The Countess curses the maid for having an affair with her husband and getting pregnant. The owner sends the girl to a distant Northern village and finally says that all the women in her family will only be able to get pregnant in old age and will die in childbirth. The newborn daughter of the maid is now an orphan, she does not know about the curse and lives until she is sixty-five years old in complete ignorance of what intimacy with a man is and prays to God for a miracle. A young folklorist comes to the village, and that very night a woman begins to menstruate for the first time in 65 years.