It's tough to be an accountant in a time of war. It's tough to be a poet, young and earnest, while your family struggles to make ends meet and your friends risk their lives to sabotage the Nazis in your occupied streets. It's tough to be in love with the idea of being in love, even as your country has been turned into a factory of death. For Jurek, though, it is impossible "not" to be all these things, and he may have found the one place on earth where his optimism and lyricism make sense. A psychiatric hospital just outside of Warsaw needs someone to keep the books. In ordinary times, the hospital in the village of Tworki is synonymous with bedlam. But in these extraordinary times, its walled gardens and manicured walks frame an unlikely idyll, with Jurek its unlikely hero. Here Goethe and Durer discourse on philosophy and art; Newton conjures new theories; and Rubens dabbles with his paints. Great emperors, now of gentler disposition, have traded their armies for cards. And the only thing that threatens to break the routine is an occasional picnic. But the happiness Jurek finds in Tworki is perforated by melancholy. For life involves risk, and there is no longer such a thing as a small risk. People are disappearing. There are strange columns of smoke on the horizon. As the realities of war swallow the world beyond the hospital walls, Jurek and his friends must try to rediscover and salvage whatever beauty they can.