The heroine, Gora, is a frail, middle-aged woman who works as a janitor in a residential area of Rostov-on-Don. She has no residence permit or health insurance, and to save money, she lives with a friend in a barracks for 500 rubles. The two-story, densely populated barracks survived only because it stood on landfill land its entire history. People have lived here for over forty years. They raise geese and goats in their summer kitchens, brew moonshine, drink, love, and die. A hundred meters from the barracks is a convent. It houses 15 young women of all ages; it's essentially the same barracks, only whitewashed and surrounded by a brick wall. Rumor has it the abbess is a former prison guard. The passions are as intense as those in a hardcore Mexican soap opera.
