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The action takes place in an anonymous post-totalitarian state, in the months after the collapse of the former tyrannical power: perhaps Czechoslovakia, Poland or Bulgaria after 1989.

The Professor, deprived of his university position on account of his dissident profile, had lost his wife some years before the action of the opera, and had then been arrested on suspicion of helping opponents of the system to flee the country. The Professor was never brought to trial but instead died under interrogation, leaving his two children, then 19 and 14, to fend for themselves, without hope of a further education, and condemned to menial employment. They have kept the apartment assigned to their parents, a small, neat place in a modern block on the outskirts of an ordinary Central European town, and Peter has, through his industry and intelligence, risen to the position of floor manager in the run-down local firm, not yet privatized, which makes electrical appliances. Anna has found work in a bookshop, and also gives lessons in the violin. They are devoted to each other, Peter serious, gloomy, protective of his sister, she a quiet, busy, lovable girl, popular with all who knew her and for him the one trusted source of love and stability. She is not without ambition and, like Peter, deeply frustrated by the impossibility of pursuing it. The Professor constantly appears in the memory of Peter and Anna, as they puzzle over his fate, Peter longing for justice, Anna desiring to fill the gap in her life, and to bring the work of mourning to an end.