33 Place Brugmann

Set in Brussels on the eve of and during World War II, the novel unfolds through rotating first-person perspectives of the residents of 33 Place Brugmann, a modest apartment building where every sound carries through thin walls. A prologue reveals its central rupture: The Raphaël family flees in the middle of the night, leaving behind their furnishings. Rumors circulate that the family took their silver; their valuable paintings simply disappear. For Charlotte Sauvin, the seventeen-year-old art student across the fourth-floor landing, the departure is a betrayal. The Raphaëls left a box of home movies, oil paints, and a blank canvas with a note: "For Charlotte."

The story opens in August 1939. Charlotte lives with her father, Francois Sauvin, an architect and World War I veteran. She is color-blind, a condition Francois discovered when she was three and has spent years helping her conceal. Despite this, Charlotte has been admitted to the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp, where she produces stunning, unconventional color combinations. Her closest friend is Julian Raphaël, eighteen, a math student at Cambridge who lives across the hall with his parents, Leo and Sophia, and his sister, Esther. Charlotte considers Julian the nearest thing to a brother, though his feelings run deeper.

Julian and Charlotte spend their last summer days filming with a prototype movie camera. When a car kills a stray cat they are filming, Charlotte experiences a hallucinatory vision of blood pouring from the church doors and flooding the square, a premonition no one else notices. Julian tells Charlotte that if war comes he will fight and asks her to think of him "like a prayer." She dismisses the possibility; he tells her not to say stupid things. The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus recurs throughout the novel as a shared touchstone for Julian, Charlotte, and Francois.

Other voices fill out the building. Masha Balyayeva, a Russian Jewish refugee in the fifth-floor maid's room, recounts her past: Her mother was killed during a pogrom carried out by the Red Guard, revolutionary soldiers who targeted Jewish communities in Russia. Her rabbi uncle sent her west with three contacts; the last led to Sophia Raphaël, who gave Masha a home and a livelihood as a seamstress. Masha became Charlotte's surrogate mother. Through the Colonel, a retired military officer on the third floor, Masha met Harry, a charismatic, secretive man who became her lover and drew her into resistance work.

Leo Raphaël, a fine art dealer, discovers on a trip to America that U.S. immigration quotas block his family's plans to emigrate. He refuses a collaborator's offer to front for his Jewish clients and accepts his London cousin's plan to help protect a museum's art collection. He presents Francois with an unspecified arrangement; Francois declares he will not design buildings for the Nazis. Miss Agathe Hobert, the nosy former café proprietor in 3R, monitors every coming and going. Martin DeBaerre, a gentle lawyer in 2R, quietly asks Francois for help, hinting at secrets.

Charlotte falls in love with Philippe Kahn, an older architecture student and painter at her academy. Their relationship deepens through autumn 1939 as France declares war on Germany. They marry in secret with only Francois and a priest as witnesses, choosing not to register the marriage for safety. Charlotte helps her Jewish instructor, Professor Weiss, pack his art into false-bottomed crates before he goes into hiding.

When the Nazis occupy Brussels in May 1940, Philippe leaves immediately to fight. The occupation's horrors accumulate gradually: curfews, rationing, the Yellow Star decree requiring all Jews to wear identifying stars and register, deportations, and murders. Charlotte works at a hat shop and then a uniform factory, battling for basic provisions. She learns she is pregnant. A Flemish newsboy who secretly distributes resistance newspapers whispers that Philippe is alive in England, training as a parachutist at Ringway. Martin, now revealed to be secretly supporting a Jewish family in hiding, gives Francois an envelope to deliver to the baker Maryanne should anything happen to him.

Sophia Raphaël writes anxiously from exile in the Outer Hebrides. Leo helps hide the National Gallery's collection in a Welsh slate mine, experiencing waking visions that blur with reality. Julian, serving as a navigator in Britain's Royal Air Force (RAF), describes the terror of bombing missions and reflects constantly on Charlotte. He reunites briefly with Guy, his childhood friend from the building, now surgically altered for undercover work with the Special Operations Executive (SOE), a British covert operations organization. Esther, nursing RAF casualties in Scotland, records devastating injuries and decides she no longer believes in God.

Masha's voice arrives from beyond death. She recounts escorting a young RAF pilot in Paris to a café rendezvous with a resistance shuttle who turned out to be a Flemish informant. She spots the deception through his accent, cheap gloves hiding a missing fingertip, and a Belgian zinc coin. Shot in the neck as she fled, Masha stumbles to the emergency meeting place. Harry arrives late and, finding her dying, shoots her, whether to spare her torture or protect the network, she cannot say. The Colonel delivers the news. Charlotte experiences her first migraine, then sees a lioness in the square below her window, a mystical presence she keeps to herself.

Julian's plane is shot down over Flanders. He escapes through fields, plunges into an icy canal, and wakes in a barn where Flemish farmers vote to let him live after he reveals he is Jewish. Working the farm as a pretend deaf-mute, he is eventually shuttled through the resistance network to the Colonel's apartment at 33 Place Brugmann. When the building's Nazi-affiliated tenant and a notary demand to search the Colonel's rooms, the Colonel orders his dog, Zipper, to attack, buying time. Julian climbs out the window onto the building's narrow exterior ledge, the same one Guy once walked on a childhood dare, and reaches Charlotte's balcony.

Charlotte opens the door and understands what she has long suppressed: She cannot remember Philippe but will never forget Julian. They kiss. As they plan his escape, Dirk DeBaerre, Martin's son, pushes into the apartment. Dirk, who has been attending collaborationist meetings while secretly gathering intelligence, warns that the escape contact is a trap. He presses into Charlotte's hand a worn red pencil stub, the one he stole from her in childhood, inadvertently exposing her color blindness. "I owe you," he says. Charlotte and Francois create a diversion while Julian slips into a nearby bakery and is hidden in a grain truck.

The next morning, the Gestapo, the Nazi secret police, searches every apartment, finding nothing except Francois's old, boltless World War I rifle. Despite the objection of Schmidt, the German officer Charlotte encountered earlier in a ration queue, that the gun is nonfunctional, an officer of the SS, the Nazi paramilitary force, insists on arresting Francois. Charlotte watches her father walk downstairs. At the bottom, he looks up and tips his hat.

Charlotte waits through a sleepless night, then walks to the Gestapo headquarters on Avenue Louise only to find the building destroyed by a Belgian RAF pilot avenging his father's death there. Charlotte screams that her father was inside; an officer tells her to go home. She understands it is an ending.

Walking home, Charlotte feels the baby move for the first time. She stops crying and looks up at the cloudless sky. At home, she opens Francois's sketchbook and discovers his final creation: a reimagining of 33 Place Brugmann as a building grown in a garden, with unmortared stone walls and gathering rooms where all the residents, living and dead, sit together. On the last page, Francois has drawn himself where Charlotte now sits, holding an olive branch that is also a pencil, inscribed: "What is thinkable is also possible." Julian, crossing the Pyrenees with the Wittgenstein book over his heart, reaches Gibraltar and learns Philippe is missing and presumed dead. He reveals that the Raphaëls' paintings lie hidden beneath the parquet floor Francois laid in Charlotte's apartment before the family fled. Charlotte, looking out over the city her father never gave up on, resolves that neither will she.