Pavel Zuev has to start his life over from darkness after he looses his sight. The young man has to learn again how to eat, walk, wash himself, do simple housework, and even how to look out of the window without seeing anything. All connections to his previous life are broken. In this new life blind Zuev encounters an exceptional woman capable of seeing more than other people. Her name sounds symbolic – Nadezhda (translates as 'hope' into English) and she works at the local hospital. Nadezhda will help Zuev find his strength and a new sense of existing. These equally strong but otherwise different people spend together what, perhaps, will be the best days of their lives; but everything has an ending.

This is a poetic film set in the times of Lenin's NEP. A ballet dancer steals a brooch and gives it as a present to another dancer. This is a crime of passion. A mysterious black ball is after the heroine. She runs away from it and manages to give the brooch in an exquisite pirouette movement, as shiny as diamond facets. What gives a stone its dazzling luster are its polished facets. But the real gem is love, and it's much harder to get than any diamond in the world.