Antoine is an urban fifty-year-old, a large wine merchant. He is a man who appears solid and sure of himself. One day, he receives a strange phone call from Russia - all he hears is the sound of breathing. He is convinced that it is a call from Solange, a woman he had met four years earlier in Moscow and had loved passionately before she disappeared from his life. Shaken by this call, he gives up everything, work and family, and sets out to find her. A journey that takes him to Moscow, St. Petersburg and then to the far north. He throws himself body and soul into his futile search, and the memories he has with Solange obsess him. Exhausted, on the verge of perdition, he is taken in by the inhabitants of a house lost on the edge of a frozen lake: an initiatory stay that will transform him.