Adela and Sonja: two figures of women and two destinies that could not be imagined more different. The former, in the 1930s, leads a comfortable existence beside her parents in their riverside villa, weaving with a distinguished poet a naive and passionate correspondence about art, music, and beauty; the latter, in the present day, works in the same house as a caregiver in the service of a despotic old gentleman. But it was no accident that led her there, for Adela and Sonja are mother and daughter; and between their affairs, as a tragic caesura and at the same time indelible trait d'union, the catastrophe of war and racial persecution intervened. As she cares for her master by accompanying his gradual regression into childhood, Sonja learns from some letters about her mother's fate: deportation, "salvation" paid for with services rendered in another home, the impossible return, after that extreme degradation, to the normality of a bourgeois life... if there is any hope of redemption, it is entrusted to the memory and compassion of those who come after or perhaps