Timofey Ilyin - pilot, communist, order bearer, hero of the Spanish and Finnish campaigns, favorite of women. He believes only in his own courage, is not afraid of anything and is not bothered by memories of the past. Fate protected Ilyin until one day in the late autumn of 1941 he sat at the helm of a captured fighter with a swastika on the wings and made an emergency landing near Vyazma on territory captured by the Germans. It seemed that there, in the freezing forests of the Rzhev-Vyazma ledge, Captain Ilyin went through all the circles of hell: he was a prisoner of a terrible prisoner of war camp, escaped, froze into swamp ice, miraculously escaped and ended up in a hospital, where a tired doctor amputated both of his legs. Timofey was treated and, frightened by his stories about his experience in the swamps near Vyazma, he was sent to Gorky, away from sin and sensitive, interested ears. But fate prepared new trials for him. In 1953, pilot Ilyin, who drank away his military decorations, ended up in a boarding school for war veterans located on the island of Valaam. Only irrepressible fortitude and newfound faith help him to survive and find his happiness even among rejected exiles...