The paths of Ahysa and Asylbeck cross on a cargo ship in the middle of the sea. She is a young prostitute from Kazakhstan, and she is pregnant; he is a generous Russian sailor. Both of them are trying to give a meaning to their lives and think they can do it together. Ahysa and little Tursyn, her son, follow Asylbeck: before in the eternal winter of an isolated farm in Siberia, then in the summer of the arid steppes of Kazakhstan. Years later, Tursyn returns home to face what remains of his family: an old nomad about to die, his grandfather, and a shipwrecked father. Both of them will bring back the vague memories that Tursyn has of his mother, as fragments scattered in the remotest moors of the earth, almost at the end of the world.
