In the 1890s, Father Adolf Daens goes to Aalst, a textile town where child labor is rife, pay and working conditions are horrible, the poor have no vote, and the Catholic church backs the petite bourgeoisie in oppressing workers. He writes a few columns for the Catholic paper, and soon workers are listening and the powerful are in an uproar. He's expelled from the Catholic party, so he starts the Christian Democrats and is elected to Parliament. After Rome disciplines him, he must choose between two callings, as priest and as champion of workers. In subplots, a courageous young woman falls in love with a socialist and survives a shop foreman's rape; children die; prelates play billiards.

A factory worker is employed in the desolate, cold-storage cellars of a brewery. His spare time he devotes to collecting romantic images of wild flowers and sticking newspaper cuttings in an album, demonstrating a preference for more gruesome stories. Murders, rapes and acts of violence are the events which accompany his everyday existence and invest it with a tinge of color.

An unlikely friendship blossoms between Elsa, a preppy, idle, spoiled blond who calls herself Gino, and Nina, a wannabe anarchist who plots with three others to blow up an arms factory. Nina is often sour and tempestuous, but with Gino she's spontaneous and funny. Yet the friendship often founders, as the feckless Gino spoils Nina's frequent and demanding plans. They decide to rob Gino's rich uncle to pay for bombs and creature comforts, they sneak into a stranger's house, they steal a painting belonging to one of Gino's boyfriends, bombs fail to explode, and Gino costs Nina the trust of her anarchist pals. Then comes the crocodile test, the ultimate for any friendship.

A portrait of a woman and 26 witnesses who appear to be accusing her of something but we'll never know what. We'll never even know who she is and who the witnesses are. A complex experiment about space, voice and speech.