A young man is confronted with corrupt and vindictive colleagues at work and negligent officials at the hospital where his mother is dying. As he searches quixotically for a steadfast moral code by which to live, he suffers from the knowledge of human frailty and our darker inclinations to do harm.
Jan is a young assistant professor in chemistry and a workaholic, Anna is an unsuccessful science writer who turns to Jan for advice and human compassion, but Jan, absorbed with his career, remains immune to Anna's clumsy efforts to pierce his defenses.
A Warsaw writer, Wacław Kisielecki, returning from Rome, has his car break down somewhere late in the evening on a country road, so he and his chauffeur, Konstanty, have to look for accommodation in a nearby manor house. Its owner is a young man, Jan, who has been managing the severely run-down estate himself since his mother's death.
