Satantango

On a decaying agricultural estate in rural Hungary, Futaki, a man with a limp, wakes one October morning in the kitchen bed of Mrs. Schmidt to hear bells ringing. The source is a mystery: The nearest chapel lost its tower during the war. Before Futaki can leave, Mrs. Schmidt's husband, Schmidt, returns early from rounding up cattle with another resident, Kräner. Futaki deduces that the two men have been planning to abscond with the communal money the residents earned from raising poultry, and he forces his way into a three-way split. As they count banknotes, a neighbor, Mrs. Halics, brings startling news. The bus driver Kelemen has spotted two men on the road heading for the estate: Irimiás and his companion Petrina, once central figures in the community who were believed dead for 18 months. Futaki is electrified, calling Irimiás a great magician. Schmidt insists it is a trap, but the escape plot collapses, and Futaki and Schmidt set out through the rain toward the bar to wait.

The narrative shifts to Irimiás and Petrina, sitting in a government building awaiting an official summons. Irimiás is tall, eloquent, and radiates authority; Petrina is short and nervously deferential. A captain reveals that both men are informants on the state's payroll. Their previous handler has retired, and the captain demands total obedience, threatening imprisonment. Irimiás resists, and the captain throws them out. Irimiás decides they will go to the estate instead, predicting with contempt that the residents will still be there, waiting for someone to lead them. Near the estate, young Sanyi Horgos, a boy from the local Horgos family, intercepts them, revealing that Irimiás himself instructed the boy to spread the lie of their deaths. They approach the bar at dawn.

Meanwhile, the doctor, a recluse who monitors the estate from his armchair, keeps notebooks recording each resident's movements. When his supply runner, Mrs. Kräner, announces she can no longer make trips to town, the doctor sets out for the bar himself to arrange a new supply of pálinka, a Hungarian fruit brandy. On the way, he encounters little Esti Horgos, the youngest of the Horgos children, who clings to his coat in the rain. He frees himself impatiently and stumbles. Esti runs off. The doctor collapses from heart failure and lies in a ditch until dawn, when the driver Kelemen finds him and hauls him onto a cart.

At the bar, Kerekes, a blind farmer from the estate, drinks and intimidates the landlord, while Halics, Mrs. Halics's meek husband, nurses empty glasses. Kelemen arrives with an eyewitness account of seeing Irimiás in town. Mrs. Halics bursts through the door crying "RESURRECTION!" (90). Mrs. Schmidt arrives, lost in fantasies of escape with Irimiás. Mrs. Horgos, the children's mother, stops in looking for Esti, whom no one has seen, curses the missing child, and leaves. The residents settle in for a long vigil.

The novel also follows Esti Horgos, a girl of about 10 who was sent home from a special school and lives in constant fear of her mother and elder sisters. Her secret refuge is an old pigeon loft in the attic, its openings covered with magazine photographs as windows. The day before, her brother Sanyi gave her candy and shared a secret: if they bury coins by the canal and water them, money will grow. Esti contributed her hidden savings. In the loft, burning with fever, she catches the family's cat, Micur, and tries to overpower it. When the terrified cat defecates, Esti is enraged and forces its face into a bowl of milk laced with rat poison, killing it. At the canal, she discovers the coins are gone. On the road, Sanyi reveals coldly that the money was always his and mocks her for believing. He finds the bag of rat poison in her pocket but presses it back into her hand. After a desperate encounter with the doctor, who pushes her away, Esti walks alone through the night to the ruins of Weinkheim Manor. At dawn, she lays the dead cat beside her, swallows half the remaining poison, and places the rest where Sanyi will find it. She closes her eyes, certain her guardian angels are on the way.

The first part concludes with the long night at the bar. The residents drink, dance, and quarrel while waiting. Kerekes plays the accordion. Gradually everyone falls asleep. Spiders cover every surface in fine webs, mirroring the invisible systems of dependency that bind the characters together. In the silence, Irimiás and Petrina enter.

The novel's second part mirrors the first in reverse chapter order. After Esti's body is discovered at Weinkheim Manor, Irimiás delivers a speech reconstructing the child's death and declaring it a necessary punishment for the community's collective failure. He calls the residents the embodiment of guilt, reducing them to tears. Then he shifts to hope, proposing a model economy at Almássy Manor, a commune for people with nothing left to lose. When he mentions the plan requires money, the residents pledge their savings without hesitation. Futaki throws his contribution on the table first.

The residents depart in euphoric procession. Before leaving, each household destroys its possessions rather than abandon them. They arrive at Almássy Manor at dusk, finding a grand but crumbling ruin, and camp in the entrance hall. Meanwhile, Irimiás, Petrina, and Sanyi walk toward town. Near Weinkheim Manor, they witness a terrifying phenomenon: Esti's body, though already coffined, appears to rise from the ground wrapped in transparent veils and ascend into the clouds. All three are shaken. Irimiás declares that meaning is an illusion and they are all trapped in a network of dependency. In town, he arranges to borrow a truck and meets a gun dealer named Páyer to discuss acquiring arms, presumably funded by the residents' money.

At dawn, the group at Almássy Manor wakes to bitter disillusionment. Irimiás has not arrived as promised. Kräner declares they have been conned. Schmidt kicks Futaki in the face. At that moment, Irimiás appears, announcing that the manor plan must be suspended because unnamed authorities object. The residents must disperse across the country instead. He assigns each household a destination and a job, instructing them to observe their surroundings and report back. Futaki refuses further help and departs alone with a broken nose and a single suitcase. The penultimate chapter reveals the mechanism behind the scheme: Two government clerks spend a day translating Irimiás's vulgar, handwritten intelligence report on the residents into official bureaucratic language. Irimiás has been filing assessments of the people he claims to lead, treating them as subjects of surveillance all along.

In the final chapter, the doctor returns from the hospital to find the estate deserted. He resumes his observation post and hears the bells again. Seized by the conviction that focused writing can control events on the estate, he begins composing entries about the residents as if directing their actions. Venturing out to trace the source of the bells, he discovers a vagrant who has rigged a small bell in the ruined chapel tower. Devastated, the doctor flees home, nails his door shut, and opens a new notebook. The text he writes is the novel's opening paragraph: "One morning near the end of October not long before the first drops of the mercilessly long autumn rains began to fall on the cracked and saline soil on the western side of the estate ... Futaki woke to hear bells" (280). The narrative circles back to its own beginning, trapping the story and all its characters in an endless recursive loop.