This book consists of three interlocking narratives in all of which the surge is present of the great tides that have raced through the Balkan history in the last sixty years, but reflected in the mirror of the rural dialect. In this, the boundaries between personal and collective tragedy become blurred, and each is invested with the properties of the other. Death and old age come to be felt as part of the tragic passing of a whole world, and the passing of the whole world as carrying within it all the accumulated pathos of each and every death.