1980. London. Psychiatrist Robert Hendrix receives a letter of invitation from a stranger - a Frenchman named Alexandre Pereira, living on a tiny Mediterranean island. Pereira, who is in his eighties, writes that he served with Robert's father, who died in the war, and has his letters, photographs and other documents. Robert has his own military background. A veteran of another World War - the Second - he participated in the Allied landings in Italy, where he was wounded and met his first and only love. Pereira, like Hendricks, is a psychiatrist who has devoted many years to studying memory problems. The same topic occupies Robert, and not only from a professional point of view. In conversations with Pereira, plunging into memories of a difficult childhood, turbulent student years, his first steps in medicine, reliving the nightmare of everyday life in the trenches, the loss of his best friends and separation from his beloved, for the first time he forces himself to face his past, the echoes of which haunt him. in the present.