1946, Kyrgyzstan, evacuated from Leningrad woman with two children — boys of six and ten years. Their father is in hospital, badly wounded. Time is poor, hungry. The family fights for life, selling homemade rugs on the market and picking up everything that can be useful in the economy on the ruins of abandoned houses. Once the brothers find in the dump a book with wonderful pictures. This is Alexander Pushkin's fairy tale "goldfish". The mother reads it to them before bedtime — and in the lives of boys be the dream and the sense of becoming owners of the coveted gold fish and the three wishes, one of which, of course, the return of the father, alive and well.