Set in the midst of World War II and interspersed with beautiful choir music, the horrors of the war unfold when the Germans realized one of the boys in the choir is a Jew and they must find him immediately.

The piano teacher Gavrilescu, a loser at 49, forgets one day the bag of sheet music of one of his students. Turning back and in the hot weather, he can't wait for a streetcar and sets off on foot. He is drawn, to the cool walnut garden where there used to be a brothel called "The Gypsy", which the men talked about pathetically on the tram, pretending that they loathed it.