As a seven-year-old child, Mikhail Brodsky stood under the gun of a Romanian officer in Odessa in the fall of 1941. He was in prison, lost his mother, and was separated from his father. He was saved by an Odessa doctor and a lieutenant of the Romanian Gestapo - the Siguranians. The author writes about his childhood at a time when death ceased to be an event, about his youth in the Moscow theater world, about the adult life of a major Soviet engineer. War and occupation, the people among whom he lived, famous and unknown, detective stories, inhabitants of the zone, ministers - such is the disappeared nature, recreated by the author with ruthless observation and wonderful humor.