Bessarabia on the eve of World War II... Soldier Ștefan Brebu is being taken to trial in a prison car as a witness. The escorts were ordered to shoot him on the way "at attempt to escape." A soldier can give testimony in court that is undesirable for the authorities: it was not communists who were shooting at unarmed peasants...

A young couple on the river bank leaf through Lesya Ukrainka's book "Forest Song". Reading takes the young people to Polesia, where the drama takes place.

The captain of a foreign ship drops off Hans, a sick sailor with no papers, on one of the islands in the Mediterranean Sea. Silvana, a fisherwoman, finds him and takes him into her home. Hans gets better and, after becoming friends with her son, starts going out to sea to fish. After a serious illness, the sailor forgot his past, and everyone thought he was German. He was happy in Silvana's house. But one day, when he fell ill, Hans began to shout in Russian in his delirium. After he recovered, Silvana was unable to prevent him from returning to his homeland...

A youth brigade at one of Kyiv's factories is competing for the title of Communist Labor Brigade. They are assisted by an old worker, Yakov Sereda. However, two people actively interfere with the Komsomol members: the rogue Yevgeny, who pretends to be a self-taught inventor, and the careerist engineer Kamensky...

The plot is based on the story of the complex relationship between Peter Schmidt and Zinaida Rizberg, with whom he corresponded after a chance meeting on the train.