The samizdat edition of this work, which consists of three parts and an epilogue, raised an uproar in the mid 1980’s. The individual parts deal with different topics and have different narrators. Gradually, especially in the epilogue, what unifies these three stories comes to the surface, as does their relation to one another and complicated reflections; a possible key to the interpretation of the three faces of a single novel is offered to the patient reader. In this work, Kratochvil presents his poetic style of writing a novel as an open system.