Is it possible for a novel to make us reflect on the limits of body and soul, about the quiet force of nature, about the impossibility of understanding death and infinity, about metaphysical longings and enlightenment? Maybe touch the water, touch the wind talk about it. While in 1939 the Nazis enter Poland, the Jewish mathematician and watchmaker Elisha Pomeranz is forced to flee to the frozen forests, leaving behind his beautiful and intelligent wife, Stefa. After the war, after eluding the concentration camps, both managed to remake their lives while looking for the moment to meet again: Stefa, in Stalin's Russia, and Elisha, in Israel, where another conflict is starting to fuse ... In this novel, Amoz Oz adds to his story an allegorical fantasy frame, a popular tale. Thus, in the same way that Chagall's figures naturally resolve gravitational problems, Elisha levitates and flies "the Germans, the woods, the huts, the ghosts, the wolves"; Stefa, on the other hand, becomes a kind of comic heroine of the Soviet bureaucracy. But when the marriage finally reunites, it will only be to disappear again, already turned into such insubstantial beings as all those who have moved too far from the earth to escape the corrosive tentacles of evil.