“Catch-22” By Joseph - Khamkoo

“Catch-22” By Joseph Heller 125
‘Look, I might keep interested in this if you stop shouting it all over the island and if you
stick to killing Colonel Cathcart. But if you’re going to turn this into a blood bath, you can
forget about me.’
‘All right, all right,’ Dobbs sought to placate him. ‘Just Colonel Cathcart. Should I do it?
Tell me to go ahead.’ Yossarian shook his head. ‘I don’t think I could tell you to go
ahead.’ Dobbs was frantic. ‘I’m willing to compromise,’ he pleaded vehemently. ‘You
don’t have to tell me to go ahead. Just tell me it’s a good idea. Okay? Is it a good idea?’
Yossarian still shook his head. ‘It would have been a great idea if you had gone ahead
and done it without even speaking to me. Now it’s too late. I don’t think I can tell you
anything. Give me some more time. I might change my mind.’
‘Then it will be too late.’ Yossarian kept shaking his head. Dobbs was disappointed.
He sat for a moment with a hangdog look, then spurted to his feet suddenly and
stamped away to have another impetuous crack at persuading Doc Daneeka to ground
him, knocking over Yossarian’s washstand with his hip when he lurched around and
tripping over the fuel line of the stove Orr was still constructing. Doc Daneeka withstood
Dobbs’s blustering and gesticulating attack with a series of impatient nods and sent him
to the medical tent to describe his symptoms to Gus and Wes, who painted his gums
purple with gentian-violet solution the moment he started to talk. They painted his toes
purple, too, and forced a laxative down his throat when he opened his mouth again to
complain, and then they sent him away.
Dobbs was in even worse shape than Hungry Joe, who could at least fly missions
when he was not having nightmares. Dobbs was almost as bad as Orr, who seemed
happy as an undersized, grinning lark with his deranged and galvanic giggle and
shivering warped buck teeth and who was sent along for a rest leave with Milo and
Yossarian on the trip to Cairo for eggs when Milo bought cotton instead and took off at
dawn for Istanbul with his plane packed to the gun turrets with exotic spiders and
unripened red bananas. Orr was one of the homeliest freaks Yossarian had ever
encountered, and one of the most attractive. He had a raw bulgy face, with hazel eyes
squeezing from their sockets like matching brown halves of marbles and thick, wavy
particolored hair sloping up to a peak on the top of his head like a pomaded pup tent.
Orr was knocked down into the water or had an engine shot out almost every time he
went up, and he began jerking on Yossarian’s arm like a wild man after they had taken
off for Naples and come down in Sicily to find the scheming, cigar-smoking, ten-year-old
pimp with the two twelve-year-old virgin sisters waiting for them in town in front of the
hotel in which there was room for only Milo. Yossarian pulled back from Orr adamantly,
gazing with some concern and bewilderment at Mt. Etna instead of Mt. Vesuvius and
wondering what they were doing in Sicily instead of Naples as Orr kept entreating him in
a tittering, stuttering, concupiscent turmoil to go along with him behind the scheming
ten-year-old pimp to his two twelve-year-old virgin sisters who were not really virgins
and not really sisters and who were really only twenty-eight.
‘Go with him,’ Milo instructed Yossarian laconically. ‘Remember your mission.’
‘All right,’ Yossarian yielded with a sigh, remembering his mission. ‘But at least let me
try to find a hotel room first so I can get a good night’s sleep afterward.’
‘You’ll get a good night’s sleep with the girls,’ Milo replied with the same air of intrigue.
‘Remember your mission.’ But they got no sleep at all, for Yossarian and Orr found
themselves jammed into the same double bed with the two twelve –year-old twentyeight-year-old
prostitutes, who turned out to be oily and obese and who kept waking
them up all night long to ask them to switch partners. Yossarian’s perceptions were
soon so fuzzy that he paid no notice to the beige turban the fat one crowding into him
kept wearing until late the next morning when the scheming ten-year-old pimp with the
Cuban panatella snatched it off in public in a bestial caprice that exposed in the brilliant
Sicilian daylight her shocking, misshapen and denudate skull. Vengeful neighbors had
shaved her hair to the gleaming bone because she had slept with Germans. The girl
screeched in feminine outrage and waddled comically after the scheming ten-year-old
pimp, her grisly, bleak, violated scalp slithering up and down ludicrously around the