Yugoslavia, 1950: the local communist regime has quarreled with the Soviet Union while being under blockade from the West. The country is isolated, poor, government secret agents in long black leather coats are everywhere, people are disappearing during the night. The novel is set in a small provincial town that must be, by decree, turned into an industrial complex in a single summer.

The protagonist is a naive young man, 18 years old, a war orphan who wasn't accepted in the army because of his bad knee; he is disabled, so the authorities decide - with communist logic - that he should become a postman. He arrives in the town, into corrupt and dangerous world of double- (and triple-) crossing swindlers, armed only with his naive optimism. He will entangle himself into the deadly world of German Lottery, an unique charity where every ticket is free and everyone wins, where stakes are getting higher and higher, until one day somebody wins a jackpot …