“Catch-22” By Joseph - Khamkoo

“Catch-22” By Joseph Heller 226
‘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