Professor Hans Faul, tired and lonely, is the director of a psychosomatic clinic in the rural Black Forest. In this melting pot of transcultural suffering, people complain of "wandering pains" or a "falling navel" – metaphors for a suffering that conventional medicine often has no answer for. Into this setting steps Orhan Osman, a former prison doctor from Turkey, who was forced to witness torture. Osman is a wounded healer who endures the silence of the patients because he speaks the language of pain.

The novel unfolds a mosaic of fates that collide in the clinic's tea room, the social heart of the place: Gül, who is fragmented between different personality parts and punishes men to feel herself; Hazal, who is haunted at night by demons sitting on her chest; Benjamin, a trans man who struggles with religious dogmas over his identity; and the former arch-enemies Hozan and Ahmet, who find a fragile brotherhood through music.

The book culminates in a spring festival, where the different cultural threads – pain, music, and dance – weave together into a moment of collective healing.