December 1989. Stoian Mirtzu, a thirty-five year old professor of literature who who had cultivated his longing for freedom for so long, is at last liberated from the shackles of the Rumanian dictatorship into which he was plunged by a dark machination. During the six years of imprisonment, doubt and suffering, only the memory of the kiss of Rodica, one of his former students, gives him the strength to survive. Upon his liberation, Stoian discovers the portrait of Rodica on a stamp. Why is she the personification of “La Fille au Ibis” symbol of the Rumanian anti-fascist resistance? What has become of her? Where is she? Chasing and closing in on a phantom, Stoian follows a remarkable lead that will set him on the trail of the young woman. At the outbreak of the insurrection of Bucharest, he finally finds her on a small island in the Danube where she has taken refuge, leaving behind her the body of an agent of the Securitate who was her formidable and appealing manipulator…