fallen bird".
A young nurse, Safta, brings him pencil and paper so that he might draw. She does not tell her colleagues that she knows this man, Augustin. They were born six months apart and raised together on her family's grand country estate at Poiana. She was the daughter of aristocrats, he was the cook's illegitimate son. Safta understood Augustin as no one else could, as if he was "the silent side of herself".
But that was then. Before the second world war, before Soviet occupation, before communism. This is a time of secret police and neighbourly denunciations, of imprisonments and labour camps. It is dangerous for Safta to admit to who she once was.
It is also dangerous for Augustin to move about without identity papers. It is even dangerous for him to draw. Drawing was Augustin's childhood obsession, as he struggled to make sense of a world without words. Strange, precise, multi-layered drawings of faceless people, and rooms more telling for what he leaves out than what he includes.
The story skips between the monochrome city of Iasi, with its bitter, sooty aroma and "used-up sky", and their childhood in Poiana. Safta returns in her mind to places long abandoned, recalling a lost love she has tried to forget. As the memories resurface, Augustin begins to draw again. At first his drawings make little sense, but gradually he reveals what has happened in the years since Safta's family fled to Britain ahead of the advancing war and she remained to train as a nurse with the army.
