The film is set during the last summer before the Great Patriotic War. Three sisters are coming to stay with their grandmother in the village. They imagine the world as a vast and charming "Garden of desires" and all members of the household are waiting for Asya's birthday. Asya has a sense of foreboding regarding the impending grief. Guests come to visit but none of them are her parents. She still does not know that her father was declared an enemy of the people, that tomorrow she will not see her mother and that the war is approaching.
The shoe factory is undergoing production reform. Poor quality shoes no longer bring savings, the company began to suffer only losses. To get out of this crisis, the factory management decided to produce normal products designed for the wishes of the consumer. To do this, you must cope with new technologies.
A rare astronomical phenomenon — the parade of planets — has a strange effect on several men. The heroes of the film — an astrophysicist, locksmith, salesman, architect, loader, trolley bus driver — are called up for military training, which ends ahead of time. There is a strange pause in their life — no one knows where they are, no one is waiting for them, and they themselves can not rush anywhere. This short respite in a hasty and busy life gives the heroes the opportunity to experience strong and very important feelings for them.
In this drama with socio-political nuances, a heroic engineer is able to save the passengers on his train from injury or death by sacrificing his own life when his locomotive crashes. An investigator Ermakov and journalist Malinin are both involved in the story of the crash but from two different angles: the investigator wants to find out why it happened, the journalist wants to laud the heroism of the dead engineer.
