1942 year. Pavlodar. Kazakhstan. Far Eastern military echelon. Tanker Stepan hopes to meet his mother. The soldier Litovkin is faced with a difficult choice - to fulfill the order or to skip mother to son.
The mother sent the teenager to learn how to swim with a good trainer. After the first classes, the boy staged a local revolution in the pool. It seemed more important to resist than to learn how to swim.