Mafalda is nine years old, wears glasses with thick yellow lenses, knows “The Baron in the Tree” by Italo Calvino by heart and adores her cat. She has a rare retinal disease and soon faces complete blindness. She is afraid of being in the dark, so she keeps a diary where she writes down exactly what she will no longer be able to do, for example, count the stars, play football with the boys, or climb the cherry tree in the school yard. She adores this tree, which has become her only refuge, and welcomes it from afar as her best friend. But the trouble is, every day between the point where Mafalda begins to distinguish the contours of the tree and the cherry tree itself there are fewer and fewer steps, which means darkness is already very close. For the first time in Russian!