Iron Curtain Raisers

THE ENEMY (143 pp.)--Tibor Mercy --Criterion ($3).

SIGH FOR A STRANGE LAND (188 pp.)--Monica Stirling--Atlantic--Little .Brown ($3.50).

When the Chinese want to wish anyone harm, according to Novelist Monica Stirling, they say, "May you live at an interesting period of history." The saying may or may not be authentic, but its barbed humor especially befits the century in which the high cost of living has been surpassed only by the higher cost of staying alive. Authors Meray and Stirling take a Communist Party bureaucrat and a teen-age refugee girl, respectively, and evoke contrasting symbols of 20th century corruption and redemption.

Right As Robespierre. In The Enemy, a loyal young Hungarian Communist gradually puts out the eye of his own conscience after he is told that one of his four closest friends and associates is a secret enemy of the state and must be ferreted out. Comrade Nemeth must choose between 1) his best friend. 2) his fiancee-mistress. 3) a religious-minded old spinster. 4) a battle-scarred party veteran. Feverish with party zeal. Nemeth first fingers the religious old lady as a "reactionary clericalist."

But. infected with suspicion. Nemeth cannot be sure that the right head has fallen. An antiparty joke seals the fate of the old party fighter, and Nemeth sends his best friend to jail because his office accounts do not balance. Righteous as Robespierre. Nemeth finally convinces himself that his Russian-born mistress is really a White Russian and denounces her. The girl commits suicide, and for a moment--but a moment only--Comrade Nemeth sees himself for the monster he has become.

Exiled Hungarian Journalist Tibor Meray. 33. is a plodding novelist but a masterly expositor of black-is-white party dialectics and the mechanics of self brainwashing. As a Communist reporter in Korea, he cried up the monstrous germ warfare charges against the U.S.. later took part in the Hungarian Revolution and fled to Paris, where he now lives.

Expectation of Good. Sigh for a Strange Land is an intermittently successful attempt to share imaginatively what its British author. Monica Stirling, has not suffered--the life of a refugee. Resi. a confused and attractive 16-year-old, flees a country very like Hungary. With her go her schnapps-tippling, aristocratic Aunt Natasha and Natasha's long-ago lover Boris, a trainer of circus horses. The dance of liberty soon slows to the shuffle of Red Cross soup queues, even though the gallant trio refuses to indulge in the occupational pastime of unhappy refugees--back-biting the hand that feeds them.

A kindly British couple gives Resi a glimpse of possible happiness, and she resolves to explore "the strange land of love where tomorrow' is not always a frightening word." Cluttered with romantic folderol. Sigh nonetheless says something about man's inhumanity to man and fleetingly embodies the Simone Weil text it takes for its theme: "At the bottom of the heart of every human being . . . there is something that goes on indomitably expecting, in the teeth of all experience . . . that good and not evil will be done to him."

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