Based on Valentin Rasputin's story of the same title. The winter of 1945. In a village on the Angara embankment the women wait the return of their husbands from the front. The young soldier Andrei Guskov, who fled from the hospital, returns as a deserter. In his remote winter hut only his wife Nastena visits him : she is the only person whom he can trust with his life - of an eternal fugitive doomed to loneliness. Only she loves him. She lives in the present, remembers the past and does not believe in the future. She will have a child, and to the entire village she is an unfaithful wife who did not wait for her husband to return...