The chapters written in first and third person and connected by short "fragments" representing sessions of psychotherapy that illuminate the plot from different angles, in the style of "Rashomon".
Beno (Benjamin) Gottzeit, a self-righteous and domineering Holocaust survivor, is obsessed with rectifying past injustices, those that he suffered as well as those that he caused.
The unexpected details of their lives unfold through streams of memory and confession, revealing a history as intricate and fragile as an origami bird.
Zohar, Edna’s husband is a history teacher-turned-land surveyor, orphaned at a young age and desperately searching for the love and security that he did not get as a child.
Ilias, a Greek Orthodox monk, was raised in Greece, like Edna in Hungary, by a father with rigid and unreasonable expectations: it is his arrival in Jerusalem that unexpectedly shapes the destiny of all the others and brings the novel to its conclusion.