The love triangle: wife, husband and his mistress, amusingly crumbles because the loving writer is fleetingly infatuated with a third woman, young and inexperienced, rightly believing that an artist needs a muse every day, not a wife and mistress.
Nurdin is a man who failed to protect friendship and love, who retreated before deceit and hypocrisy. The benevolent viewer is personified by the Old Man, a character who seems to stand outside the plot. Nurdin tells the Old Man about his life.
There lived a poor peasant with his wife. They had three sons: Mats, Peter and Svend. One day there was a drought, and the family had a hard time. And the sons went to work. Mats took his father's old jacket for himself. Peter - a saucepan to sell. And his younger brother Svend got an old rusty nail...