The intellectual family Faragó lives a bit busy life, but ensures complete autonomy for its members in a tiny flat in Budapest, while the newly rich Belvizis in the neighbourhood have a luxury apartment and a conventional and purposeful life, sentencing their only daughter for solitude.
Misu is spending his summer holiday in an old block of flats in Budapest. The caretaker of the house, Poldi, a park attendant by occupation, is going to retire in a few days and he is afraid to think ahead of the years to come without grass and trees. An idea comes to Misu to spend the summer in an active way. He organises a working party to sod the inner court of the block of flats they live in. To achieve his plan, he has to make alliances with some people and to win the opponent to the idea, namely Kamilla, an insurance consultant. Their assistants in this mission will be the dustman and the coal deliverer and Piroska, a girl spending her holyday at Kamilla's.
Set during a turbulent era of disquiet, fear, persecution and terror, which permeates every corner of post-WWI Hungarian society. In 1919, after just a few months of communist rule the Hungarian Republic of Councils falls victim to a nationalist counter-revolution. Admiral Horthy, leader of the nationalist far right movement, becomes the self-proclaimed regent of Hungary, and assumes power as the legal Head of State. Soldiers of the short-lived Hungarian Red Army are now on the run from relentless secret policemen and patrol units of the nationalist Royal Gendarme. If caught, ex-Red Army soldiers are executed without mercy or proper trial. István Cserzi, a former soldier of the Red Army has fled to the Great Hungarian Plains and has taken refuge on a farm, which is run by two sympathetic women.
The engineer Ambrus has been suspended in his job because he publicly called the attention of the customers to a construction mistake of some goods designed to be exported. His immediate boss learns the news on a business trip to Paris. He meets his old friend Lendvay, an emigrant from Hungary, and his French wife in a cellar bar. After their talk Benkő starts seeing things in a different perspective. When he returns home, he decides to take a stand for Ambrus against Ferenczi, the general director, despite his wife's and the old director's advice.
Chingachgook, a Mohawk-born Delaware warrior, strives to rescue his wife Wahtawah from the clutches of an enemy camp of Huron. Joined by his trusted huntsman Deerslayer, the two confront racist pioneers and brutal British soldiers in their quest. Deerslayer catches the desire of Judith and thus the jealousy of her suitor, Harry. The action of the story functions like a seesaw, characters continuously traveling back and forth between a house on the lake and the Huron camp until the violent climax.