The friendly company gathered for many years on Fridays at Marisha and Serge. The owner of the house, Serge, talent and common pride, calculated the principle of flying flying saucers, he was invited to a special institute by the department head, but he preferred the freedom of an ordinary junior research fellow of the World Ocean Institute. The company also belonged to Andrei the informer, who worked with Serge. His knocking did not frighten the audience: Andrei was obliged to knock only during ocean expeditions, but on land he did not engage. Andrei appeared first with his wife Anyuta, then with different women, and finally with his new wife Nadia, the eighteen-year-old daughter of a wealthy colonel, who looked like a spoiled schoolgirl, whose eyes fell on her cheek with excitement. Another participant in the Friday gatherings was the talented Zhora, the future doctor of science, half Jewish, about which no one had ever stuttered, as about some kind of his vice. There has always been Tanya, a Valkyrie about eighty meters tall, who manically brushed her snow-white teeth for twenty minutes three times a day. Twenty-year-old Lenka Marchukaite, a beauty in the “export version”, for some reason was never accepted into the company, although she was entrusted with her confidence in Marisha. And finally, the heroine belonged to the company with her husband Kolya, a bosom friend of Serge.

Whether ten years passed on these drunken Fridays, whether fifteen, Czech, Polish, Chinese, Romanian events swept, political trials took place - all this passed by “our circle”. “Sometimes flying birds came from other, adjacent areas of human activity” - for example, the district police officer Valera, who unknown tracked at parties and dreamed of the imminent arrival of a “master” like Stalin, got into a habit. Once they all loved hiking, bonfires, lived together in tents by the sea in the Crimea. All the boys, including Kolya, have been in love with Marisha since the institute, an inaccessible priestess of love. At the sunset of common life, Kolya went to her, leaving his wife. Serge by that time left Marisha, continuing, however, to maintain the appearance of family life for the sake of her beloved daughter Sonja, a child prodigy with outstanding abilities for drawing, music and poetry. The seven-year-old son of the heroine and Kolya, Alyosha, had no abilities, which terribly annoyed his father, who saw his copy in his son.

The heroine is a tough person and treats everyone with a mockery. She knows that she is very smart, and she is sure that what she does not understand does not exist at all. She has no illusions about the future and the fate of her son, as she knows that she is ill with an incurable kidney disease with progressive blindness, from which her mother recently died in terrible agony. A heartbroken father died of a heart attack shortly after his mother. Immediately after the mother’s funeral, Kolya suggested that his wife get a divorce. Knowing about her imminent death, the heroine does not expect her ex-husband to take care of his son: on his rare visits, he only yells at the boy, annoyed by his talents, and once hit him in the face when the child began to urinate after the death of his grandparents to bed.

For Easter, the heroine invites “her circle” to visit. Easter gatherings for her and Kolya were always the same tradition as Friday's for Marisha and Serge, and none of the company decided to refuse. Before that day, she prepared a lot of food with her mom and dad, then her parents took Alyoshka and left for the garden site about an hour and a half drive from the city, so that it would be convenient for guests to eat, drink and walk all night. In the first Easter Easter after the death of the parents, the heroine takes her son to the cemetery to her grandparents, without explanation, showing the boy what he will need to do after her death. Before the arrival of the guests, she sends Alyoshka alone to the summer cottage. During the usual common booze, the heroine speaks aloud about the vices of “her circle”: Kolya's ex-husband retires to the bedroom to take away the sheets from there; Marisha peers at the apartment, wondering how best to exchange it; the prosperous Zhora condescendingly speaks with the loser Serge; the daughter of Serge and Marisha Sonechka was sent to the son of Tanya-Valkyrie for a party, and everyone knows what these children do in private. And eight years later, Sonechka will become the mistress of her own father, whose crazy love for her daughter "leads through life with corners, nooks and dark basements."

The heroine in passing reports that she is going to give her son to the orphanage, which causes general outrage. Having finally gathered to leave, guests discover on the stairs under the door of Alyosha. In front of the whole company, the heroine rushes to her son and with a wild cry to the blood hits him in the face. Her calculation turns out to be correct: people of "their own circle", who could calmly cut each other into pieces, could not stand the sight of children's blood. An indignant Kolya takes his son, everyone is busy with the boy. Looking after them from the window, the heroine thinks that after her death all this "sentimental" company will be embarrassed not to take care of her orphaned child and he will not go to boarding schools. She managed to arrange his fate by sending him without a key to a summer cottage. The boy had to return, and she played the role of a monster mother for sure. Forever parting with her son, the heroine hopes that he will come to her in the cemetery for Easter and forgive her for hitting him in the face instead of a blessing.