The extraordinary life of an attractive, vital woman called Marta, and of her two adolescent daughters, Majda and the younger Gábina, and their "fathers". We are in a critical decade of our recent history, starting on the eve of the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1968 and ending with the persecution of Charter 77 signatories, when a divorced man, the father of both girls, once an actor and later a prominent dissident, emigrates with his young bride, while his outwardly-appearing cowardly and apolitical ex-wife Marta stays behind and faces the adverse era quietly and persistently.