‘Then you are not a Baptist, aren’t you?’
‘Sir?’
‘I don’t see why you’re bickering with me on that point. You’ve already admitted it. Now, Chaplain, to say you’re not a Baptist doesn’t really tell us anything about what you are, does it? You could be anything or anyone.’ He leaned forward slightly and his manner took on a shrewd and significant air. ‘You could even be,’ he added, ‘Washington Irving, couldn’t you?’
‘Washington Irving?’ the chaplain repeated with surprise.
‘Come on, Washington,’ the corpulent colonel broke in irascibly. ‘Why don’t you make a clean breast of it? We know you stole that plum tomato.’
After a moment’s shock, the chaplain giggled with nervous relief. ‘Oh, is that it!’ he exclaimed. ‘Now I’m beginning to understand. I didn’t steal that plum tomato, sir. Colonel Cathcart gave it to me. You can even ask him if you don’t believe me.’
A door opened at the other end of the room and Colonel Cathcart stepped into the basement as though from a closet.
‘Hello, Colonel. Colonel, he claims you gave him that plum tomato. Did you?’ ‘Why should I give him a plum tomato?’ answered Colonel Cathcart.
‘Thank you, Colonel. That will be all.’
‘It’s a pleasure, Colonel,’ Colonel Cathcart replied, and he stepped back out of the basement, closing the door after him.
‘Well, Chaplain? What have you got to say now?’
‘He did give it to me!’ the chaplain hissed in a whisper that was both fierce and fearful. ‘He did give it to me!’
‘You’re not calling a superior officer a liar are you, Chaplain?’ ‘Why should a superior officer give you a plum tomato, Chaplain?’
‘Is that why you tried to give it to Sergeant Whitcomb, Chaplain? Because it was a hot tomato?’
‘No, no, no,’ the chaplain protested, wondering miserably why they were not able to understand. ‘I offered it to Sergeant Whitcomb because I didn’t want it.’
‘Why’d you steal it from Colonel Cathcart if you didn’t want it?’ ‘I didn’t steal it from Colonel Cathcard’
‘Then why are you so guilty, if you didn’t steal it?’ ‘I’m not guilty!’
‘Then why would we be questioning you if you weren’t guilty?’
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ the chaplain groaned, kneading his fingers in his lap and shaking his bowed and anguished head. ‘I don’t know.’
‘He thinks we have time to waste,’ snorted the major.
‘Chaplain,’ resumed the officer without insignia at a more leisurely pace, lifting a typewritten sheet of yellow paper from the open folder, ‘I have a signed statement here from Colonel Cathcart
asserting you stole that plum tomato from him.’ He lay the sheet face down on one side of the folder and picked up a second page from the other side. ‘And I have a notarized affidavit from Sergeant Whitcomb in which he states that he knew the tomato was hot just from the way you tried to unload it on him.’
‘I swear to God I didn’t steal it, sir,’ the chaplain pleaded with distress, almost in tears. ‘I give you my sacred word it was not a hot tomato.’
‘Chaplain, do you believe in God?’ ‘Yes, sir. Of course I do.’
‘That’s odd, Chaplain,’ said the officer, taking from the folder another typewritten yellow page, ‘because I have here in my hands now another statement from Colonel Cathcart in which he swears that you refused to co-operate with him in conducting prayer meetings in the briefing room before each mission.’
After looking blank a moment, the chaplain nodded quickly with recollection. ‘Oh, that’s not quite true, sir,’ he explained eagerly. ‘Colonel Cathcart gave up the idea himself once he realized enlisted men pray to the same God as officers.’
‘He did what?’ exclaimed the officer in disbelief.
‘What nonsense!’ declared the red-faced colonel, and swung away from the chaplain with dignity and annoyance.
‘Does he expect us to believe that?’ cried the major incredulously.
The officer without insignia chuckled acidly. ‘Chaplain, aren’t you stretching things a bit far now?’ he inquired with a smile that was indulgent and unfriendly.
‘But, sir, it’s the truth, sir! I swear it’s the truth.’
‘I don’t see how that matters one way or the other,’ the officer answered nonchalantly, and reached sideways again toward the open folder filled with papers. ‘Chaplain, did you say you did believe in God in answer to my question? I don’t remember.’
‘Yes, sir. I did say so, sir. I do believe in God.’
‘Then that really is very odd, Chaplain, because I have here another affidavit from Colonel Cathcart that states you once told him atheism was not against the law. Do you recall ever making a statement like that to anyone?’
The chaplain nodded without any hesitation, feeling himself on very solid ground now. ‘Yes, sir, I did make a statement like that. I made it because it’s true. Atheism is not against the law.’
‘But that’s still no reason to say so, Chaplain, is it?’ the officer chided tartly, frowning, and picked up still one more typewritten, notarized page from the folder. ‘And here I have another sworn statement from Sergeant Whitcomb that says you opposed his plan of sending letters of condolence over Colonel Cathcart’s signature to the next of kin of men killed or wounded in combat. Is that true?’
‘Yes, sir, I did oppose it,’ answered the chaplain. ‘And I’m proud that I did. Those letters are insincere and dishonest. Their only purpose is to bring glory to Colonel Cathcart.’
‘But what difference does that make?’ replied the officer. ‘They still bring solace and comfort to the families that receive them, don’t they? Chaplain, I simply can’t understand your thinking process.’ The chaplain was stumped and at a complete loss for a reply. He hung his head, feeling tongue-tied and naive.
The ruddy stout colonel stepped forward vigorously with a sudden idea. ‘Why don’t we knock his goddam brains out?’ he suggested with robust enthusiasm to the others.
‘Yes, we could knock his goddam brains out, couldn’t we?’ the hawk-faced major agreed. ‘He’s only an Anabaptist.’
‘No, we’ve got to find him guilty first,’ the officer without insignia cautioned with a languid restraining wave. He slid lightly to the floor and moved around to the other side of the table, facing the chaplain with both hands pressed flat on the surface. His expression was dark and very stern, square and forbidding. ‘Chaplain,’ he announced with magisterial rigidity, ‘we charge you formally with being Washington Irving and taking capricious and unlicensed liberties in censoring the letters of officers and enlisted men. Are you guilty or innocent?’
‘Innocent, sir.’ The chaplain licked dry lips with a dry tongue and leaned forward in suspense on the edge of his chair.
‘Guilty,’ said the colonel. ‘Guilty,’ said the major.
‘Guilty it is, then,’ remarked the officer without insignia, and wrote a word on a page in the folder. ‘Chaplain,’ he continued, looking up, ‘we accuse you also of the commission of crimes and infractions we don’t even know about yet. Guilty or innocent?’
‘I don’t know, sir. How can I say if you don’t tell me what they are?’ ‘How can we tell you if we don’t know?’
‘Guilty,’ decided the colonel.
‘Sure he’s guilty,’ agreed the major. ‘If they’re his crimes and infractions, he must have committed them.’
‘Guilty it is, then,’ chanted the officer without insignia, and moved off to the side of the room. ‘He’s all yours, Colonel.’
‘Thank you,’ commended the colonel. ‘You did a very good job.’ He turned to the chaplain. ‘Okay, Chaplain, the jig’s up. Take a walk.’
The chaplain did not understand. ‘What do you wish me to do?’
‘Go on, beat it, I told you!’ the colonel roared, jerking a thumb over his shoulder angrily. ‘Get the hell out of here.’
The chaplain was shocked by his bellicose words and tone and, to his own amazement and
mystification, deeply chagrined that they were turning him loose. ‘Aren’t you even going to punish me?’ he inquired with querulous surprise.
‘You’re damned right we’re going to punish you. But we’re certainly not going to let you hang around while we decide how and when to do it. So get going. Hit the road.’
The chaplain rose tentatively and took a few steps away. ‘I’m free to go?’
‘For the time being. But don’t try to leave the island. We’ve got your number, Chaplain. Just remember that we’ve got you under surveillance twenty-four hours a day.’
It was not conceivable that they would allow him to leave. The chaplain walked toward the exit gingerly, expecting at any instant to be ordered back by a peremptory voice or halted in his tracks by a heavy blow on the shoulder or the head. They did nothing to stop him. He found his way through the stale, dark, dank corridors to the flight of stairs. He was staggering and panting when he climbed out into the fresh air. As soon as he had escaped, a feeling of overwhelining moral outrage filled him. He was furious, more furious at the atrocities of the day than he had ever felt before in his whole life. He swept through the spacious, echoing lobby of the building in a temper of scalding and vindictive resentment. He was not going to stand for it any more, he told himself, he was simply not going to stand for it. When he reached the entrance, he spied, with a feeling of good fortune, Colonel Korn trotting up the wide steps alone. Bracing himself with a deep breath, the chaplain moved courageously forward to intercept him.
‘Colonel, I’m not going to stand for it any more,’ he declared with vehement determination, and watched in dismay as Colonel Korn went trotting by up the steps without even noticing him. ‘Colonel Korn!’
The tubby, loose figure of his superior officer stopped, turned and came trotting back down slowly. ‘What is it, Chaplain?’
‘Colonel Korn, I want to talk to you about the crash this morning. It was a terrible thing to happen, terrible!’
Colonel Korn was silent a moment, regarding the chaplain with a glint of cynical amusement. ‘Yes, Chaplain, it certainly was terrible,’ he said finally. ‘I don’t know how we’re going to write this one up without making ourselves look bad.’
‘That isn’t what I meant,’ the chaplain scolded firmly without any fear at all. ‘Some of those twelve men had already finished their seventy missions.’
Colonel Korn laughed. ‘Would it be any less terrible if they had all been new men?’ he inquired caustically.
Once again the chaplain was stumped. Immoral logic seemed to be confounding him at every turn. He was less sure of himself than before when he continued, and his voice wavered. ‘Sir, it just isn’t right to make the men in this group fly eighty missions when the men in other groups are being sent home with fifty and fifty-five.’
‘We’ll take the matter under consideration,’ Colonel Korn said with bored disinterest, and started away. ‘Adios, Padre.’
‘What does that mean, sir?’ the chaplain persisted in a voice turning shrill.
Colonel Korn stopped with an unpleasant expression and took a step back down. ‘It means we’ll think about it, Padre,’ he answered with sarcasm and contempt. ‘You wouldn’t want us to do anything without thinking about it, would you?’
‘No, sir, I suppose not. But you have been thinking about it, haven’t you?’
‘Yes, Padre, we have been thinking about it. But to make you happy, we’ll think about it some more, and you’ll be the first person we’ll tell if we reach a new decision. And now, adios.’ Colonel Korn whirled away again and hurried up the stairs.
‘Colonel Korn!’ The chaplain’s cry made Colonel Korn stop once more. His head swung slowly around toward the chaplain with a look of morose impatience. Words gushed from the chaplain in a nervous torrent. ‘Sir, I would like your permission to take the matter to General Dreedle. I want to bring my protests to Wing Headquarters.’
Colonel Korn’s thick, dark jowls inflated unexpectedly with a suppressed guffaw, and it took him a moment to reply. ‘That’s all right, Padre,’ he answered with mischievous merriment, trying hard to keep a straight face. ‘You have my permission to speak to General Dreedle.’
‘Thank you, sir. I believe it only fair to warn you that I think I have some influence with General Dreedle.’
‘It’s good of you to warn me, Padre. And I believe it only fair to warn you that you won’t find General Dreedle at Wing.’ Colonel Korn grinned wickedly and then broke into triumphant laughter. ‘General Dreedle is out, Padre. And General Peckem is in. We have a new wing commander.’
The chaplain was stunned. ‘General Peckem!’
‘That’s right, Chaplain. Have you got any influence with him?’
‘Why, I don’t even know General Peckem,’ the chaplain protested wretchedly.
Colonel Korn laughed again. ‘That’s too bad, Chaplain, because Colonel Cathcart knows him very well.’ Colonel Korn chuckled steadily with gloating relish for another second or two and then stopped abruptly. ‘And by the way, Padre,’ he warned coldly, poking his finger once into the chaplain’s chest. ‘The jig is up between you and Dr. Stubbs. We know very well he sent you up here to complain today.’
‘Dr. Stubbs?’ The chaplain shook his head in baffled protest. ‘I haven’t seen Dr. Stubbs, Colonel. I was brought here by three strange officers who took me down into the cellar without authority and questioned and insulted me.’
Colonel Korn poked the chaplain in the chest once more. ‘You know damned well Dr. Stubbs has been telling the men in his squadron they didn’t have to fly more than seventy missions.’ He laughed harshly. ‘Well, Padre, they do have to fly more than seventy missions, because we’re
transferring Dr. Stubbs to the Pacific. So adios, Padre. Adios.’ 37 GENERAL SCHEISSKOPF
Dreedle was out, and General Peckem was in, and General Peckem had hardly moved inside General Dreedle’s office to replace him when his splendid military victory began falling to pieces around him.
‘General Scheisskopf?’ he inquired unsuspectingly of the sergeant in his new office who brought him word of the order that had come in that morning. ‘You mean Colonel Scheisskopf, don’t you?’ ‘No, sir, General Scheisskopf He was promoted to general this morning, sir.’
‘Well, that’s certainly curious! Scheisskopf? A general? What grade?’ ‘Lieutenant general, sir, and -‘
‘Lieutenant general!’
‘Yes, sir, and he wants you to issue no orders to anyone in your command without first clearing them through him.’
‘Well, I’ll be damned,’ mused General Peckem with astonishment, swearing aloud for perhaps the first time in his life. ‘Cargill, did you hear that? Scheisskopf was promoted way up to lieutenant general. I’ll bet that promotion was intended for me and they gave it to him by mistake.’
Colonel Cargill had been rubbing his sturdy chin reflectively. ‘Why is he giving orders to us?’ General Peckem’s sleek, scrubbed, distinguished face tightened. ‘Yes, Sergeant,’ he said slowly with an uncomprehending frown. ‘Why is he issuing orders to us if he’s still in Special Services and we’re in combat operations?’
‘That’s another change that was made this morning, sir. All combat operations are now under the jurisdiction of Special Services. General Scheisskopf is our new commanding officer.’
General Peckem let out a sharp cry. ‘Oh, my God!’ he wailed, and all his practical composure went up in hysteria. ‘Scheisskopf in charge? Scheisskopf?’ He pressed his fists down on his eyes with horror. ‘Cargill, get me Wintergreen! Scheisskopf? Not Scheisskopf!’
All phones began ringing at once. A corporal ran in and saluted.
‘Sir, there’s a chaplain outside to see you with news of an injustice in Colonel Cathcart’s squadron.’ ‘Send him away, send him away! We’ve got enough injustices of our own. Where’s Wintergreen?’ ‘Sir, General Scheisskopf is on the phone. He wants to speak to you at once.’
‘Tell him I haven’t arrived yet. Good Lord!’ General Peckem screamed, as though struck by the enormity of the disaster for the first time. ‘Scheisskopf? The man’s a moron! I walked all over that blockhead, and now he’s my superior officer. Oh, my Lord! Cargill! Cargill, don’t desert me! Where’s Wintergreen?’
‘Sir, I have an ex-Sergeant Wintergreen on your other telephone. He’s been trying to reach you all morning.’
‘General, I can’t get Wintergreen,’ Colonel Cargill shouted, ‘His line is busy.’
General Peckem was perspiring freely as he lunged for the other telephone. ‘Wintergreen!’
‘Peckem, you son of a bitch -‘
‘Wintergreen, have you heard what they’ve done?’ ‘- what have you done, you stupid bastard?’
‘They put Scheisskopf in charge of everything!’
Wintergreen was shrieking with rage and panic. ‘You and your goddam memorandums! They’ve gone and transferred combat operations to Special Services!’
‘Oh, no,’ moaned General Peckem. ‘Is that what did it? My memoranda? Is that what made them put Scheisskopf in charge? Why didn’t they put me in charge?’
‘Because you weren’t in Special Services any more. You transferred out and left him in charge. And do you know what he wants? Do you know what the bastard wants us all to do?’
‘Sir, I think you’d better talk to General Scheisskopf,’ pleaded the sergeant nervously. ‘He insists on speaking to someone.’
‘Cargill, talk to Scheisskopf for me. I can’t do it. Find out what he wants.’
Colonel Cargill listened to General Scheisskopf for a moment and went white as a sheet. ‘Oh, my God!’ he cried, as the phone fell from his fingers. ‘Do you know what he wants? He wants us to march. He wants everybody to march!’
KID SISTER
Yossarian marched backward with his gun on his hip and refused to fly any more missions. He marched backward because he was continously spinning around as he walked to make certain no one was sneaking up on him from behind. Every sound to his rear was a warning, every person he passed a potential assassin. He kept his hand on his gun butt constantly and smiled at no one but Hungry Joe. He told Captain Piltchard and Captain Wren that he was through flying. Captain Piltchard and Captain Wren left his name off the flight schedule for the next mission and reported the matter to Group Headquarters.
Colonel Korn laughed cahnly. ‘What the devil do you mean, he won’t fly more missions?’ he asked with a smile, as Colonel Cathcart crept away into a corner to brood about the sinister import of the name Yossarian popping up to plague him once again. ‘Why won’t he?’
‘His friend Nately was killed in the crash over Spezia. Maybe that’s why.’
‘Who does he think he is – Achilles?’ Colonel Korn was pleased with the simile and filed a mental reminder to repeat it the next time he found himself in General Peckem’s presence. ‘He has to fly more missions. He has no choice. Go back and tell him you’ll report the matter to us if he doesn’t change his mind.’
‘We already did tell him that, sir. It made no difference.’ ‘What does Major Major say?’
‘We never see Major Major. He seems to have disappeared.’
‘I wish we could disappear him!’ Colonel Cathcart blurted out from the corner peevishly. ‘The way they did that fellow Dunbar.’
‘Oh, there are plenty of other ways we can handle this one,’ Colonel Korn assured him confidently, and continued to Piltchard and Wren, ‘Let’s begin with the kindest. Send him to Rome for a rest for a few days. Maybe this fellow’s death really did hurt him a bit.’
Nately’s death, in fact, almost killed Yossarian too, for when he broke the news to Nately’s whore in Rome she uttered a piercing, heartbroken shriek and tried to stab him to death with a potato peeler. ‘Bruto!’ she howled at him in hysterical fury as he bent her arm up around behind her back and twisted gradually until the potato peeler dropped from her grasp. ‘Bruto! Bruto!’ She lashed at him swiftly with the long-nailed fingers of her free hand and raked open his cheek. She spat in his face viciously.
‘What’s the matter?’ he screamed in stinging pain and bewilderment, flinging her away from him all the way across the room to the wall. ‘What do you want from me?’
She flew back at him with both fists flailing and bloodied his mouth with a solid punch before he was able to grab her wrists and hold her still. Her hair tossed wildly. Tears were streaming in single torrents from her flashing, hate-filled eyes as she struggled against him fiercely in an irrational frenzy of maddened might, snarling and cursing savagely and screaming ‘Bruto! Bruto!’ each time he tried to explain. Her great strength caught him off guard, and he lost his footing. She was nearly as tall as Yossarian, and for a few fantastic, terror-filled moments he was certain she would overpower him in her crazed determination, crush him to the ground and rip him apart mercilessly limb from limb for some heinous crime he had never committed. He wanted to yell for help as they strove against each other frantically in a grunting, panting stalemate, arm against arm. At last she weakened, and he was able to force her back and plead with her to let him talk, swearing to her that Nately’s death had not been his fault. She spat in his face again, and he pushed her away hard in disgusted anger and frustration. She hurled herself down toward the potato peeler the instant he released her. He flung himself down after her, and they rolled over each other on the floor several times before he could tear the potato peeler away. She tried to trip him with her hand as he scrambled to his feet and scratched an excruciating chunk out of his ankle. He hopped across the room in pain and threw the potato peeler out the window. He heaved a huge sigh of relief once he saw he was safe.
‘Now, please let me explain something to you,’ he cajoled in a mature, reasoning, earnest voice.
She kicked him in the groin. Whoosh! went the air out of him, and he sank down on his side with a shrill and ululating cry, doubled up over his knees in chaotic agony and retching for breath. Nately’s whore ran from the room. Yossarian staggered up to his feet not a moment too soon, for she came charging back in from the kitchen carrying a long bread knife. A moan of incredulous dismay
wafted from his lips as, still clutching his throbbing, tender, burning bowels in both hands, he dropped his full weight down against her shins and knocked her legs out from under her. She flipped completely over his head and landed on the floor on her elbows with a jarring thud. The knife skittered free, and he slapped it out of sight under the bed. She tried to lunge after it, and he seized her by the arm and yanked her up. She tried to kick him in the groin again, and he slung her away with a violent oath of his own. She slammed into the wall off balance and smashed a chair over into a vanity table covered with combs, hairbrushes and cosmetic jars that all went crashing off. A framed picture fell to the floor at the other end of the room, the glass front shattering.
‘What do you want from me?’ he yelled at her in whining and exasperated confusion. ‘I didn’t kill him.’
She hurled a heavy glass ash tray at his head. He made a fist and wanted to punch her in the stomach when she came charging at him again, but he was afraid he might harm her. He wanted to clip her very neatly on the point of the jaw and run from the room, but there was no clear target, and he merely skipped aside neatly at the last second and helped her along past him with a strong shove. She banged hard against the other wall. Now she was blocking the door. She threw a large vase at him. Then she came at him with a full wine bottle and struck him squarely on the temple, knocking him down half-stunned on one knee. His ears were buzzing, his whole face was numb. More than anything else, he was embarrassed. He felt awkward because she was going to murder him. He simply did not understand what was going on. He had no idea what to do. But he did know he had to save himself, and he catapulted forward off the floor when he saw her raise the wine bottle to clout him again and barreled into her midriff before she could strike him. He had momentum, and he propelled her before him backward in his driving rush until her knees buckled against the side of the bed and she fell over onto the mattress with Yossarian sprawled on top of her between her legs. She plunged her nails into the side of his neck and gouged as he worked his way up the supple, full hills and ledges of her rounded body until he covered her completely and pressed her into submission, his fingers pursuing her thrashing arm persistently until they arrived at the wine bottle finally and wrenched it free. She was still kicking and cursing and scratching ferociously. She tried to bite him cruelly, her coarse, sensual lips stretched back over her teeth like an enraged omnivorous beast’s. Now that she lay captive beneath him, he wondered how he would ever escape her without leaving himself vulnerable. He could feel the tensed, straddling inside of her buffeting thighs and knees squeezing and churning around one of his legs. He was stirred by thoughts of sex that made him ashamed. He was conscious of the voluptuous flesh of her firm, young-woman’s body straining and beating against him like a humid, fluid, delectable, unyielding tide, her belly and warm, live, plastic breasts thrusting upward against him vigorously in sweet and menacing temptation. Her breath was scalding. All at once he realized – though the writhing turbulence beneath him had not diminished one whit – that she was no longer grappling with him,
recognized with a quiver that she was not fighting him but heaving her pelvis up against him remorselessly in the primal, powerful, rhapsodic instinctual rhythm of erotic ardor and abandonment. He gasped in delighted surprise. Her face – as beautiful as a blooming flower to him now – was distorted with a new kind of torture, the tissues serenely swollen, her half-closed eyes misty and unseeing with the stultifying languor of desire.
‘Caro,’ she murmured hoarsely as though from the depths of a tranquil and luxurious trance. ‘Ooooh, caro mio.’
He stroked her hair. She drove her mouth against his face with savage passion. He licked her neck. She wrapped her arms around him and hugged. He felt himself falling, falling ecstatically in love with her as she kissed him again and again with lips that were steaming and wet and soft and hard, mumbling deep sounds to him adoringly in an incoherent oblivion of rapture, one caressing hand on his back slipping deftly down inside his trouser belt while the other groped secretly and treacherously about on the floor for the bread knife and found it. He saved himself just in time. She still wanted to kill him! He was shocked and astounded by her depraved subteruge as he tore the knife from her grasp and hurled it away. He bounded out of the bed to his feet. His face was agog with befuddlement and disillusion. He did not know whether to dart through the door to freedom or collapse on the bed to fall in love with her and place himself abjectly at her mercy again. She spared him from doing either by bursting unpredictably into tears. He was stunned again.
This time she wept with no other emotion than grief, profound, debilitating, humble grief, forgetting all about him. Her desolation was pathetic as she sat with her tempestuous, proud, lovely head bowed, her shoulders sagging, her spirit melting. This time there was no mistaking her anguish. Great racking sobs choked and shook her. She was no longer aware of him, no longer cared. He could have walked from the room safely then. But he chose to remain and console and help her.
‘Please,’ he urged her inarticulately with his arm about her shoulders, recollecting with pained sadness how inarticulate and enfeebled he had felt in the plane coming back from Avignon when Snowden kept whimpering to him that he was cold, he was cold, and all Yossarian could offer him in return was ‘There, there. There, there.’ ‘Please,’ he repeated to her sympathetically. ‘Please, please.’
She rested against him and cried until she seemed too weak to cry any longer, and did not look at him once until he extended his handkerchief when she had finished. She wiped her cheeks with a tiny, polite smile and gave the handkerchief back, murmuring ‘Grazie, grazie’ with meek, maidenly propriety, and then, without any warning whatsoever of a change in mood, clawed suddenly at his eyes with both hands. She landed with each and let out a victorious shriek.
‘Ha! Assassino!’ she hooted, and raced joyously across the room for the bread knife to finish him off.
Half blinded, he rose and stumbled after her. A noise behind him made him turn. His senses reeled in horror at what he saw. Nately’s whore’s kid sister, of all people, was coming after him with another long bread knife!
‘Oh, no,’ he wailed with a shudder, and he knocked the knife out of her hand with a sharp downward blow on her wrist. He lost patience entirely with the whole grotesque and incomprehensible melee. There was no telling who might lunge at him next through the doorway with another long bread knife, and he lifted Nately’s whore’s kid sister off the floor, threw her at Nately’s whore and ran out of the room, out of the apartment and down the stairs. The two girls chased out into the hall after him. He heard their footsteps lag farther and farther behind as he fled and then cease altogether. He heard sobbing directly overhead. Glancing backward up the stair well, he spied Nately’s whore sitting in a heap on one of the steps, weeping with her face in both hands, while her pagan, irrepressible kid sister hung dangerously over the banister shouting ‘Bruto! Bruto!’ down at him happily and brandished her bread knife at him as though it were an exciting new toy she was eager to use.
Yossarian escaped, but kept looking back over his shoulder anxiously as he retreated through the street. People stared at him strangely, making him more apprehensive. He walked in nervous haste, wondering what there was in his appearance that caught everyone’s attention. When he touched his hand to a sore spot on his forehead, his fingers turned gooey with blood, and he understood. He dabbed his face and neck with a handkerchief. Wherever it pressed, he picked up new red smudges. He was bleeding everywhere. He hurried into the Red Cross building and down the two steep flights of white marble stairs to the men’s washroom, where he cleansed and nursed his innumerable visible wounds with cold water and soap and straightened his shirt collar and combed his hair. He had never seen a face so badly bruised and scratched as the one still blinking back at him in the mirror with a dazed and startled uneasiness. What on earth had she wanted from him?
When he left the men’s room, Nately’s whore was waiting outside in ambush. She was crouched against the wall near the bottom of the staircase and came pouncing down upon him like a hawk with a glittering silver steak knife in her fist. He broke the brunt of her assault with his upraised elbow and punched her neatly on the jaw. Her eyes rolled. He caught her before she dropped and sat her down gently. Then he ran up the steps and out of the building and spent the next three hours hunting through the city for Hungry Joe so that he could get away from Rome before she could find him again. He did not feel really safe until the plane had taken off. When they landed in Pianosa, Nately’s whore, disguised in a mechanic’s green overalls, was waiting with her steak knife exactly where the plane stopped, and all that saved him as she stabbed at his chest in her leather-soled high-heeled shoes was the gravel underfoot that made her feet roll out from under her. Yossarian, astounded, hauled her up into the plane and held her motionless on the floor in a double armlock while Hungry Joe radioed the control tower for permission to return to Rome. At the airport in
Rome, Yossarian dumped her out of the plane on the taxi strip, and Hungry Joe took right off for Pianosa again without even cutting his engines. Scarcely breathing, Yossarian scrutinized every figure warily as he and Hungry Joe walked back through the squadron toward their tents. Hungry Joe eyed him steadily with a funny expression.
‘Are you sure you didn’t imagine the whole thing?’ Hungry Joe inquired hesitantly after a while. ‘Imagine it? You were right there with me, weren’t you? You just flew her back to Rome.’ ‘Maybe I imagined the whole thing, too. Why does she want to kill you for?’
‘She never did like me. Maybe it’s because I broke his nose, or maybe it’s because I was the only one in sight she could hate when she got the news. Do you think she’ll come back?’
Yossarian went to the officers’ club that night and stayed very late. He kept a leery eye out for Nately’s whore as he approached his tent. He stopped when he saw her hiding in the bushes around the side, gripping a huge carving knife and all dressed up to look like a Pianosan farmer. Yossarian tiptoed around the back noiselessly and seized her from behind.
‘Caramba!’ she exclaimed in a rage, and resisted like a wildcat as he dragged her inside the tent and hurled her down on the floor.
‘Hey, what’s going on?’ queried one of his roommates drowsily.
‘Hold her till I get back,’ Yossarian ordered, yanking him out of bed on top of her and running out. ‘Hold her!’
‘Let me kill him and I’ll ficky-fick you all,’ she offered.
The other roommates leaped out of their cots when they saw it was a girl and tried to make her ficky-fick them all first as Yossarian ran to get Hungry Joe, who was sleeping like a baby. Yossarian lifted Huple’s cat off Hungry Joe’s face and shook him awake. Hungry Joe dressed rapidly. This time they flew the plane north and turned in over Italy far behind the enemy lines. When they were over level land, they strapped a parachute on Nately’s whore and shoved her out the escape hatch. Yossarian was positive that he was at last rid of her and was relieved. As he approached his tent back in Pianosa, a figure reared up in the darkness right beside the path, and he fainted. He came to sitting on the ground and waited for the knife to strike him, almost welcoming the mortal blow for the peace it would bring. A friendly hand helped him up instead. It belonged to a pilot in Dunbar’s squadron.
‘How are you doing?’ asked the pilot, whispering. ‘Pretty good,’ Yossarian answered.
‘I saw you fall down just now. I thought something happened to you.’ ‘I think I fainted.’
‘There’s a rumor in my squadron that you told them you weren’t going to fly any more combat missions.’
‘That’s the truth.’
‘Then they came around from Group and told us that the rumor wasn’t true, that you were just kidding around.’
‘That was a lie.’
‘Do you think they’ll let you get away with it?’ ‘I don’t know.’
‘What will they do to you?’ ‘I don’t know.’
‘Do you think they’ll court-martial you for desertion in the face of the enemy?’ ‘I don’t know.’
‘I hope you get away with it,’ said the pilot in Dunbar’s squadron, stealing out of sight into the shadows. ‘Let me know how you’re doing.’
Yossarian stared after him a few seconds and continued toward his tent.
‘Pssst!’ said a voice a few paces onward. It was Appleby, hiding in back of a tree. ‘How are you doing?’
‘Pretty good,’ said Yossarian.
‘I heard them say they were going to threaten to court-martial you for deserting in the face of the enemy. But that they wouldn’t try to go through with it because they’re not even sure they’ve got a case against you on that. And because it might make them look bad with the new commanders. Besides, you’re still a pretty big hero for going around twice over the bridge at Ferrara. I guess you’re just about the biggest hero we’ve got now in the group. I just thought you’d like to know that they’ll only be bluffing.’
‘Thanks, Appleby.’
‘That’s the only reason I started talking to you, to warn you.’ ‘I appreciate it.’
Appleby scuffed the toes of his shoes into the ground sheepishly. ‘I’m sorry we had that fist fight in the officers’ club, Yossarian.’
‘That’s all right.’
‘But I didn’t start it. I guess that was Orr’s fault for hitting me in the face with his ping-pong paddle. What’d he want to do that for?’
‘You were beating him.’
‘Wasn’t I supposed to beat him? Isn’t that the point? Now that he’s dead, I guess it doesn’t matter any more whether I’m a better ping-pong player or not, does it?’
‘I guess not.’
‘And I’m sorry about making such a fuss about those Atabrine tablets on the way over. If you want to catch malaria, I guess it’s your business, isn’t it?’
‘That’s all right, Appleby.’
‘But I was only trying to do my duty. I was obeying orders. I was always taught that I had to obey orders.’
‘That’s all right.’
‘You know, I said to Colonel Korn and Colonel Cathcart that I didn’t think they ought to make you fly any more missions if you didn’t want to, and they said they were very disappointed in me.’ Yossarian smiled with rueful amusement. ‘I’ll bet they are.’ ‘Well, I don’t care. Hell, you’ve flown seventy-one. That ought to be enough. Do you think they’ll let you get away with it?’
‘No.’
‘Say, if they do let you get away with it, they’ll have to let the rest of us get away with it, won’t they?’
‘That’s why they can’t let me get away with it.’ ‘What do you think they’ll do?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Do you think they will try to court-martial you?’ ‘I don’t know.’
‘Are you afraid?’ ‘Yes.’
‘Are you going to fly more missions?’ ‘No.’
‘I hope you do get away with it,’ Appleby whispered with conviction. ‘I really do.’ ‘Thanks, Appleby.’
‘I don’t feel too happy about flying so many missions either now that it looks as though we’ve got the war won. I’ll let you know if I hear anything else.’
‘Thanks, Appleby.’
‘Hey!’ called a muted, peremptory voice from the leafless shrubs growing beside his tent in a waist-high clump after Appleby had gone. Havermeyer was hiding there in a squat. He was eating peanut brittle, and his pimples and large, oily pores looked like dark scales. ‘How you doing?’ he asked when Yossarian had walked to him.
‘Pretty good.’
‘Are you going to fly more missions?’ ‘No.’
‘Suppose they try to make you?’ ‘I won’t let them.’
‘Are you yellow?’ ‘Yes.’
‘Will they court-martial you?’
‘They’ll probably try.’
‘What did Major Major say?’ ‘Major Major’s gone.’
‘Did they disappear him?’ ‘I don’t know.’
‘What will you do if they decide to disappear you?’ ‘I’ll try to stop them.’
‘Didn’t they offer you any deals or anything if you did fly?’
‘Piltchard and Wren said they’d arrange things so I’d only go on milk runs.’
Havermeyer perked up. ‘Say, that sounds like a pretty good deal. I wouldn’t mind a deal like that myself. I bet you snapped it up.’
‘I turned it down.’
‘That was dumb.’ Havermeyer’s stolid, dull face furrowed with consternation. ‘Say, a deal like that wasn’t so fair to the rest of us, was it? If you only flew on milk runs, then some of us would have to fly your share of the dangerous missions, wouldn’t we?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Say, I don’t like that,’ Havermeyer exclaimed, rising resentfully with his hands clenched on his hips. ‘I don’t like that a bit. That’s a real royal screwing they’re getting ready to give me just because you’re too goddam yellow to fly any more missions, isn’t it?’
‘Take it up with them,’ said Yossarian and moved his hand to his gun vigilantly.
‘No, I’m not blaming you,’ said Havermeyer, ‘even though I don’t like you. You know, I’m not too happy about flying so many missions any more either. Isn’t there some way I can get out of it, too?’ Yossarian snickered ironically and joked, ‘Put a gun on and start marching with me.’
Havermeyer shook his head thoughtfully. ‘Nah, I couldn’t do that. I might bring some disgrace on my wife and kid if I acted like a coward. Nobody likes a coward. Besides, I want to stay in the reserves when the war is over. You get five hundred dollars a year if you stay in the reserves.’
‘Then fly more missions.’
‘Yeah, I guess I have to. Say, do you think there’s any chance they might take you off combat duty and send you home?’
‘No.’
‘But if they do and let you take one person with you, will you pick me? Don’t pick anyone like Appleby. Pick me.’
‘Why in the world should they do something like that?’
‘I don’t know. But if they do, just remember that I asked you first, will you? And let me know how you’re doing. I’ll wait for you here in these bushes every night. Maybe if they don’t do anything bad to you, I won’t fly any more missions either. Okay?’
All the next evening, people kept popping up at him out of the darkness to ask him how he was doing, appealing to him for confidential information with weary, troubled faces on the basis of some morbid and clandestine kinship he had not guessed existed. People in the squadron he barely knew popped into sight out of nowhere as he passed and asked him how he was doing. Even men from other squadrons came one by one to conceal themselves in the darkness and pop out. Everywhere he stepped after sundown someone was lying in wait to pop out and ask him how he was doing. People popped out at him from trees and bushes, from ditches and tall weeds, from around the corners of tents and from behind the fenders of parked cars. Even one of his roommates popped out to ask him how he was doing and pleaded with him not to tell any of his other roommates he had popped out. Yossarian drew near each beckoning, overly cautious silhouette with his hand on his gun, never knowing which hissing shadow would finally turn dishonestly into Nately’s whore or, worse, into some duly constituted governmental authority sent to club him ruthlessly into insensibility. It began to look as if they would have to do something like that. They did not want to court-martial him for desertion in the face of the enemy because a hundred and thirty-five miles away from the enemy could hardly be called the face of the enemy, and because Yossarian was the one who had finally knocked down the bridge at Ferrara by going around twice over the target and killing Kraft – he was always almost forgetting Kraft when he counted the dead men he knew. But they had to do something to him, and everyone waited grimly to see what horrible thing it would be.
During the day, they avoided him, even Aarfy, and Yossarian understood that they were different people together in daylight than they were alone in the dark. He did not care about them at all as he walked about backward with his hand on his gun and awaited the latest blandishments, threats and inducements from Group each time Captains Piltchard and Wren drove back from another urgent conference with Colonel Cathcart and Colonel Korn. Hungry Joe was hardly around, and the only other person who ever spoke to him was Captain Black, who called him ‘Old Blood and Guts’ in a merry, taunting voice each time he hailed him and who came back from Rome toward the end of the week to tell him Nately’s whore was gone. Yossarian turned sorry with a stab of yearning and remorse. He missed her.
‘Gone?’ he echoed in a hollow tone.
‘Yeah, gone.’ Captain Black laughed, his bleary eyes narrow with fatigue and his peaked, sharp face sprouting as usual with a sparse reddish-blond stubble. He rubbed the bags under his eyes with both fists. ‘I thought I might as well give the stupid broad another boff just for old times’ sake as long as I was in Rome anyway. You know, just to keep that kid Nately’s body spinning in his grave, ha, ha! Remember the way I used to needle him? But the place was empty.’
‘Was there any word from her?’ prodded Yossarian, who had been brooding incessantly about the girl, wondering how much she was suffering, and feeling almost lonely and deserted without her
ferocious and unappeasable attacks.
‘There’s no one there,’ Captain Black exclaimed cheerfully, trying to make Yossarian understand. ‘Don’t you understand? They’re all gone. The whole place is busted.’
‘Gone?’
‘Yeah, gone. Flushed right out into the street.’ Captain Black chuckled heartily again, and his pointed Adam’s apple jumped up and down with glee inside his scraggly neck. ‘The joint’s empty. The M.P.s busted the whole apartment up and drove the whores right out. Ain’t that a laugh?’ Yossarian was scared and began to tremble. ‘Why’d they do that?’
‘What difference does it make? responded Captain Black with an exuberant gesture. ‘They flushed them right out into the street. How do you like that? The whole batch.’
‘What about the kid sister?’
‘Flushed away,’ laughed Captain Black. ‘Flushed away with the rest of the broads. Right out into the street.’
‘But she’s only a kid!’ Yossarian objected passionately. ‘She doesn’t know anybody else in the whole city. What’s going to happen to her?’
‘What the hell do I care?’ responded Captain Black with an indifferent shrug, and then gawked suddenly at Yossarian with surprise and with a crafty gleam of prying elation. ‘Say, what’s the matter? If I knew this was going to make you so unhappy, I would have come right over and told you, just to make you eat your liver. Hey, where are you going? Come on back! Come on back here and eat your liver!’
THE ETERNAL CITY
Yossarian was going absent without official leave with Milo, who, as the plane cruised toward Rome, shook his head reproachfully and, with pious lips pulsed, informed Yossarian in ecclesiastical tones that he was ashamed of him. Yossarian nodded. Yossarian was making an uncouth spectacle of himself by walking around backward with his gun on his hip and refusing to fly more combat missions, Milo said. Yossarian nodded. It was disloyal to his squadron and embarrassing to his superiors. He was placing Milo in a very uncomfortable position, too. Yossarian nodded again. The men were starting to grumble. It was not fair for Yossarian to think only of his own safety while men like Milo, Colonel Cathcart, Colonel Korn and ex-P.F.C. Wintergreen were willing to do everything they could to win the war. The men with seventy missions were starring to grumble because they had to fly eighty, and there was a danger some of them might put on guns and begin walking around backward, too. Morale was deteriorating and it was all Yossarian’s fault. The country was in peril; he was jeopardizing his traditional rights of freedom and independence by daring to exercise them.
Yossarian kept nodding in the co-pilot’s seat and tried not to listen as Milo prattled on. Nately’s whore was on his mind, as were Kraft and Orr and Nately and Dunbar, and Kid Sampson and
McWatt, and all the poor and stupid and diseased people he had seen in Italy, Egypt and North Africa and knew about in other areas of the world, and Snowden and Nately’s whore’s kid sister were on his conscience, too. Yossarian thought he knew why Nately’s whore held him responsible for Nately’s death and wanted to kill him. Why the hell shouldn’t she? It was a man’s world, and she and everyone younger had every right to blame him and everyone older for every unnatural tragedy that befell them; just as she, even in her grief, was to blame for every man-made misery that landed on her kid sister and on all other children behind her. Someone had to do something sometime. Every victim was a culprit, every culprit a victim, and somebody had to stand up sometime to try to break the lousy chain of inherited habit that was imperiling them all. In parts of Africa little boys were still stolen away by adult slave traders and sold for money to men who disemboweled them and ate them. Yossarian marveled that children could suffer such barbaric sacrifice without evincing the slightest hint of fear or pain. He took it for granted that they did submit so stoically. If not, he reasoned, the custom would certainly have died, for no craving for wealth or immortality could be so great, he felt, as to subsist on the sorrow of children.
He was rocking the boat, Milo said, and Yossarian nodded once more. He was not a good member of the team, Milo said. Yossarian nodded and listened to Milo tell him that the decent thing to do if he did not like the way Colonel Cathcart and Colonel Korn were running the group was go to Russia, instead of stirring up trouble. Colonel Cathcart and Colonel Korn had both been very good to Yossarian, Milo said; hadn’t they given him a medal after the last mission to Ferrara and promoted him to captain? Yossarian nodded. Didn’t they feed him and give him his pay every month? Yossarian nodded again. Milo was sure they would be charitable if he went to them to apologize and recant and promise to fly eighty missions. Yossarian said he would think it over, and held his breath and prayed for a safe landing as Milo dropped his wheels and glided in toward the runway. It was funny how he had really come to detest flying.
Rome was in ruins, he saw, when the plane was down. The airdrome had been bombed eight months before, and knobby slabs of white stone rubble had been bulldozed into flat-topped heaps on both sides of the entrance through the wire fence surrounding the field. The Colosseum was a dilapidated shell, and the Arch of Constantine had fallen. Nately’s whore’s apartment was a shambles. The girls were gone, and the only one there was the old woman. The windows in the apartment had been smashed. She was bundled up in sweaters and skirts and wore a dark shawl about her head. She sat on a wooden chair near an electric hot plate, her arms folded, boiling water in a battered aluminum pot. She was talking aloud to herself when Yossarian entered and began moaning as soon as she saw him.
‘Gone,’ she moaned before he could even inquire. Holding her elbows, she rocked back and forth mournfully on her creaking chair. ‘Gone.’
‘Who?’
‘All. All the poor young girls.’ ‘Where?’
‘Away. Chased away into the street. All of them gone. All the poor young girls.’ ‘Chased away by who? Who did it?’
‘The mean tall soldiers with the hard white hats and clubs. And by our carabinieri. They came with their clubs and chased them away. They would not even let them take their coats. The poor things. They just chased them away into the cold.’
‘Did they arrest them?’
‘They chased them away. They just chased them away.’ ‘Then why did they do it if they didn’t arrest them?’
‘I don’t know,’ sobbed the old woman. ‘I don’t know. Who will take care of me? Who will take care of me now that all the poor young girls are gone? Who will take care of me?’
‘There must have been a reason,’ Yossarian persisted, pounding his fist into his hand. ‘They couldn’t just barge in here and chase everyone out.’
‘No reason,’ wailed the old woman. ‘No reason.’ ‘What right did they have?’
‘Catch-22.’
‘What?’ Yossarian froze in his tracks with fear and alarm and felt his whole body begin to tingle. ‘What did you say?’
‘Catch-22’ the old woman repeated, rocking her head up and down. ‘Catch-22. Catch-22 says they have a right to do anything we can’t stop them from doing.’
‘What the hell are you talking about?’ Yossarian shouted at her in bewildered, furious protest. ‘How did you know it was Catch-22? Who the hell told you it was Catch-22?’
‘The soldiers with the hard white hats and clubs. The girls were crying. “Did we do anything wrong?” they said. The men said no and pushed them away out the door with the ends of their clubs. “Then why are you chasing us out?” the girls said. “Catch-22,” the men said. “What right do you have?” the girls said. “Catch-22,” the men said. All they kept saying was “Catch-22, Catch-22.” What does it mean, Catch-22? What is Catch-22?’
‘Didn’t they show it to you?’ Yossarian demanded, stamping about in anger and distress. ‘Didn’t you even make them read it?’
‘They don’t have to show us Catch-22,’ the old woman answered. ‘The law says they don’t have to.’ ‘What law says they don’t have to?’
‘Catch-22.’
‘Oh, God damn!’ Yossarian exclaimed bitterly. ‘I bet it wasn’t even really there.’ He stopped walking and glanced about the room disconsolately. ‘Where’s the old man?’
‘Gone,’ mourned the old woman.
‘Gone?’
‘Dead,’ the old woman told him, nodding in emphatic lament, pointing to her head with the flat of her hand. ‘Something broke in here. One minute he was living, one minute he was dead.’
‘But he can’t be dead!’ Yossarian cried, ready to argue insistently. But of course he knew it was true, knew it was logical and true; once again the old man had marched along with the majority.
Yossarian turned away and trudged through the apartment with a gloomy scowl, peering with pessimistic curiosity into all the rooms. Everything made of glass had been smashed by the men with the clubs. Torn drapes and bedding lay dumped on the floor. Chairs, tables and dressers had been overturned. Everything breakable had been broken. The destruction was total. No wild vandals could have been more thorough. Every window was smashed, and darkness poured like inky clouds into each room through the shattered panes. Yossarian could imagine the heavy, crashing footfalls of the tall M.P.s in the hard white hats. He could picture the fiery and malicious exhilaration with which they had made their wreckage, and their sanctimonious, ruthless sense of right and dedication. All the poor young girls were gone. Everyone was gone but the weeping old woman in the bulky brown and gray sweaters and black head shawl, and soon she too would be gone.
‘Gone,’ she grieved, when he walked back in, before he could even speak. ‘Who will take care of me now?’
Yossarian ignored the question. ‘Nately’s girl friend – did anyone hear from her?’ he asked. ‘Gone.’
‘I know she’s gone. But did anyone hear from her? Does anyone know where she is?’ ‘Gone.’
‘The little sister. What happened to her?’ ‘Gone.’ The old woman’s tone had not changed.
‘Do you know what I’m talking about?’ Yossarian asked sharply, staring into her eyes to see if she were not speaking to him from a coma. He raised his voice. ‘What happened to the kid sister, to the little girl?’
‘Gone, gone,’ the old woman replied with a crabby shrug, irritated by his persistence, her low wail growing louder. ‘Chased away with the rest, chased away into the street. They would not even let her take her coat.’
‘Where did she go?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t know.’ ‘Who will take care of her?’ ‘Who will take care of me?’
‘She doesn’t know anybody else, does she?’ ‘Who will take care of me?’
Yossarian left money in the old woman’s lap – it was odd how many wrongs leaving money seemed to right – and strode out of the apartment, cursing Catch-22 vehemently as he descended the stairs, even though he knew there was no such thing. Catch22 did not exist, he was positive of that, but it made no difference. What did matter was that everyone thought it existed, and that was much worse, for there was no object or text to ridicule or refute, to accuse, criticize, attack, amend, hate, revile, spit at, rip to shreds, trample upon or burn up.
It was cold outside, and dark, and a leaky, insipid mist lay swollen in the air and trickled down the large, unpolished stone blocks of the houses and the pedestals of monuments. Yossarian hurried back to Milo and recanted. He said he was sorry and, knowing he was lying, promised to fly as many more missions as Colonel Cathcart wanted if Milo would only use all his influence in Rome to help him locate Nately’s whore’s kid sister.
‘She’s just a twelve-year-old virgin, Milo,’ he explained anxiously, ‘and I want to find her before it’s too late.’
Milo responded to his request with a benign smile. ‘I’ve got just the twelve-year-old virgin you’re looking for,’ he announced jubilantly. ‘This twelve-year-old virgin is really only thirty-four, but she was brought up on a low-protein diet by very strict parents and didn’t start sleeping with men until
-‘
‘Milo, I’m talking about a little girl!’ Yossarian interrupted him with desperate impatience. ‘Don’t you understand? I don’t want to sleep with her. I want to help her. You’ve got daughters. She’s just a little kid, and she’s all alone in this city with no one to take care of her. I want to protect her from harm. Don’t you know what I’m talking about?’
Milo did understand and was deeply touched. ‘Yossarian, I’m proud of you,’ he exclaimed with profound emotion. ‘I really am. You don’t know how glad I am to see that everything isn’t always just sex with you. You’ve got principles. Certainly I’ve got daughters, and I know exactly what you’re talking about. We’ll find that girl if we have to turn this whole city upside down. Come along.’
Yossarian went along in Milo Minderbinder’s speeding M & M staff car to police headquarters to meet a swarthy, untidy police commissioner with a narrow black mustache and unbuttoned tunic who was fiddling with a stout woman with warts and two chins when they entered his office and who greeted Milo with warm surprise and bowed and scraped in obscene servility as though Milo were some elegant marquis.
‘Ah, Marchese Milo,’ he declared with effusive pleasure, pushing the fat, disgruntled woman out the door without even looking toward her. ‘Why didn’t you tell me you were coming? I would have a big party for you. Come in, come in, Marchese. You almost never visit us any more.’
Milo knew that there was not one moment to waste. ‘Hello, Luigi,’ he said, nodding so briskly that he almost seemed rude. ‘Luigi, I need your help. My friend here wants to find a girl.’
‘A girl, Marchese?’ said Luigi, scratching his face pensively. ‘There are lots of girls in Rome. For an American officer, a girl should not be too difficult.’
‘No, Luigi, you don’t understand. This is a twelve-year-old virgin that he has to find right away.’ ‘Ah, yes, now I understand,’ Luigi said sagaciously. ‘A virgin might take a little time. But if he waits at the bus terminal where the young farm girls looking for work arrive, I -‘
‘Luigi, you still don’t understand,’ Milo snapped with such brusque impatience that the police commissioner’s face flushed and he jumped to attention and began buttoning his uniform in confusion. ‘This girl is a friend, an old friend of the family, and we want to help her. She’s only a child. She’s all alone in this city somewhere, and we have to find her before somebody harms her. Now do you understand? Luigi, this is very important to me. I have a daughter the same age as that little girl, and nothing in the world means more to me right now than saving that poor child before it’s too late. Will you help?’
‘Si, Marchese, now I understand,’ said Luigi. ‘And I will do everything in my power to find her. But tonight I have almost no men. Tonight all my men are busy trying to break up the traffic in illegal tobacco.’
‘Illegal tobacco?’ asked Milo.
‘Milo,’ Yossarian bleated faintly with a sinking heart, sensing at once that all was lost.
‘Si, Marchese,’ said Luigi. ‘The profit in illegal tobacco is so high that the smuggling is almost impossible to control.’
‘Is there really that much profit in illegal tobacco?’ Milo inquired with keen interest, his rust-colored eyebrows arching avidly and his nostrils sniffing.
‘Milo,’ Yossarian called to him. ‘Pay attention to me, will you?’
‘Si, Marchese,’ Luigi answered. ‘The profit in illegal tobacco is very high. The smuggling is a national scandal, Marchese, truly a national disgrace.’
‘Is that a fact?’ Milo observed with a preoccupied smile and started toward the door as though in a spell.
‘Milo!’ Yossarian yelled, and bounded forward impulsively to intercept him. ‘Milo, you’ve got to help me.’
‘Illegal tobacco,’ Milo explained to him with a look of epileptic lust, struggling doggedly to get by. ‘Let me go. I’ve got to smuggle illegal tobacco.’
‘Stay here and help me find her,’ pleaded Yossarian. ‘You can smuggle illegal tobacco tomorrow.’
But Milo was deaf and kept pushing forward, nonviolently but irresistibly, sweating, his eyes, as though he were in the grip of a blind fixation, burning feverishly, and his twitching mouth slavering. He moaned calmly as though in remote, instinctive distress and kept repeating, ‘Illegal tobacco, illegal tobacco.’ Yossarian stepped out of the way with resignation finally when he saw it was hopeless to try to reason with him. Milo was gone like a shot. The commissioner of police
unbuttoned his tunic again and looked at Yossarian with contempt.
‘What do you want here?’ he asked coldly. ‘Do you want me to arrest you?’
Yossarian walked out of the office and down the stairs into the dark, tomblike street, passing in the hall the stout woman with warts and two chins, who was already on her way back in. There was no sign of Milo outside. There were no lights in any of the windows. The deserted sidewalk rose steeply and continuously for several blocks. He could see the glare of a broad avenue at the top of the long cobblestone incline. The police station was almost at the bottom; the yellow bulbs at the entrance sizzled in the dampness like wet torches. A frigid, fine rain was falling. He began walking slowly, pushing uphill. Soon he came to a quiet, cozy, inviting restaurant with red velvet drapes in the windows and a blue neon sign near the door that said: TONY’S RESTAURANT FINE FOOD AND DRINK. KEEP OUT. The words on the blue neon sign surprised him mildly for only an instant. Nothing warped seemed bizarre any more in his strange, distorted surroundings. The tops of the sheer buildings slanted in weird, surrealistic perspective, and the street seemed tilted. He raised the collar of his warm woolen coat and hugged it around him. The night was raw. A boy in a thin shirt and thin tattered trousers walked out of the darkness on bare feet. The boy had black hair and needed a haircut and shoes and socks. His sickly face was pale and sad. His feet made grisly, soft, sucking sounds in the rain puddles on the wet pavement as he passed, and Yossarian was moved by such intense pity for his poverty that he wanted to smash his pale, sad, sickly face with his fist and knock him out of existence because he brought to mind all the pale, sad, sickly children in Italy that same night who needed haircuts and needed shoes and socks. He made Yossarian think of cripples and of cold and hungry men and women, and of all the dumb, passive, devout mothers with catatonic eyes nursing infants outdoors that same night with chilled animal udders bared insensibly to that same raw rain. Cows. Almost on cue, a nursing mother padded past holding an infant in black rags, and Yossarian wanted to smash her too, because she reminded him of the barefoot boy in the thin shirt and thin, tattered trousers and of all the shivering, stupefying misery in a world that never yet had provided enough heat and food and justice for all but an ingenious and unscrupulous handful. What a lousy earth! He wondered how many people were destitute that same night even in his own prosperous country, how many homes were shanties, how many husbands were drunk and wives socked, and how many children were bullied, abused or abandoned. How many families hungered for food they could not afford to buy? How many hearts were broken? How many suicides would take place that same night, how many people would go insane? How many cockroaches and landlords would triumph? How many winners were losers, successes failures, rich men poor men? How many wise guys were stupid? How many happy endings were unhappy endings? How many honest men were liars, brave men cowards, loyal men traitors, how many sainted men were corrupt, how many people in positions of trust had sold their souls to blackguards for petty cash, how many had never had souls? How many straight-and-narrow paths
were crooked paths? How many best families were worst families and how many good people were bad people? When you added them all up and then subtracted, you might be left with only the children, and perhaps with Albert Einstein and an old violinist or sculptor somewhere. Yossarian walked in lonely torture, feeling estranged, and could not wipe from his mind the excruciating image of the barefoot boy with sickly cheeks until he turned the corner into the avenue finally and came upon an Allied soldier having convulsions on the ground, a young lieutenant with a small, pale, boyish face. Six other soldiers from different countries wrestled with different parts of him, striving to help him and hold him still. He yelped and groaned unintelligibly through clenched teeth, his eyes rolled up into his head. ‘Don’t let him bite his tongue off,’ a short sergeant near Yossarian advised shrewdly, and a seventh man threw himself into the fray to wrestle with the ill lieutenant’s face. All at once the wrestlers won and turned to each other undecidedly, for now that they held the young lieutenant rigid they did not know what to do with him. A quiver of moronic panic spread from one straining brute face to another. ‘Why don’t you lift him up and put him on the hood of that car?’ a corporal standing in back of Yossarian drawled. That seemed to make sense, so the seven men lifted the young lieutenant up and stretched him out carefully on the hood of a parked car, still pinning each struggling part of him down. Once they had him stretched out on the hood of the parked car, they stared at each other uneasily again, for they had no idea what to do with him next. ‘Why don’t you lift him up off the hood of that car and lay him down on the ground?’ drawled the same corporal behind Yossarian. That seemed like a good idea, too, and they began to move him back to the sidewalk, but before they could finish, a jeep raced up with a flashing red spotlight at the side and two military policemen in the front seat.
‘What’s going on?’ the driver yelled.
‘He’s having convulsions,’ one of the men grappling with one of the young lieutenant’s limbs answered. ‘We’re holding him still.’
‘That’s good. He’s under arrest.’ ‘What should we do with him?’
‘Keep him under arrest!’ the M.P. shouted, doubling over with raucous laughter at his jest, and sped away in his jeep.
Yossarian recalled that he had no leave papers and moved prudently past the strange group toward the sound of muffled voices emanating from a distance inside the murky darkness ahead. The broad, rain-blotched boulevard was illuminated every half-block by short, curling lampposts with eerie, shimmering glares surrounded by smoky brown mist. From a window overhead he heard an unhappy female voice pleading, ‘Please don’t. Please don’t.’ A despondent young woman in a black raincoat with much black hair on her face passed with her eyes lowered. At the Ministry of Public Affairs on the next block, a drunken lady was backed up against one of the fluted Corinthian columns by a drunken young soldier, while three drunken comrades in arms sat watching nearby on
the steps with wine bottles standing between their legs. ‘Pleeshe don’t,’ begged the drunken lady. ‘I want to go home now. Pleeshe don’t.’ One of the sitting men cursed pugnaciously and hurled a wine bottle at Yossarian when he turned to look up. The bottle shattered harmlessly far away with a brief and muted noise. Yossarian continued walking away at the same listless, unhurried pace, hands buried in his pockets. ‘Come on, baby,’ he heard the drunken soldier urge determinedly. ‘It’s my turn now.’ ‘Pleeshe don’t,’ begged the drunken lady. ‘Pleeshe don’t.’ At the very next corner, deep inside the dense, impenetrable shadows of a narrow, winding side street, he heard the mysterious, unmistakable sound of someone shoveling snow. The measured, labored, evocative scrape of iron shovel against concrete made his flesh crawl with terror as he stepped from the curb to cross the ominous alley and hurried onward until the haunting, incongruous noise had been left behind. Now he knew where he was: soon, if he continued without turning, he would come to the dry fountain in the middle of the boulevard, then to the officers’ apartment seven blocks beyond. He heard snarling, inhuman voices cutting through the ghostly blackness in front suddenly. The bulb on the corner lamp post had died, spilling gloom over half the street, throwing everything visible off balance. On the other side of the intersection, a man was beating a dog with a stick like the man who was beating the horse with a whip in Raskolnikov’s dream. Yossarian strained helplessly not to see or hear. The dog whimpered and squealed in brute, dumbfounded hysteria at the end of an old Manila rope and groveled and crawled on its belly without resisting, but the man beat it and beat it anyway with his heavy, flat stick. A small crowd watched. A squat woman stepped out and asked him please to stop. ‘Mind your own business,’ the man barked gruffly, lifting his stick as though he might beat her too, and the woman retreated sheepishly with an abject and humiliated air. Yossarian quickened his pace to get away, almost ran. The night was filled with horrors, and he thought he knew how Christ must have felt as he walked through the world, like a psychiatrist through a ward full of nuts, like a victim through a prison full of thieves. What a welcome sight a leper must have been! At the next corner a man was beating a small boy brutally in the midst of an immobile crowd of adult spectators who made no effort to intervene. Yossarian recoiled with sickening recognition. He was certain he had witnessed that same horrible scene sometime before. D‚j… vu? The sinister coincidence shook him and filled him with doubt and dread. It was the same scene he had witnessed a block before, although everything in it seemed quite different. What in the world was happening? Would a squat woman step out and ask the man to please stop? Would he raise his hand to strike her and would she retreat? Nobody moved. The child cried steadily as though in drugged misery. The man kept knocking him down with hard, resounding open-palm blows to the head, then jerking him up to his feet in order to knock him down again. No one in the sullen, cowering crowd seemed to care enough about the stunned and beaten boy to interfere. The child was no more than nine. One drab woman was weeping silently into a dirty dish towel. The boy was emaciated and needed a haircut. Bright-red blood was streaming from both ears. Yossarian crossed quickly to the
other side of the immense avenue to escape the nauseating sight and found himself walking on human teeth lying on the drenched, glistening pavement near splotches of blood kept sticky by the pelting raindrops poking each one like sharp fingernails. Molars and broken incisors lay scattered everywhere. He circled on tiptoe the grotesque debris and came near a doorway containing a crying soldier holding a saturated handkerchief to his mouth, supported as he sagged by two other soldiers waiting in grave impatience for the military ambulance that finally came clanging up with amber fog lights on and passed them by for an altercation on the next block between a civilian Italian with books and a slew of civilian policemen with armlocks and clubs. The screaming, struggling civilian was a dark man with a face white as flour from fear. His eyes were pulsating in hectic desperation, flapping like bat’s wings, as the many tall policemen seized him by the arms and legs and lifted him up. His books were spilled on the ground. ‘Help!’ he shrieked shrilly in a voice strangling in its own emotion, as the policemen carried him to the open doors in the rear of the ambulance and threw him inside. ‘Police! Help! Police!’ The doors were shut and bolted, and the ambulance raced away. There was a humorless irony in the ludicrous panic of the man screaming for help to the police while policemen were all around him. Yossarian smiled wryly at the futile and ridiculous cry for aid, then saw with a start that the words were ambiguous, realized with alarm that they were not, perhaps, intended as a call for police but as a heroic warning from the grave by a doomed friend to everyone who was not a policeman with a club and a gun and a mob of other policemen with clubs and guns to back him up. ‘Help! Police!’ the man had cried, and he could have been shouting of danger. Yossarian responded to the thought by slipping away stealthily from the police and almost tripped over the feet of a burly woman of forty hastening across the intersection guiltily, darting furtive, vindictive glances behind her toward a woman of eighty with thick, bandaged ankles doddering after her in a losing pursuit. The old woman was gasping for breath as she minced along and muttering to herself in distracted agitation. There was no mistaking the nature of the scene; it was a chase. The triumphant first woman was halfway across the wide avenue before the second woman reached the curb. The nasty, small, gloating smile with which she glanced back at the laboring old woman was both wicked and apprehensive. Yossarian knew he could help the troubled old woman if she would only cry out, knew he could spring forward and capture the sturdy first woman and hold her for the mob of policemen nearby if the second woman would only give him license with a shriek of distress. But the old woman passed by without even seeing him, mumbling in terrible, tragic vexation, and soon the first woman had vanished into the deepening layers of darkness and the old woman was left standing helplessly in the center of the thoroughfare, dazed, uncertain which way to proceed, alone. Yossarian tore his eyes from her and hurried away in shame because he had done nothing to assist her. He darted furtive, guilty glances back as he fled in defeat, afraid the old woman might now start following him, and he welcomed the concealing shelter of the drizzling, drifting, lightless, nearly opaque gloom. Mobs… mobs of policemen – everything but
England was in the hands of mobs, mobs, mobs. Mobs with clubs were in control everywhere.
The surface of the collar and shoulders of Yossarian’s coat was soaked. His socks were wet and cold. The light on the next lamppost was out, too, the glass globe broken. Buildings and featureless shapes flowed by him noiselessly as though borne past immutably on the surface of some rank and timeless tide. A tall monk passed, his face buried entirely inside a coarse gray cowl, even the eyes hidden. Footsteps sloshed toward him steadily through a puddle, and he feared it would be another barefoot child. He brushed by a gaunt, cadaverous, tristful man in a black raincoat with a star-shaped scar in his cheek and a glossy mutilated depression the size of an egg in one temple. On squishing straw sandals, a young woman materialized with her whole face disfigured by a God-awful pink and piebald burn that started on her neck and stretched in a raw, corrugated mass up both cheeks past her eyes! Yossarian could not bear to look, and shuddered. No one would ever love her. His spirit was sick; he longed to lie down with some girl he could love who would soothe and excite him and put him to sleep. A mob with a club was waiting for him in Pianosa. The girls were all gone. The countess and her daughter-in-law were no longer good enough; he had grown too old for fun, he no longer had the time. Luciana was gone, dead, probably; if not yet, then soon enough. Aarfy’s buxom trollop had vanished with her smutty cameo ring, and Nurse Duckett was ashamed of him because he had refused to fly more combat missions and would cause a scandal. The only girl he knew nearby was the plain maid in the officers’ apartment, whom none of the men had ever slept with. Her name was Michaela, but the men called her filthy things in dulcet, ingratiating voices, and she giggled with childish joy because she understood no English and thought they were flattering her and making harmless jokes. Everything wild she watched them do filled her with enchanted delight. She was a happy, simple-minded, hard-working girl who could not read and was barely able to write her name. Her straight hair was the color of rotting straw. She had sallow skin and myopic eyes, and none of the men had ever slept with her because none of the men had ever wanted to, none but Aarfy, who had raped her once that same evening and had then held her prisoner in a clothes closet for almost two hours with his hand over her mouth until the civilian curfew sirens sounded and it was unlawful for her to be outside.
Then he threw her out the window. Her dead body was still lying on the pavement when Yossarian arrived and pushed his way politely through the circle of solemn neighbors with dim lanterns, who glared with venom as they shrank away from him and pointed up bitterly toward the second-floor windows in their private, grim, accusing conversations. Yossarian’s heart pounded with fright and horror at the pitiful, ominous, gory spectacle of the broken corpse. He ducked into the hallway and bolted up the stairs into the apartment, where he found Aarfy pacing about uneasily with a pompous, slightly uncomfortable smile. Aarfy seemed a bit unsettled as he fidgeted with his pipe and assured Yossarian that everything was going to be all right. There was nothing to worry about.
‘I only raped her once,’ he explained.
Yossarian was aghast. ‘But you killed her, Aarfy! You killed her!’
‘Oh, I had to do that after I raped her,’ Aarfy replied in his most condescending manner. ‘I couldn’t very well let her go around saying bad things about us, could I?’
‘But why did you have to touch her at all, you dumb bastard?’ Yossarian shouted. ‘Why couldn’t you get yourself a girl off the street if you wanted one? The city is full of prostitutes.’
‘Oh, no, not me,’ Aarfy bragged. ‘I never paid for it in my life.’
‘Aarfy, are you insane?’ Yossarian was almost speechless. ‘You killed a girl. They’re going to put you in jail!’
‘Oh, no,’ Aarfy answered with a forced smile. ‘Not me. They aren’t going to put good old Aarfy in jail. Not for killing her.’
‘But you threw her out the window. She’s lying dead in the street.’ ‘She has no right to be there,’ Aarfy answered. ‘It’s after curfew.’
‘Stupid! Don’t you realize what you’ve done?’ Yossarian wanted to grab Aarfy by his well-fed, caterpillar-soft shoulders and shake some sense into him. ‘You’ve murdered a human being. They are going to put you in jail. They might even hang you!’
‘Oh, I hardly think they’ll do that,’ Aarfy replied with a jovial chuckle, although his symptoms of nervousness increased. He spilled tobacco crumbs unconsciously as his short fingers fumbled with the bowl of his pipe. ‘No, sirree. Not to good old Aarfy.’ He chortled again. ‘She was only a servant girl. I hardly think they’re going to make too much of a fuss over one poor Italian servant girl when so many thousands of lives are being lost every day. Do you?’
‘Listen!’ Yossarian cried, almost in joy. He pricked up his ears and watched the blood drain from Aarfy’s face as sirens mourned far away, police sirens, and then ascended almost instantaneously to a howling, strident, onrushing cacophony of overwhelming sound that seemed to crash into the room around them from every side. ‘Aarfy, they’re coming for you,’ he said in a flood of compassion, shouting to be heard above the noise. ‘They’re coming to arrest you. Aarfy, don’t you understand? You can’t take the life of another human being and get away with it, even if she is just a poor servant girl. Don’t you see? Can’t you understand?’
‘Oh, no,’ Aarfy insisted with a lame laugh and a weak smile. ‘They’re not coming to arrest me. Not good old Aarfy.’
All at once he looked sick. He sank down on a chair in a trembling stupor, his stumpy, lax hands quaking in his lap. Cars skidded to a stop outside. Spotlights hit the windows immediately. Car doors slammed and police whistles screeched. Voices rose harshly. Aarfy was green. He kept shaking his head mechanically with a queer, numb smile and repeating in a weak, hollow monotone that they were not coming for him, not for good old Aarfy, no sirree, striving to convince himself that this was so even as heavy footsteps raced up the stairs and pounded across the landing, even as fists beat on the door four times with a deafening, inexorable force. Then the door to the apartment
flew open, and two large, tough, brawny M.P.s with icy eyes and firm, sinewy, unsmiling jaws entered quickly, strode across the room, and arrested Yossarian.
They arrested Yossarian for being in Rome without a pass.
They apologized to Aarfy for intruding and led Yossarian away between them, gripping him under each arm with fingers as hard as steel manacles. They said nothing at all to him on the way down. Two more tall M.P.s with clubs and hard white helmets were waiting outside at a closed car. They marched Yossarian into the back seat, and the car roared away and weaved through the rain and muddy fog to a police station. The M.P.s locked him up for the night in a cell with four stone walls. At dawn they gave him a pail for a latrine and drove him to the airport, where two more giant M.P.s with clubs and white helmets were waiting at a transport plane whose engines were already warming up when they arrived, the cylindrical green cowlings oozing quivering beads of condensation. None of the M.P.s said anything to each other either. They did not even nod. Yossarian had never seen such granite faces. The plane flew to Pianosa. Two more silent M.P.s were waiting at the landing strip. There were now eight, and they filed with precise, wordless discipline into two cars and sped on humming tires past the four squadron areas to the Group Headquarters building, where still two more M.P.s were waiting at the parking area. All ten tall, strong, purposeful, silent men towered around him as they turned toward the entrance. Their footsteps crunched in loud unison on the cindered ground. He had an impression of accelerating haste. He was terrified. Every one of the ten M.P.s seemed powerful enough to bash him to death with a single blow. They had only to press their massive, toughened, boulderous shoulders against him to crush all life from his body. There was nothing he could do to save himself. He could not even see which two were gripping him under the arms as they marched him rapidly between the two tight single-file columns they had formed. Their pace quickened, and he felt as though he were flying along with his feet off the ground as they trotted in resolute cadence up the wide marble staircase to the upper landing, where still two more inscrutable military policemen with hard faces were waiting to lead them all at an even faster pace down the long, cantilevered balcony overhanging the immense lobby. Their marching footsteps on the dull tile floor thundered like an awesome, quickening drum roll through the vacant center of the building as they moved with even greater speed and precision toward Colonel Cathcart’s office, and violent winds of panic began blowing in Yossarian’s ears when they turned him toward his doom inside the office, where Colonel Korn, his rump spreading comfortably on a corner of Colonel Cathcart’s desk, sat waiting to greet him with a genial smile and said,
‘We’re sending you home.’ 40 CATCH-22
There was, of course, a catch. ‘Catch-22?’ inquired Yossarian.
‘Of course,’ Colonel Korn answered pleasantly, after he had chased the mighty guard of massive
M.P.s out with an insouciant flick of his hand and a slightly contemptuous nod – most relaxed, as always, when he could be most cynical. His rimless square eyeglasses glinted with sly amusement as he gazed at Yossarian. ‘After all, we can’t simply send you home for refusing to fly more missions and keep the rest of the men here, can we? That would hardly be fair to them.’
‘You’re goddam right!’ Colonel Cathcart blurted out, lumbering back and forth gracelessly like a winded bull, puffing and pouting angrily. ‘I’d like to tie him up hand and foot and throw him aboard a plane on every mission. That’s what I’d like to do.’
Colonel Korn motioned Colonel Cathcart to be silent and smiled at Yossarian. ‘You know, you really have been making things terribly difficult for Colonel Cathcart,’ he observed with flip good humor, as though the fact did not displease him at all. ‘The men are unhappy and morale is beginning to deteriorate. And it’s all your fault.’
‘It’s your fault,’ Yossarian argued, ‘for raising the number of missions.’
‘No, it’s your fault for refusing to fly them,’ Colonel Korn retorted. ‘The men were perfectly content to fly as many missions as we asked as long as they thought they had no alternative. Now you’ve given them hope, and they’re unhappy. So the blame is all yours.’
‘Doesn’t he know there’s a war going on?’ Colonel Cathcart, still stamping back and forth, demanded morosely without looking at Yossarian.
‘I’m quite sure he does,’ Colonel Korn answered. ‘That’s probably why he refuses to fly them.’ ‘Doesn’t it make any difference to him?’
‘Will the knowledge that there’s a war going on weaken your decision to refuse to participate in it?’ Colonel Korn inquired with sarcastic seriousness, mocking Colonel Cathcart.
‘No, sir,’ Yossarian replied, almost returning Colonel Korn’s smile.
‘I was afraid of that,’ Colonel Korn remarked with an elaborate sigh, locking his fingers together comfortably on top of his smooth, bald, broad, shiny brown head. ‘You know, in all fairness, we really haven’t treated you too badly, have we? We’ve fed you and paid you on time. We gave you a medal and even made you a captain.’
‘I never should have made him a captain,’ Colonel Cathcart exclaimed bitterly. ‘I should have given him a court-martial after he loused up that Ferrara mission and went around twice.’
‘I told you not to promote him,’ said Colonel Korn, ‘but you wouldn’t listen to me.’ ‘No you didn’t. You told me to promote him, didn’t you?’
‘I told you not to promote him. But you just wouldn’t listen.’ ‘I should have listened.’
‘You never listen to me,’ Colonel Korn persisted with relish. ‘That’s the reason we’re in this spot.’ ‘All right, gee whiz. Stop rubbing it in, will you?’
Colonel Cathcart burrowed his fists down deep inside his pockets and turned away in a slouch.
‘Instead of picking on me, why don’t you figure out what we’re going to do about him?’
‘We’re going to send him home, I’m afraid.’ Colonel Korn was chuckling triumphantly when he turned away from Colonel Cathcart to face Yossarian. ‘Yossarian, the war is over for you. We’re going to send you home. You really don’t deserve it, you know, which is one of the reasons I don’t mind doing it. Since there’s nothing else we can risk doing to you at this time, we’ve decided to return you to the States. We’ve worked out this little deal to -‘
‘What kind of deal?’ Yossarian demanded with defiant mistrust.
Colonel Korn tossed his head back and laughed. ‘Oh, a thoroughly despicable deal, make no mistake about that. It’s absolutely revolting. But you’ll accept it quickly enough.’
‘Don’t be too sure.’
‘I haven’t the slightest doubt you will, even though it stinks to high heaven. Oh, by the way. You haven’t told any of the men you’ve refused to fly more missions, have you?’
‘No, sir,’ Yossarian answered promptly.
Colonel Korn nodded approvingly. ‘That’s good. I like the way you lie. You’ll go far in this world if you ever acquire some decent ambition.’
‘Doesn’t he know there’s a war going on?’ Colonel Cathcart yelled out suddenly, and blew with vigorous disbelief into the open end of his cigarette holder.
‘I’m quite sure he does,’ Colonel Korn replied acidly, ‘since you brought that identical point to his attention just a moment ago.’ Colonel Korn frowned wearily for Yossarian’s benefit, his eyes twinkling swarthily with sly and daring scorn. Gripping the edge of Colonel Cathcart’s desk with both hands, he lifted his flaccid haunches far back on the corner to sit with both short legs dangling freely. His shoes kicked lightly against the yellow oak wood, his sludge-brown socks, garterless, collapsed in sagging circles below ankles that were surprisingly small and white. ‘You know, Yossarian,’ he mused affably in a manner of casual reflection that seemed both derisive and sincere, ‘I really do admire you a bit. You’re an intelligent person of great moral character who has taken a very courageous stand. I’m an intelligent person with no moral character at all, so I’m in an ideal position to appreciate it.’
‘These are very critical times,’ Colonel Cathcart asserted petulantly from a far corner of the office, paying no attention to Colonel Korn.
‘Very critical times indeed,’ Colonel Korn agreed with a placid nod. ‘We’ve just had a change of command above, and we can’t afford a situation that might put us in a bad light with either General Scheisskopf or General Peckem. Isn’t that what you mean, Colonel?’
‘Hasn’t he got any patriotism?’
‘Won’t you fight for your country?’ Colonel Korn demanded, emulating Colonel Cathcart’s harsh, self-righteous tone. ‘Won’t you give up your life for Colonel Cathcart and me?’
Yossarian tensed with alert astonishment when he heard Colonel Korn’s concluding words. ‘What’s
that?’ he exclaimed. ‘What have you and Colonel Cathcart got to do with my country? You’re not the same.’
‘How can you separate us?’ Colonel Korn inquired with ironical tranquillity.
‘That’s right,’ Colonel Cathcart cried emphatically. ‘You’re either for us or against us. There’s no two ways about it.’
‘I’m afraid he’s got you,’ added Colonel Korn. ‘You’re either for us or against your country. It’s as simple as that.’
‘Oh, no, Colonel. I don’t buy that.’
Colonel Korn was unrufed. ‘Neither do I, frankly, but everyone else will. So there you are.’
‘You’re a disgrace to your uniform!’ Colonel Cathcart declared with blustering wrath, whirling to confront Yossarian for the first time. ‘I’d like to know how you ever got to be a captain, anyway.’ ‘You promoted him,’ Colonel Korn reminded sweetly, stifling a snicker. ‘Don’t you remember?’ ‘Well, I never should have done it.’
‘I told you not to do it,’ Colonel Korn said. ‘But you just wouldn’t listen to me.’
‘Gee whiz, will you stop rubbing it in?’ Colonel Cathcart cried. He furrowed his brow and glowered at Colonel Korn through eyes narrow with suspicion, his fists clenched on his hips. ‘Say, whose side are you on, anyway?’
‘Your side, Colonel. What other side could I be on?’
‘Then stop picking on me, will you? Get off my back, will you?’ ‘I’m on your side, Colonel. I’m just loaded with patriotism.’
‘Well, just make sure you don’t forget that.’ Colonel Cathcart turned away grudgingly after another moment, incompletely reassured, and began striding the floor, his hands kneading his long cigarette holder. He jerked a thumb toward Yossarian. ‘Let’s settle with him. I know what I’d like to do with him. I’d like to take him outside and shoot him. That’s what I’d like to do with him. That’s what General Dreedle would do with him.’
‘But General Dreedle isn’t with us any more,’ said Colonel Korn, ‘so we can’t take him outside and shoot him.’ Now that his moment of tension with Colonel Cathcart had passed, Colonel Korn relaxed again and resumed kicking softly against Colonel Cathcart’s desk. He returned to Yossarian. ‘So we’re going to send you home instead. It took a bit of thinking, but we finally worked out this horrible little plan for sending you home without causing too much dissatisfaction among the friends you’ll leave behind. Doesn’t that make you happy?’
‘What kind of plan? I’m not sure I’m going to like it.’
‘I know you’re not going to like it.’ Colonel Korn laughed, locking his hands contentedly on top of his head again. ‘You’re going to loathe it. It really is odious and certainly will offend your conscience. But you’ll agree to it quickly enough. You’ll agree to it because it will send you home safe and sound in two weeks, and because you have no choice. It’s that or a court-martial. Take it or
leave it.’
Yossarian snorted. ‘Stop bluffing, Colonel. You can’t court-martial me for desertion in the face of the enemy. It would make you look bad and you probably couldn’t get a conviction.’
‘But we can court-martial you now for desertion from duty, since you went to Rome without a pass. And we could make it stick. If you think about it a minute, you’ll see that you’d leave us no alternative. We can’t simply let you keep walking around in open insubordination without punishing you. All the other men would stop flying missions, too. No, you have my word for it. We will court-martial you if you turn our deal down, even though it would raise a lot of questions and be a terrible black eye for Colonel Cathcart.’
Colonel Cathcart winced at the words ‘black eye’ and, without any apparent premeditation, hurled his slender onyx-and-ivory cigarette holder down viciously on the wooden surface on his desk. ‘Jesus Christ!’ he shouted unexpectedly. ‘I hate this goddam cigarette holder!’ The cigarette holder bounced off the desk to the wall, ricocheted across the window sill to the floor and came to a stop almost where he was standing. Colonel Cathcart stared down at it with an irascible scowl. ‘I wonder if it’s really doing me any good.’
‘It’s a feather in your cap with General Peckem, but a black eye for you with General Scheisskopf,’ Colonel Korn informed him with a mischievous look of innocence.
‘Well, which one am I supposed to please?’ ‘Both.’
‘How can I please them both? They hate each other. How am I ever going to get a feather in my cap from General Scheisskopf without getting a black eye from General Peckem?’
‘March.’
‘Yeah, march. That’s the only way to please him. March. March.’ Colonel Cathcart grimaced sullenly. ‘Some generals! They’re a disgrace to their uniforms. If people like those two can make general, I don’t see how I can miss.’
‘You’re going to go far.’ Colonel Korn assured him with a flat lack of conviction, and turned back chuckling to Yossarian, his disdainful merriment increasing at the sight of Yossarian’s unyielding expression of antagonism and distrust. ‘And there you have the crux of the situation. Colonel Cathcart wants to be a general and I want to be a colonel, and that’s why we have to send you home.’
‘Why does he want to be a general?’
‘Why? For the same reason that I want to be a colonel. What else have we got to do? Everyone teaches us to aspire to higher things. A general is higher than a colonel, and a colonel is higher than a lieutenant colonel. So we’re both aspiring. And you know, Yossarian, it’s a lucky thing for you that we are. Your timing on this is absolutely perfect, but I suppose you took that factor into account in your calculations.’
‘I haven’t been doing any calculating,’ Yossarian retorted.
‘Yes, I really do enjoy the way you lie,’ Colonel Korn answered. ‘Won’t it make you proud to have your commanding officer promoted to general – to know you served in an outfit that averaged more combat missions per person than any other? Don’t you want to earn more unit citations and more oak leaf clusters for your Air Medal? Where’s your ‘sprit de corps? Don’t you want to contribute further to this great record by flying more combat missions? It’s your last chance to answer yes.’ ‘No.’
‘In that case, you have us over a barrel -‘ said Colonel Korn without rancor. ‘He ought to be ashamed of himself!’
‘- and we have to send you home. Just do a few little things for us, and -‘ ‘What sort of things?’ Yossarian interrupted with belligerent misgiving.
‘Oh, tiny, insignificant things. Really, this is a very generous deal we’re making with you. We will issue orders returning you to the States – really, we will – and all you have to do in return is…’ ‘What? What must I do?’
Colonel Korn laughed curtly. ‘Like us.’ Yossarian blinked. ‘Like you?’
‘Like us.’ ‘Like you?’
‘That’s right,’ said Colonel Korn, nodding, gratified immeasurably by Yossarian’s guileless surprise and bewilderment. ‘Like us. Join us. Be our pal. Say nice things about us here and back in the States. Become one of the boys. Now, that isn’t asking too much, is it?’
‘You just want me to like you? Is that all?’ ‘That’s all.’
‘That’s all?’
‘Just find it in your heart to like us.’
Yossarian wanted to laugh confidently when he saw with amazement that Colonel Korn was telling the truth. ‘That isn’t going to be too easy,’ he sneered.
‘Oh, it will be a lot easier than you think,’ Colonel Korn taunted in return, undismayed by Yossarian’s barb. ‘You’ll be surprised at how easy you’ll find it to like us once you begin.’ Colonel Korn hitched up the waist of his loose, voluminous trousers. The deep black grooves isolating his square chin from his jowls were bent again in a kind of jeering and reprehensible mirth. ‘You see, Yossarian, we’re going to put you on easy street. We’re going to promote you to major and even give you another medal. Captain Flume is already working on glowing press releases describing your valor over Ferrara, your deep and abiding loyalty to your outfit and your consummate dedication to duty. Those phrases are all actual quotations, by the way. We’re going to glorify you and send you home a hero, recalled by the Pentagon for morale and public-relations purposes.
You’ll live like a millionaire. Everyone will lionize you. You’ll have parades in your honor and make speeches to raise money for war bonds. A whole new world of luxury awaits you once you become our pal. Isn’t it lovely?’
Yossarian found himself listening intently to the fascinating elucidation of details. ‘I’m not sure I want to make speeches.’
‘Then we’ll forget the speeches. The important thing is what you say to people here.’ Colonel Korn leaned forward earnestly, no longer smiling. ‘We don’t want any of the men in the group to know that we’re sending you home as a result of your refusal to fly more missions. And we don’t want General Peckem or General Scheisskopf to get wind of any friction between us, either. That’s why we’re going to become such good pals.’
‘What will I say to the men who asked me why I refused to fly more missions?’
‘Tell them you had been informed in confidence that you were being returned to the States and that you were unwilling to risk your life for another mission or two. Just a minor disagreement between pals, that’s all.’
‘Will they believe it?’
‘Of course they’ll believe it, once they see what great friends we’ve become and when they see the press releases and read the flattering things you have to say about me and Colonel Cathcart. Don’t worry about the men. They’ll be easy enough to discipline and control when you’ve gone. It’s only while you’re still here that they may prove troublesome. You know, one good apple can spoil the rest,’ Colonel Korn concluded with conscious irony. ‘You know – this would really be wonderful – you might even serve as an inspiration to them to fly more missions.’
‘Suppose I denounce you when I get back to the States?’
‘After you’ve accepted our medal and promotion and all the fanfare? No one would believe you, the Army wouldn’t let you, and why in the world should you want to? You’re going to be one of the boys, remember? You’ll enjoy a rich, rewarding, luxurious, privileged existence. You’d have to be a fool to throw it all away just for a moral principle, and you’re not a fool. Is it a deal?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘It’s that or a court-martial.’
‘That’s a pretty scummy trick I’d be playing on the men in the squadron, isn’t it?’
‘Odious,’ Colonel Korn agreed amiably, and waited, watching Yossarian patiently with a glimmer of private delight.
‘But what the hell!’ Yossarian exclaimed. ‘If they don’t want to fly more missions, let them stand up and do something about it the way I did. Right?’
‘Of course,’ said Colonel Korn.
‘There’s no reason I have to risk my life for them, is there?’ ‘Of course not.’
Yossarian arrived at his decision with a swift grin. ‘It’s a deal!’ he announced jubilantly.
‘Great,’ said Colonel Korn with somewhat less cordiality than Yossarian had expected, and he slid himself off Colonel Cathcart’s desk to stand on the floor. He tugged the folds of cloth of his pants and undershorts free from his crotch and gave Yossarian a limp hand to shake. ‘Welcome aboard.’ ‘Thanks, Colonel. I -‘
‘Call me Blackie, John. We’re pals now.’
‘Sure, Blackie. My friends call me Yo-Yo. Blackie, I -‘
‘His friends call him Yo-Yo,’ Colonel Korn sang out to Colonel Cathcart. ‘Why don’t you congratulate Yo-Yo on what a sensible move he’s making?’
‘That’s a real sensible move you’re making, Yo-Yo,’ Colonel Cathcart said, pumping Yossarian’s hand with clumsy zeal.
‘Thank you, Colonel, I -‘
‘Call him Chuck,’ said Colonel Korn.
‘Sure, call me Chuck,’ said Colonel Cathcart with a laugh that was hearty and awkward. ‘We’re all pals now.’
‘Sure, Chuck.’
‘Exit smiling,’ said Colonel Korn, his hands on both their shoulders as the three of them moved to the door.
‘Come on over for dinner with us some night, Yo-Yo,’ Colonel Cathcart invited hospitably. ‘How about tonight? In the group dining room.’
‘I’d love to, sir.’
‘Chuck,’ Colonel Korn corrected reprovingly. ‘I’m sorry, Blackie. Chuck. I can’t get used to it.’ ‘That’s all right, pal.’
‘Sure, pal.’
‘Thanks, pal.’
‘Don’t mention it, pal.’ ‘So long, pal.’
Yossarian waved goodbye fondly to his new pals and sauntered out onto the balcony corridor, almost bursting into song the instant he was alone. He was home free: he had pulled it off; his act of rebellion had succeeded; he was safe, and he had nothing to be ashamed of to anyone. He started toward the staircase with a jaunty and exhilarated air. A private in green fatigues saluted him. Yossarian returned the salute happily, staring at the private with curiosity. He looked strangely familiar. When Yossarian returned the salute, the private in green fatigues turned suddenly into Nately’s whore and lunged at him murderously with a bone-handled kitchen knife that caught him in the side below his upraised arm. Yossarian sank to the floor with a shriek, shutting his eyes in
overwhelming terror as he saw the girl lift the knife to strike at him again. He was already unconscious when Colonel Korn and Colonel Cathcart dashed out of the office and saved his life by frightening her away.
SNOWDEN
‘Cut,’ said a doctor. ‘You cut,’ said another.
‘No cuts,’ said Yossarian with a thick, unwieldy tongue.
‘Now look who’s butting in,’ complained one of the doctors. ‘Another county heard from. Are we going to operate or aren’t we?’
‘He doesn’t need an operation,’ complained the other. ‘It’s a small wound. All we have to do is stop the bleeding, clean it out and put a few stitches in.’
‘But I’ve never had a chance to operate before. Which one is the scalpel? Is this one the scalpel?’ ‘No, the other one is the scalpel. Well, go ahead and cut already if you’re going to. Make the incision.’
‘Like this?’
‘Not there, you dope!’
‘No incisions,’ Yossarian said, perceiving through the lifting fog of insensibility that the two strangers were ready to begin cutting him.
‘Another county heard from,’ complained the first doctor sarcastically. ‘Is he going to keep talking that way while I operate on him?’
‘You can’t operate on him until I admit him,’ said a clerk.
‘You can’t admit him until I clear him,’ said a fat, gruff colonel with a mustache and an enormous pink face that pressed down very close to Yossarian and radiated scorching heat like the bottom of a huge frying pan. ‘Where were you born?’
The fat, gruff colonel reminded Yossarian of the fat, gruff colonel who had interrogated the chaplain and found him guilty. Yossarian stared up at him through a glassy film. The cloying scents of formaldehyde and alcohol sweetened the air.
‘On a battlefield,’ he answered.
‘No, no. In what state were you born?’ ‘In a state of innocence.’
‘No, no, you don’t understand.’
‘Let me handle him,’ urged a hatchet-faced man with sunken acrimonious eyes and a thin, malevolent mouth. ‘Are you a smart aleck or something?’ he asked Yossarian.
‘He’s delirious,’ one of the doctors said. ‘Why don’t you let us take him back inside and treat him?’ ‘Leave him right here if he’s delirious. He might say something incriminating.’
‘But he’s still bleeding profusely. Can’t you see? He might even die.’
‘Good for him!’
‘It would serve the finky bastard right,’ said the fat, gruff colonel. ‘All right, John, let’s speak out. We want to get to the truth.’
‘Everyone calls me Yo-Yo.’
‘We want you to co-operate with us, Yo-Yo. We’re your friends and we want you to trust us. We’re here to help you. We’re not going to hurt you.’
‘Let’s jab our thumbs down inside his wound and gouge it,’ suggested the hatchet-faced man. Yossarian let his eyes fall closed and hoped they would think he was unconscious.
‘He’s fainted,’ he heard a doctor say. ‘Can’t we treat him now before it’s too late? He really might die.’
‘All right, take him. I hope the bastard does die.’ ‘You can’t treat him until I admit him,’ the clerk said.
Yossarian played dead with his eyes shut while the clerk admitted him by shuffling some papers, and then he was rolled away slowly into a stuffy, dark room with searing spotlights overhead in which the cloying smell of formaldehyde and sweet alcohol was even stronger. The pleasant, permeating stink was intoxicating. He smelled ether too and heard glass tinkling. He listened with secret, egotistical mirth to the husky breathing of the two doctors. It delighted him that they thought he was unconscious and did not know he was listening. It all seemed very silly to him until one of the doctors said,
‘Well, do you think we should save his life? They might be sore at us if we do.’
‘Let’s operate,’ said the other doctor. ‘Let’s cut him open and get to the inside of things once and for all. He keeps complaining about his liver. His liver looks pretty small on this X ray.’
‘That’s his pancreas, you dope. This is his liver.’
‘No it isn’t. That’s his heart. I’ll bet you a nickel this is his liver. I’m going to operate and find out. Should I wash my hands first?’
‘No operations,’ Yossarian said, opening his eyes and trying to sit up.
‘Another county heard from,’ scoffed one of the doctors indignantly. ‘Can’t we make him shut up?’ ‘We could give him a total. The ether’s right here.’
‘No totals,’ said Yossarian.
‘Another county heard from,’ said a doctor.
‘Let’s give him a total and knock him out. Then we can do what we want with him.’
They gave Yossarian total anesthesia and knocked him out. He woke up thirsty in a private room, drowning in ether fumes. Colonel Korn was there at his bedside, waiting calmly in a chair in his baggy, wool, olive-drab shirt and trousers. A bland, phlegmatic smile hung on his brown face with its heavy-bearded cheeks, and he was buffing the facets of his bald head gently with the palms of both hands. He bent forward chuckling when Yossarian awoke, and assured him in the friendliest
tones that the deal they had made was still on if Yossarian didn’t die. Yossarian vomited, and Colonel Korn shot to his feet at the first cough and fled in disgust, so it seemed indeed that there was a silver lining to every cloud, Yossarian reflected, as he drifted back into a suffocating daze. A hand with sharp fingers shook him awake roughly. He turned and opened his eyes and saw a strange man with a mean face who curled his lip at him in a spiteful scowl and bragged,
‘We’ve got your pal, buddy. We’ve got your pal.’ Yossarian turned cold and faint and broke into a sweat.
‘Who’s my pal?’ he asked when he saw the chaplain sitting where Colonel Korn had been sitting. ‘Maybe I’m your pal,’ the chaplain answered.
But Yossarian couldn’t hear him and closed his eyes. Someone gave him water to sip and tiptoed away. He slept and woke up feeling great until he turned his head to smile at the chaplain and saw Aarfy there instead. Yossarian moaned instinctively and screwed his face up with excruciating irritability when Aarfy chortled and asked how he was feeling. Aarfy looked puzzled when Yossarian inquired why he was not in jail. Yossarian shut his eyes to make him go away. When he opened them, Aarfy was gone and the chaplain was there. Yossarian broke into laughter when he spied the chaplain’s cheerful grin and asked him what in the hell he was so happy about.
‘I’m happy about you,’ the chaplain replied with excited candor and joy. ‘I heard at Group that you were very seriously injured and that you would have to be sent home if you lived. Colonel Korn said your condition was critical. But I’ve just learned from one of the doctors that your wound is really a very slight one and that you’ll probably be able to leave in a day or two. You’re in no danger. It isn’t bad at all.’
Yossarian listened to the chaplain’s news with enormous relief. ‘That’s good.’
‘Yes,’ said the chaplain, a pink flush of impish pleasure creeping into his cheeks. ‘Yes, that is good.’ Yossarian laughed, recalling his first conversation with the chaplain. ‘You know, the first time I met you was in the hospital. And now I’m in the hospital again. Just about the only time I see you lately is in the hospital. Where’ve you been keeping yourself?’
The chaplain shrugged. ‘I’ve been praying a lot,’ he confessed. ‘I try to stay in my tent as much as I can, and I pray every time Sergeant Whitcomb leaves the area, so that he won’t catch me.’
‘Does it do any good?’
