Orthodox Easter days. Trieste, the city where it is impossible to stay and from which it is lacerating to leave. Alma returns; she has three days. She must recover the inheritance that her father, orphaned by Tito, left to Vili for her.  But Vili is the last person Alma would want to find again.

Three days become the watershed between what was and what will be. The years of a childhood divided between her grandparents' Austro-Hungarian cafes and secret trips with her father to the Yugoslav islands.

And a present where coming to terms with the memory of a war across the border and those same streets where Alma and Vili now try to find their place.

"She would not have been able to tell where she belonged, even her tormented cit¬ity did not know: they called it a paper city because she always thought of herself as part of a nation that was not her own, imagined Austria, so¬came the Slavs, and even the Garibaldi¬na nation, but then she was estranged from everything and especially from herself."