Meluzin takes a job as a primary care physician at a health center in the small village of Větrov.

When Meluzin lights a fire in a field, one autumn afternoon, in order to roast potatoes that he's been given for dinner, a villager yells at him to extinguish it.

On strolls to the cemetery, however, he befriends the village sexton, who jestingly calls him a "colleague," and he also befriends his neighbor Pavla Kodetová, a schoolteacher, after she lights a fire for him one day in the Franklin stove in his room and invites him into her kitchen for lívance (pancakes), which reminds him of his mother, who made them with bilberries when he was a child.

He becomes involved, too, in the life of Markéta, the ambulance driver's girlfriend, whose eccentric mother has become reclusive and antisocial on account of a government plan to build a highway through her duck farm and home.

After Markéta's mother finds out about the pregnancy, Meluzin stops the woman from chasing her daughter with a hatchet, and he arranges for the girl to stay with his neighbor Pavla.

Missing the company of her new friend Pavla, Markéta runs away from the maternity hospital on foot one night, walking all the way back to Větrov.