It's a pitch black, rainy night in a small Iranian town. Inside his house the Colonel is immersed in thought. Memories are storming in. Memories of his wife. Memories of the great patriots of the past, all of them assassinated or executed. Memories of his children, who had joined the different factions of the 1979 revolution. There is a knock on the door. Two young policemen have come to summon the Colonel to collect the tortured body of his youngest daughter and bury her before sunrise. The Islamic Revolution, like every other revolution in history, is devouring its own children. And whose fault is that? This shocking diatribe against the failures of the Iranian left over the last fifty years does not leave one taboo unbroken.

During the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s, an Iraqi journalist is given a tour of a military prison. He is informed by the major in charge about what is expected of him: he is to write a fabricated report about a murder that has occurred in the camp, in order to demoralise the enemy soldiers. The journalist is unwilling to write this story. In a long night of intense discussion at his home, he speaks to the major of a historic conflict between the two countries and tells him that he is writing a novel about a group of soldiers trapped on a hill, dying of thirst as they compete for a water tank with a group of enemy soldiers on the opposite hill. So far the water tank has remained undamaged at the bottom of a rift between the hills, but neither group has a hope of reaching it without being shot by the other. Delirious, the soldiers await their end: either being saved by a fabled female lion who feeds her milk to all who are thirsty, or morphing into doves once they are martyred. At the same time, in Iran, another writer remembers how he first came into contact with a gun...In a narrative riddled with surreal images, shifting perspectives and dark humour, Dowlatabadi blurs the boundaries between the two warring countries as he questions the meaning of national identity when confronted with time and human suffering.