[1][2][3] In the Siberian village of Atamanovka, Nastya Guskova lives with her elderly in-laws while working on the collective farm and in the lumberyard alongside other women whose husbands are away fighting in the Great Patriotic War.
Her husband, Andrey Guskov, has been at the front since the beginning of the conflict, having served in various roles, from a ski battalion near Moscow to reconnaissance near Smolensk, and later in a howitzer battery after being wounded at Stalingrad.
Eventually, Nastya becomes pregnant, a long-awaited joy tempered by the stigma and accusations of infidelity from her in-laws and the entire village, who believe she betrayed her husband presumed lost at the front.
Rumors of Andrey’s desertion prompt a police investigation led by Officer Burdak, who, with a group of men, begins to follow Nastya, suspecting she knows his whereabouts.
The story ends in 1965, with a solitary Andrey living in the nearly abandoned Atamanovka, where a passing beacon keeper stops briefly to wish him well on the 20th anniversary of Victory Day, marking the passage of time and the unhealed scars left by the war.