A bright, very talented actress Bertha Ulrich from a family of Volga Germans spends her last years in a nursing home somewhere on the outskirts of Moscow. In her past—love and fame, passionate romances and grand premieres; in the present, she is not needed by anyone except the porcelain dolls she collects on a bedside table. But then a couple of in-love students appears in Bertha’s life—people who aren’t indifferent to what will happen to Bertha… One of the most piercing novels about the connection between generations and about the fact that there are no such things as “other people’s old folks.”