“Catch-22” By Joseph - Khamkoo

“Catch-22” By Joseph Heller 199
again, but Nately had dropped out of sight with a groan and lay curled up on the ground
with his head buried in both hands and blood streaming between his fingers. Yossarian
whirled and plunged ahead up the path without looking back.
Soon he saw the machine gun. Two figures leaped up in silhouette when they heard
him and fled into the night with taunting laughter before he could get there. He was too
late. Their footsteps receded, leaving the circle of sandbags empty and silent in the crisp
and windless moonlight. He looked about dejectedly. Jeering laughter came to him
again, from a distance. A twig snapped nearby. Yossarian dropped to his knees with a
cold thrill of elation and aimed. He heard a stealthy rustle of leaves on the other side of
the sandbags and fired two quick rounds. Someone fired back at him once, and he
recognized the shot.
‘ Dunbar? he called.
‘Yossarian?’ The two men left their hiding places and walked forward to meet in the
clearing with weary disappointment, their guns down. They were both shivering slightly
from the frosty air and wheezing from the labor of their uphill rush.
‘The bastards,’ said Yossarian. ‘They got away.’
‘They took ten years off my life,’ Dunbar exclaimed. ‘I thought that son of a bitch Milo
was bombing us again. I’ve never been so scared. I wish I knew who the bastards were.
‘One was Sergeant Knight.’
‘Let’s go kill him.’ Dunbar’s teeth were chattering. ‘He had no right to scare us that
way.’ Yossarian no longer wanted to kill anyone. ‘Let’s help Nately first. I think I hurt him
at the bottom of the hill.’ But there was no sign of Nately along the path, even though
Yossarian located the right spot by the blood on the stones. Nately was not in his tent
either, and they did not catch up with him until the next morning when they checked into
the hospital as patients after learning he had checked in with a broken nose the night
before. Nately beamed in frightened surprise as they padded into the ward in their
slippers and robes behind Nurse Cramer and were assigned to their beds. Nately’s nose
was in a bulky cast, and he had two black eyes. He kept blushing giddily in shy
embarrassment and saying he was sorry when Yossarian came over to apologize for
hitting him. Yossarian felt terrible; he could hardly bear to look at Nately’s battered
countenance, even though the sight was so comical he was tempted to guffaw. Dunbar
was disgusted by their sentimentality, and all three were relieved when Hungry Joe
came barging in unexpectedly with his intricate black camera and trumped-up symptoms
of appendicitis to be near enough to Yossarian to take pictures of him feeling up Nurse
Duckett. Like Yossarian, he was soon disappointed. Nurse Duckett had decided to
marry a doctor—any doctor, because they all did so well in business—and would not
take chances in the vicinity of the man who might someday be her husband. Hungry Joe
was irate and inconsolable until—of all people—the chaplain was led in wearing a
maroon corduroy bathrobe, shining like a skinny lighthouse with a radiant grin of selfsatisfaction
too tremendous to be concealed. The chaplain had entered the hospital with
a pain in his heart that the doctors thought was gas in his stomach and with an
advanced case of Wisconsin shingles.
‘What in the world are Wisconsin shingles?’ asked Yossarian.
‘That’s just what the doctors wanted to know!’ blurted out the chaplain proudly, and
burst into laughter. No one had ever seen him so waggish, or so happy. ‘There’s no
such thing as Wisconsin shingles. Don’t you understand? I lied. I made a deal with the
doctors. I promised that I would let them know when my Wisconsin shingles went away
if they would promise not to do anything to cure them. I never told a lie before. Isn’t it
wonderful?’ The chaplain had sinned, and it was good. Common sense told him that
telling lies and defecting from duty were sins. On the other hand, everyone knew that sin
was evil, and that no good could come from evil. But he did feel good; he felt positively
marvelous. Consequently, it followed logically that telling lies and defecting from duty
could not be sins. The chaplain had mastered, in a moment of divine intuition, the handy
technique of protective rationalization, and he was exhilarated by his discovery. It was
miraculous. It was almost no trick at all, he saw, to turn vice into virtue and slander into