In the form of a spoken oath, a young woman named Bekija pledges before God and a 12-man council to live as a sworn virgin. She swears to renounce her female identity, remain celibate for life, and never touch a man. She asks that her hair be cut and her dresses burned. In exchange, she will adopt the masculine name Matija and assume the male role of providing for her family as decreed by the Kanun. She accepts that she will enjoy a long and respected life if she upholds this vow, but will face severe consequences if she violates it.

After taking the oath, Matija exits the church with a shorn head, feeling the cold air for the first time. She reflects that her dresses will be burned, but she has hidden the blue dress she took from her grandmother. Matija intended to wear the dress for her wedding, along with patent leather shoes. Her grandmother, on the other hand, had meant the blue dress for her own burial and had wanted to give Bekija a red velvet one. 

Matija recalls that her wedding was supposed to have taken place in the same church where she took her oath. Contemplating the severely restricted lives of women in her society, Matija declares that killing her former self, Bekija, was the smartest thing she ever did. Now equipped with a shotgun and a watch, she can smoke, drink, and socialize with men. She practices a new masculine walk and notes that her transformation has fulfilled her father’s lifelong wish for a son. 

Speaking to an unnamed journalist, Matija defends the need for rules and recalls the village gossip about her father’s disappointment at her birth. Walking home through the mountains, she sees the foundation of a house and cannot tell if it is being built or torn down.

Matija provides autobiographical details to the journalist. She confirms her passport name is Bekija, she is 33, and her father, Murash, was murdered. Her mother died soon after, leaving Matija with her brother, Sále, a cow named Nura, and her father’s pigeons. Matija’s favorite color is blue, and she is afraid of snow. She states that in her world, love is a forbidden concept equivalent to death. She treats her own injuries with tobacco and listens to the radio, as she has no television. She shows the journalist a photograph of her family taken before the family was fractured by tragedy.

Matija, whose birth name, “Bekija,” means “she who survives” (22), recounts the story of her birth. Her mother was pregnant with twins, a boy and a girl, but her father, Murash, only wanted a son. Bekija’s paternal grandmother was hostile to the pregnancy, and the village gossiped that Bekija’s mother was unlikely to give birth to a boy. 

After Bekija’s mother experienced a hemorrhage, an ultrasound revealed the male twin had vanished from the womb, leaving only the healthy female fetus. When Bekija was born, Murash avoided her for a year. He eventually warmed to her, calling her “daddy’s boy” because she was strong and skilled at men’s work.

Matija’s first clear memory is of her father giving her a wooden pistol; she aimed it at him, squeezed the trigger, and mimicked gunshot noises, making them both laugh. Matija now wishes she could have warned Murash about what was to come.

In the present, just before she serves hominy, Matija warns the journalist about the strict rules of hospitality under the Kanun.

Matija explains to the journalist that she knows the sworn virgin oath by heart from having attended many such ceremonies. She then details the Kanun’s sacred rules concerning guests, who must be protected at all costs. 

If a guest is killed just outside the host’s home, the host is honor-bound to avenge the murder. Matija reassures the journalist that she is safe, as women do not participate in blood feuds. However, she repeats the warning that if a guest wipes a plate with bread or adds wood to the fire, then the host is considered slighted and has the right to kill the guest. 

Reflecting on her isolation as the last sworn virgin in the area, she mentions her only companion is her cow, Nura. She then asks the journalist to retrieve a box from a dresser.

The journalist retrieves a letter dated July 8, 2017, from Matija’s brother, Sále, who now lives in Bulgaria under the name “Mihail.” Sále writes that he fled Albania to escape the destructive laws of the Kanun and does not regret his decision. He directly asks Matija why she chose him to die by tying a black armband on him and sentencing him to death. He suspects her choice is connected to an incident that occurred the night she returned late from the dairy, the same night she told Murash she wanted to become a sworn virgin and back out of her wedding. Sále says only that he knows that something happened that night and asks what it was. 

Though he knows she is angry that his flight resulted in their father’s death, he hopes for forgiveness and urges her to write back so they can finally share the truth.

Matija recalls her brother, Sále, who was born a year after her. He was a frail and delicate boy, which made him a disappointment to their father. Murash found Sále’s interest in reading and sewing repugnant. Consequently, Murash favored Bekija for her strength and continued to refer to her as “daddy’s boy.” 

One day, Murash tried to force Sále to shoot a sparrow he had tied to a rock. Terrified, Sále missed and shot his father in the calf. Enraged, Murash killed the bird himself and viciously berated Sále, calling him a weakling. Sále stood frozen in fear, having wet himself during the confrontation.

Immediately following the confrontation with his father, Sále sits outside smashing unripe walnuts with the rock that had been tied to the sparrow. As Murash chops wood nearby, Sále shoves the bitter, broken nuts into his mouth, staining his skin with their green juice. After his mother tells him to give the dead sparrow to the cats, Sále vomits.

That evening during dinner, Murash’s bandaged leg grows red with bloodstain. He aggressively sucks on a boiled cockerel’s neck while Sále, still sick, struggles with a piece of dry bread. Murash glares at his son. When he raises his hand over Sále, their mother sighs his name; Murash instead slams his fist on the table in frustration and curses Sále, who leaves the table and returns to his rock in the garden.

Matija recalls an afternoon when her father sent her to fetch sandpaper. In his room, she saw his razor stuck in the window frame, its shadow casting the image of a mustache on her upper lip in the mirror. She felt a sense of rightness and power, imagining herself as the Albanian hero Skanderbeg. 

Bekija’s moment was interrupted by Dhana, a beautiful girl visiting from Bulgaria for the summer, who smiled at her from the window. Overcome with shame, Bekija quickly moved away from the mirror. When she looked back, Dhana was gone, but the image of her silhouette remained burned into Bekija’s vision.

Murash becomes angry with Bekija for spending time with Dhana at the local water mill instead of doing her chores, which resulted in a hawk killing one of his pigeons. He is about to strike her when she stares him down, thinking of herself as his son. Her defiance makes him lower his hand. 

The scene shifts to the water mill, where Bekija and Dhana lie together and share the stories behind their respective scars. Bekija’s scar is from picking rose hips, while Dhana’s is from her father accidentally dropping her during a game. The intimate moment of sharing makes them feel they are truly seeing each other for the first time.

The morning after the hawk killed one of Murash’s pigeons, neighbors gather at the family’s gate to congratulate Murash. Bekija goes outside to see that her father has crucified the hawk on a handmade wooden cross mounted on their gate.

Sometime later, Murash informs Bekija that she is to be married in two days to a man named Nemanja. Bekija objects, saying she doesn’t know him and has heard he is ugly. Murash dismisses her protests, stating that the marriage is a good business arrangement for the family and that, under the Kanun, a betrothal cannot be broken. 

Murash reminds Bekija that he is required to provide a bullet in her dowry, which Nemanja will use to kill her if she is not a virgin on their wedding day. He asks if she is pure, and she replies that she is.

Matija tells the journalist about her father’s obsession with pigeons, which began when a neighbor gave him a pair of Serbian Highflyers. Murash built an elaborate dovecote and collected many different breeds, which Matija enumerates. A Turk who sold Murash pigeons gifted him a small cuckoo-dove on his way out, and Murash passed it to Bekija as a thank-you for her help. 

The narrative flashes back to the day Murash finished the dovecote. The family had boiled a hen for dinner, but Murash refused to eat, claiming that paint fumes made him ill. In truth, he was disgusted by the cooked bird. Later, Bekija noticed that Sále had secretly hidden a chicken wing in his pocket.

Sále’s mother finds him in a dark hallway. She comforts him after his father has called him “capricious,” telling him that her own father used to say the same thing about her. She then tears a piece of bread and gives the larger half to Sále.

While alone in the village dairy at dusk, the narrator, Bekija, is cornered by Kuka the Hook, a man known as the village idiot. Terrified by his strange song and menacing presence, she tries to talk to him to de-escalate the situation, mentioning that her betrothal is in two days, but her efforts fail. Kuka traps her and sexually assaults her among the overturned milk buckets. 

During the attack, Bekija dissociates, feeling as if she is watching the event from outside her own body. Afterward, Kuka is childlike and innocent, acting unaware of what he has done. Bekija sees blood on her fingers and realizes that no one in the village would believe her over Kuka, simply because he is a man. Deciding there is no point in telling anyone, she splashes her face with milk from the vat and washes the blood away. She then refuses Kuka’s offer to walk her home, stating she can find her own way in the dark, now resolute in a new, unspoken plan.