In a remote Czech village, an elderly woman over the age of ninety lives alone in an old villa since the fifties of the last century. No one visits her, except her granddaughter.
In her loneliness, the grandmother lives with her happy and sad memories and writes letters to her friends who neighbored her in an old neighborhood in Prague. She writes to her neighbors whom she knew before World War II when she was young and lived with them the pain of war, the arbitrariness and injustice of communism in the fifties and sixties, and after that the corruption of the democratic system In the nineties. She is claiming in her letters and with some naivety that the ministers have not changed.
One day, by chance, a young, unknown writer knocks on her door. He has been searching for a long time about a topic for a novel so she reads on him a letter that she wrote to a friend of hers who is over ninety years old as well. He finds that the message is rich in stories from the past that tell the lives of ordinary people in the twentieth century who lived through several political regimes, and they had to adapt and coexist with them. However, the story doesn't end here.
The old grandmother amazes him, even more, when she suddenly pulls out a letter she was keeping dating back to 1830 that her grandfather's father wrote to his son, that is, to her grandfather, telling him how he participated in the American liberation war, and Napoleon's campaign to Egypt, and how he believed in the false tale of defending the freedom whose slogan was raised by Napoleon Bonaparte while colonizing half of the world. In this letter, the writer discovers historical information unknown to him, dating back to the reign of the Sun King Louis XIV. After listening to all those stories, he decides that to write a novel, he needs the grandmother's letter to her friend and her grandfather's father's letter to his son also at any cost. There remains an ethical problem that he faces, which is how to get the letter and admit after that that the stories written about it are not the product of his imagination but true stories about an old lady who knew in reality and was once distinguished by unique beauty and ended up in that remote village sick and poor, exhausted by life and insulted by all the regimes she knew. She used to naively say, "The ministers have not changed."
It is worth mentioning here that the author knew that lady, and the story of the letter that she read to him is true. However, he added to the stories mentioned in the letter other stories from his imagination.
