A splendid, violent spring suddenly grips Bucharest in the 1980s after a brutal winter. Tolea, a defiant and eccentric middle-aged intellectual who has been dismissed from his job as a high-school teacher on "moral grounds", is attempting to clear up the mystery of his father's death forty years after the fact. He is gradually and irresistibly drawn into a web of suspicion in which images of an underground world linger obsessively: the organization of deaf- mutes whose nightmarish presence recalls the Single Party itself; the polite and timid informer, with his modest, homely reports; the black dog who has the same name as, and seems to be