The story begins in1948, in Bohemia, behind the Iron Curtain. In the dead of winter at midnight, Vaclav and Irina, both fifteen years old, cut through a barbed wire fence and run across the 'no-man's land' toward the border with West Germany. Irina is shot and falls, Vaclav runs back through the searchlights and machine gun fire to help her. As he picks her up a bullet enters her head. He hears her say "Go". He puts her gently on the ground and runs covered with her blood. He reaches West Germany exhausted and freezing, and discovers that Irina's eye is clenched in his right hand. He buries her eye at the base of a tree and carves her name above it. He knows he would not have had the courage to escape without her. He loved her and loves her still.

Vaclav makes his way to a Displaced Persons camp in West Germany where he discovers that Irina's eye comes alive in his hand each time he has sex with a woman. He goes to Rome and becomes a priest, but his interest in the occult and his hunger for women and sex drive him to leave the church. He goes to NYC and becomes a theatre director and acting teacher. He becomes obsessed with the story of Faust, who sold his soul to Mephistopheles, and his tragic seduction of an innocent young virgin. He begins to work on a production of the play. In 1968 when the short-lived Prague Spring liberalises the laws in Czechoslovakia, he goes back to his hometown to visit his mother. He is shocked when she tells him that Irina is still alive, but she won't tell him where she is living. He searches for Irina, and for the tree at the base of which he buried Irina's eye.