The first character introduced to the reader is a girl named Lola, who shares a college dormitory room with five other girls, including the narrator. Lola records her experiences in a diary, relating her efforts to escape from the totalitarian world of school and society. She rides the buses at night and has brutish, anonymous sex with men returning home from factory work. She also has an affair with the gym teacher, and soon joins the Communist Party. This first part of the book ends when Lola is found dead, hanging in the closet; she has left her diary in the narrator's suitcase.
Having supposedly committed suicide and thus betrayed her country and her party, Lola is publicly denounced in a school ceremony. Soon after, the narrator shares Lola's diary with three male friends, Edgar, Georg, and Kurt; Lola's life becomes an escape for them as they attend college and engage in mildly subversive activities—"harbouring unsuitable German books, humming scraps of banned songs, writing to one another in crude code, taking photographs of the blacked-out buses which carry prisoners between the prison and the construction sites."[4] The four are from German-speaking communities; all receive mail from their mothers complaining about their various illnesses and how their children's subversiveness is causing them trouble; all have fathers who had been members of the Nazi SS in Romania during World War II. They hide the diary and other documents, including photographs and books,[4] in the well of a deserted summerhouse in town. Very quickly it becomes clear that an officer of the Securitate, Captain Pjele, is interested in the four; he begins to subject them to regular interrogations. Their possessions are searched, their mail opened, and they are threatened by the captain and his dog.
After graduation the four go their separate ways, but they remain in contact through letters and regular visits, although their letters are read by the Securitate. They take menial jobs: Kurt works in a slaughterhouse as a supervisor, for instance; and the narrator translates German manuals in a factory. A fifth member, Tereza, befriends the narrator even as it becomes clear that she is acting partly on Pjele's orders.
The lives of all five become more miserable, and each conforms to the regime's demands even as they lose their jobs for apparently political reasons. They discuss fleeing the country, and Georg is the first to do so. Weeks after he arrives in Germany, he is found dead from a fall from the window of a Frankfurt hotel. The narrator and Edgar likewise acquire passports and go to Germany, but continue to receive death threats after emigrating. Kurt remains in Romania, no longer working; he is later found hanged. The novel ends with the same passage as it began: "When we don't speak, said Edgar, we become unbearable, and when we do, we make fools of ourselves".[4]
