The gardener hired by Igor's mother is a mysterious man. He's about sixty years old, pretty sparing with his words, and won't drink a drop of alcohol. And what does the blurred, illegible tattoo on his upper arm mean? With the help of a computer-savvy friend of his, young Igor manages to decipher it: ›Ochakov 1957‹, it reads, and ›Efim Chagin's House‹. The quest to get to the bottom of it takes Igor not only to Ochakov, a seaport on the Black Sea 500 kilometres away from his home near Kyiv, but also to the year 1957... In Andrey Kurkov's fantastical and absurd storytelling, anything is possible – even time travel to a past from which the present can perhaps be seen much more clearly.