When Nicole, a young copy-shop employee, is hired to translate an ancient Chinese manuscript, she soon finds that the document has strange powers that little by little begin to exert an eerie influence over her life.

The film is a story of parallel biographies. In 1944, three generations of a Jewish family of pharmacists live in a small Hungarian town. Eva, the 13-year-old granddaughter, keeps a diary and reads Dickens' Copperfield's David. From time to time, the hero of the novel appears in her life, or Eva enters the world of the novel. First, Eve's cousin is taken away. Then Eva's mother and her boyfriend arrive from Pest. They seize Grandpa's shop, arrest her father, and the ordeal doesn't end there...