Two lonely people, by the will of a cruel and tedious fate, find themselves in Moscow, without clearly understanding why.
Stefan, hereafter Stepan, is a short, almost bald, overweight Black man from New York. For forty years, he has lived with his perpetually ill mom, devoting his life to caring for her. He has never touched a woman and has already lost hope in this event. His mom is dying, and he is close to suicide, not because he is crazy, but because he can’t find a reason to live. He hates summer with its metal-melting sun, and the coldest place where he can hide from his mother’s empty room and catch his breath is Moscow on New Year’s Eve.
Matryona is an ordinary Russian woman who lives with her mom in a small village somewhere in central Russia. She’s been dragging herself through her long, drab life for thirty-five years – running to the farm at dawn to milk the cows and, at sunset, collapsing into her lonely bed, her joints creaking. On New Year’s Eve, she decides to go to Moscow, a city she’s always dreamed of seeing, to breathe in the capital’s air, recharge her batteries, and then return to her mom and the fat, kind cows.
Stepan and Matryona meet in the elevator of their cheap hotel. They spend the daylight hours and even the dark parts of it together, but every fairy tale has its ending, and they part, without even saying goodbye. But some force pushes Stepan off the already trembling plane, and Matryona off the speeding train. This force is stronger than love, than pregnancy, and even bony Death retreats before it. What kind of force is this?