“Catch-22” By Joseph - Khamkoo

“Catch-22” By Joseph Heller 115
perhaps there were not really three Yossarians but only two Yossarians, or maybe even
only one Yossarian—but that really made no difference! The colonel was still in grave
peril. Intuition warned him that he was drawing close to some immense and inscrutable
cosmic climax, and his broad, meaty, towering frame tingled from head to toe at the
thought that Yossarian, whoever he would eventually turn out to be, was destined to
serve as his nemesis.
Colonel Cathcart was not superstitious, but he did believe in omens, and he sat right
back down behind his desk and made a cryptic notation on his memorandum pad to
look into the whole suspicious business of the Yossarians right away. He wrote his
reminder to himself in a heavy and decisive hand, amplifying it sharply with a series of
coded punctuation marks and underlining the whole message twice, so that it read:
Yossarian!!! (?)!
The colonel sat back when he had finished and was extremely pleased with himself for
the prompt action he had just taken to meet this sinister crisis. Yossarian—the very sight
of the name made him shudder. There were so many esses in it. It just had to be
subversive. It was like the word subversive itself. It was like seditious and insidious too,
and like socialist, suspicious, fascist and Communist. It was an odious, alien, distasteful
name, that just did not inspire confidence. It was not at all like such clean, crisp, honest,
American names as Cathcart, Peckem and Dreedle.
Colonel Cathcart rose slowly and began drifting about his office again. Almost
unconsciously, he picked up a plum tomato from the top of one of the bushels and took
a voracious bite. He made a wry face at once and threw the rest of the plum tomato into
his waste-basket. The colonel did not like plum tomatoes, not even when they were his
own, and these were not even his own. These had been purchased in different market
places all over Pianosa by Colonel Korn under various identities, moved up to the
colonel’s farmhouse in the hills in the dead of night, and transported down to Group
Headquarters the next morning for sale to Milo, who paid Colonel Cathcart and Colonel
Korn premium prices for them. Colonel Cathcart often wondered if what they were doing
with the plum tomatoes was legal, but Colonel Korn said it was, and he tried not to
brood about it too often. He had no way of knowing whether or not the house in the hills
was legal, either, since Colonel Korn had made all the arrangements. Colonel Cathcart
did not know if he owned the house or rented it, from whom he had acquired it or how
much, if anything, it was costing. Colonel Korn was the lawyer, and if Colonel Korn
assured him that fraud, extortion, currency manipulation, embezzlement, income tax
evasion and black-market speculations were legal, Colonel Cathcart was in no position
to disagree with him.
All Colonel Cathcart knew about his house in the hills was that he had such a house
and hated it. He was never so bored as when spending there the two or three days
every other week necessary to sustain the illusion that his damp and drafty stone
farmhouse in the hills was a golden palace of carnal delights. Officers’ clubs everywhere
pulsated with blurred but knowing accounts of lavish, hushed-up drinking and sex orgies
there and of secret, intimate nights of ecstasy with the most beautiful, the most
tantalizing, the most readily aroused and most easily satisfied Italian courtesans, film
actresses, models and countesses. No such private nights of ecstasy or hushed-up
drinking and sex orgies ever occurred. They might have occurred if either General
Dreedle or General Peckem had once evinced an interest in taking part in orgies with
him, but neither ever did, and the colonel was certainly not going to waste his time and
energy making love to beautiful women unless there was something in it for him.
The colonel dreaded his dank lonely nights at his farmhouse and the dull, uneventful
days. He had much more fun back at Group, browbeating everyone he wasn’t afraid of.
However, as Colonel Korn kept reminding him, there was not much glamour in having a
farmhouse in the hills if he never used it. He drove off to his farmhouse each time in a
mood of self-pity. He carried a shotgun in his jeep and spent the monotonous hours
there shooting it at birds and at the plum tomatoes that did grow there in untended rows
and were too much trouble to harvest.