Emberek a havason (1942)

Having moved up into the Transylvanian mountains, somewhere in Csík or Háromszék, amid clouds, mountain peaks, dark pine forests and misty valleys, Székely woodcutter Erdei Csutak Gergely lives a wretched life with his wife, Anna, and their child, little Gergő. Gergely earns his bread through hard, exhausting work, and his life is made bearable only by his closeness to nature, the beauty of the unspoiled landscape, and his love for his wife and newborn son. But their family idyll cannot last. The manager of Arbor Timber Company, which owns the area, orders the young couple off the mountain: they have lived there for five years but pay no rent. He hires Gergely as a woodcutter, and employs Anna in the company canteen because he has taken a fancy to the young woman. One Sunday, promising him double pay, he sends Gergely to work a long way off, giving himself time to pursue and seduce his beautiful wife. Anna escapes from the arms of the man who is trying to force himself on her and flees with her child, but falls into a ravine. She is rescued by Üdő Márton, “the hundred-year-old father of the mountains.” Anna becomes seriously ill. Healing herbs do her no good; neither a pilgrimage to Csíksomlyó nor a further trip to Kolozsvár helps, and even the renowned professor of medicine cannot save her. She dies soon afterward. Her last wish is to rest up in the mountains. Gergely does not even have enough money to have her body transported home, so under cover of night he boards a train with her, pretending she is alive. Though the truth becomes apparent to them, the passengers in the third-class carriage stand by the poor man, and the conductor turns a blind eye to the fact that a dead woman is traveling with them. Gergely kills the manager in revenge, and the court sentences him to ten years in prison, despite his fellow woodcutters’ attempts to speak up for him. When the snow falls and Christmas approaches, he escapes so that he can spend Christmas Eve with his little son, Gergő, who has been left an orphan and placed in the village’s care. The gendarmes wound the fugitive. Mortally shot, Gergely asks one of his fellow woodcutters, Ádám, who has been sheltering him, to turn him in at the village and use the thousand pengő bounty on him to buy little Gergő clothes and boots. As Christmas morning dawns, Csutak Gergely dies. His body is laid out in state, and the Székely woodcutter—who, in Üdő Márton’s words, “in all these mountains and valleys, in this vast, rich world, had not even a place of his own where his tears could fall”—is buried with his axe, “his true brother.” That same day, Ádám reports to the village notary that he has captured the wounded man who escaped from prison, and immediately asks for the money. He buys boots, a thick coat and a fur hat for the orphan who has lost both his parents, then takes him up into the mountains to celebrate with the mountain folk before the live-actor nativity scene they have built.