A successful Croatian novelist, unable to remember his early childhood and marked by a pattern of destroyed relationships, returns to his native Medjimurje village to investigate his father's death and a cluster of deaths that occurred during his boyhood. He discovers that his mind fabricated an alternate account, including a false childhood identity, to shield him from a guilt-laden truth about those events.
When a child cannot bear responsibility or grief tied to a death, the mind can overwrite the actual sequence of events with a falsified but coherent self-narrative. The invented story feels fully real to the person, so the protective fiction operates not as forgetting but as active substitution.
A boy interprets a run of adult deaths in his village as consequences of his own secret wishes or words, assigning himself hidden causal power over events he did not control. This magical attribution converts ordinary bereavement into private culpability that shapes his later identity.
Reading a childhood place not as backdrop but as an archive, where the mud, weather, houses and local silences hold what the person cannot consciously recall. Returning physically to the terrain becomes a method of retrieval, because the environment indexes memories that interior reflection alone cannot reach.