“Catch-22” By Joseph - Khamkoo

“Catch-22” By Joseph Heller 222
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