“Catch-22” By Joseph - Khamkoo

“Catch-22” By Joseph Heller 227
straight-and-narrow paths were crooked paths? How many best families were worst
families and how many good people were bad people? When you added them all up
and then subtracted, you might be left with only the children, and perhaps with Albert
Einstein and an old violinist or sculptor somewhere. Yossarian walked in lonely torture,
feeling estranged, and could not wipe from his mind the excruciating image of the
barefoot boy with sickly cheeks until he turned the corner into the avenue finally and
came upon an Allied soldier having convulsions on the ground, a young lieutenant with a
small, pale, boyish face. Six other soldiers from different countries wrestled with different
parts of him, striving to help him and hold him still. He yelped and groaned unintelligibly
through clenched teeth, his eyes rolled up into his head. ‘Don’t let him bite his tongue
off,’ a short sergeant near Yossarian advised shrewdly, and a seventh man threw
himself into the fray to wrestle with the ill lieutenant’s face. All at once the wrestlers won
and turned to each other undecidedly, for now that they held the young lieutenant rigid
they did not know what to do with him. A quiver of moronic panic spread from one
straining brute face to another. ‘Why don’t you lift him up and put him on the hood of that
car?’ a corporal standing in back of Yossarian drawled. That seemed to make sense, so
the seven men lifted the young lieutenant up and stretched him out carefully on the hood
of a parked car, still pinning each struggling part of him down. Once they had him
stretched out on the hood of the parked car, they stared at each other uneasily again,
for they had no idea what to do with him next. ‘Why don’t you lift him up off the hood of
that car and lay him down on the ground?’ drawled the same corporal behind Yossarian.
That seemed like a good idea, too, and they began to move him back to the sidewalk,
but before they could finish, a jeep raced up with a flashing red spotlight at the side and
two military policemen in the front seat.
‘What’s going on?’ the driver yelled.
‘He’s having convulsions,’ one of the men grappling with one of the young lieutenant’s
limbs answered. ‘We’re holding him still.’
‘That’s good. He’s under arrest.’
‘What should we do with him?’
‘Keep him under arrest!’ the M.P. shouted, doubling over with raucous laughter at his
jest, and sped away in his jeep.
Yossarian recalled that he had no leave papers and moved prudently past the strange
group toward the sound of muffled voices emanating from a distance inside the murky
darkness ahead. The broad, rain-blotched boulevard was illuminated every half-block by
short, curling lampposts with eerie, shimmering glares surrounded by smoky brown mist.
From a window overhead he heard an unhappy female voice pleading, ‘Please don’t.
Please don’t.’ A despondent young woman in a black raincoat with much black hair on
her face passed with her eyes lowered. At the Ministry of Public Affairs on the next
block, a drunken lady was backed up against one of the fluted Corinthian columns by a
drunken young soldier, while three drunken comrades in arms sat watching nearby on
the steps with wine bottles standing between their legs. ‘Pleeshe don’t,’ begged the
drunken lady. ‘I want to go home now. Pleeshe don’t.’ One of the sitting men cursed
pugnaciously and hurled a wine bottle at Yossarian when he turned to look up. The
bottle shattered harmlessly far away with a brief and muted noise. Yossarian continued
walking away at the same listless, unhurried pace, hands buried in his pockets. ‘Come
on, baby,’ he heard the drunken soldier urge determinedly. ‘It’s my turn now.’
‘Pleeshe don’t,’ begged the drunken lady. ‘Pleeshe don’t.’ At the very next corner,
deep inside the dense, impenetrable shadows of a narrow, winding side street, he heard
the mysterious, unmistakable sound of someone shoveling snow. The measured,
labored, evocative scrape of iron shovel against concrete made his flesh crawl with
terror as he stepped from the curb to cross the ominous alley and hurried onward until
the haunting, incongruous noise had been left behind. Now he knew where he was:
soon, if he continued without turning, he would come to the dry fountain in the middle of
the boulevard, then to the officers’ apartment seven blocks beyond. He heard snarling,
inhuman voices cutting through the ghostly blackness in front suddenly. The bulb on the