Algis Pozera, a handsome, affluent, and honored young Lithuanian poet and dutiful Party member, travels from Moscow back to Lithuania, grumbling because foreign tourists have occupied all first-class berths. He encounters a lacquered female Intourist guide, a gaggle of Lithuanian-American women and a young girl accused of thievery, with various carnal results. Most of the book, however, consists of flashbacks to the post-WW II ""civil war"" between pro- and anti-Soviet Lithuanians, a Vendèe conducted by the Forest Brotherhood against peasants and officials loyal to the government. Brave and noble figures on each side are recreated and slaughtered. Pozera's own conflict is conveyed by alternately showing him as dashing and sensitive, then as betraying his highest poetic and nationalist impulses. He never becomes especially real, and the style is undistinguished. At most, a fresh comer of Soviet minority folklore revealed.