Hammer, Sickle & Cross

THE NINETY AND NINE (343 pp.)--Imre Kovacs--Funk & Wagnal/s ($3.75).

This novel burns a hole in the Iron Curtain with a moral blowtorch. A white-hot account of the Red tyranny in Hungary, The Ninety and Nine is fired less by skilled prose than searing passion, less by action than ideas. Hungarian-born Author Kovacs, a World War II underground fighter and onetime secretary-general of Hungary's National Peasant Party, now works for the Free Europe Committee in New York. Lacking the theoretical brilliance of a Koestler, he nonetheless brings to his grade B Darkness at Noon a fingertip knowledge of the Communist mind in action.

Catacomb Christians. The Ninety and Nine takes its title from the book of Luke: "Joy shall be in heaven over one sinner that repenteth, more than over ninety and nine just persons, which need no repentance." In due course the sinner appears, but the book's hero is on the scene from Page One, a Roman Catholic priest, about to travel the age-old road to martyrdom. Jesuit Father Janos is a good priest and a soldier of Christ in his heart, but he has had to fight few battles for the Christian faith in Roman Catholic Hungary. Then, as he sees Red agitators play on the needs and greeds of the peasantry, Father Janos wonders if his church has lost the early dedication of catacomb Christianity and the simple ideals of social justice taught by Christ.

He has little time to wonder. With the Russian occupation and its puppet regime come confiscation of church lands, curbs on church schools, threats and ultimatums: "Tell me, Father, which do you choose, the past or the future?" Father Janos chooses the eternal: "The mills of God grind smaller than those of the Communists, and one day they will pulverize them." When the official mills of the Communists grind out a law disbanding religious orders, Father Janos bids his fellow Jesuits go underground, or abroad, and himself becomes a modern catacomb Christian. But the secret police soon snap him up and jail him as a conspirator in a trumped-up "deviationist" plot against the state.

Party Rites. Father Janos' cellmate proves to be Hungary's No. 2 Communist, Leslie Rab, a character clearly modeled on onetime Hungarian Foreign Minister Laszlo Rajk, who was purged in 1949 as a Titoist. Rab is the great sinner unknowingly on his way to penance. For the second half of the novel, the good Christian and the still-loyal Communist stage a fascinating intellectual wrestling match for each other's minds and souls. Rab scoffs at the existence of God and His goodness: "Did God create man for misery, for eternal struggle, in order to enjoy his obsequious thanks for every crumb cast him, every small mercy?" Argues the priest: "The measure of faith is faith . . . You no longer believe in communism. You only use it to argue with."

At the trial both men confess, Rab as a last pious rite to the party, Father Janos to save his friends and fellow priests from further torture. But before he mounts the gallows, Rab, feeling "an absolute void within me,"' kneels before Father Janos and asks "to die in the peace of faith." Author Kovacs sometimes mashes a thumb with his literary chisel, but when he hits the historic mark, the apocalyptic tableau of hammer and sickle v. the cross stands out in bold, fresh relief.

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