“Catch-22” By Joseph - Khamkoo

“Catch-22” By Joseph Heller 228
corner lamp post had died, spilling gloom over half the street, throwing everything visible
off balance. On the other side of the intersection, a man was beating a dog with a stick
like the man who was beating the horse with a whip in Raskolnikov’s dream. Yossarian
strained helplessly not to see or hear. The dog whimpered and squealed in brute,
dumbfounded hysteria at the end of an old Manila rope and groveled and crawled on its
belly without resisting, but the man beat it and beat it anyway with his heavy, flat stick. A
small crowd watched. A squat woman stepped out and asked him please to stop. ‘Mind
your own business,’ the man barked gruffly, lifting his stick as though he might beat her
too, and the woman retreated sheepishly with an abject and humiliated air. Yossarian
quickened his pace to get away, almost ran. The night was filled with horrors, and he
thought he knew how Christ must have felt as he walked through the world, like a
psychiatrist through a ward full of nuts, like a victim through a prison full of thieves. What
a welcome sight a leper must have been! At the next corner a man was beating a small
boy brutally in the midst of an immobile crowd of adult spectators who made no effort to
intervene. Yossarian recoiled with sickening recognition. He was certain he had
witnessed that same horrible scene sometime before. Déjà vu? The
sinister coincidence shook him and filled him with doubt and dread. It was the same
scene he had witnessed a block before, although everything in it seemed quite different.
What in the world was happening? Would a squat woman step out and ask the man to
please stop? Would he raise his hand to strike her and would she retreat? Nobody
moved. The child cried steadily as though in drugged misery. The man kept knocking
him down with hard, resounding open-palm blows to the head, then jerking him up to his
feet in order to knock him down again. No one in the sullen, cowering crowd seemed to
care enough about the stunned and beaten boy to interfere. The child was no more than
nine. One drab woman was weeping silently into a dirty dish towel. The boy was
emaciated and needed a haircut. Bright-red blood was streaming from both ears.
Yossarian crossed quickly to the other side of the immense avenue to escape the
nauseating sight and found himself walking on human teeth lying on the drenched,
glistening pavement near splotches of blood kept sticky by the pelting raindrops poking
each one like sharp fingernails. Molars and broken incisors lay scattered everywhere.
He circled on tiptoe the grotesque debris and came near a doorway containing a crying
soldier holding a saturated handkerchief to his mouth, supported as he sagged by two
other soldiers waiting in grave impatience for the military ambulance that finally came
clanging up with amber fog lights on and passed them by for an altercation on the next
block between a civilian Italian with books and a slew of civilian policemen with armlocks
and clubs. The screaming, struggling civilian was a dark man with a face white as flour
from fear. His eyes were pulsating in hectic desperation, flapping like bat’s wings, as the
many tall policemen seized him by the arms and legs and lifted him up. His books were
spilled on the ground.
‘Help!’ he shrieked shrilly in a voice strangling in its own emotion, as the policemen
carried him to the open doors in the rear of the ambulance and threw him inside. ‘Police!
Help! Police!’ The doors were shut and bolted, and the ambulance raced away. There
was a humorless irony in the ludicrous panic of the man screaming for help to the police
while policemen were all around him. Yossarian smiled wryly at the futile and ridiculous
cry for aid, then saw with a start that the words were ambiguous, realized with alarm that
they were not, perhaps, intended as a call for police but as a heroic warning from the
grave by a doomed friend to everyone who was not a policeman with a club and a gun
and a mob of other policemen with clubs and guns to back him up. ‘Help! Police!’ the
man had cried, and he could have been shouting of danger. Yossarian responded to the
thought by slipping away stealthily from the police and almost tripped over the feet of a
burly woman of forty hastening across the intersection guiltily, darting furtive, vindictive
glances behind her toward a woman of eighty with thick, bandaged ankles doddering
after her in a losing pursuit. The old woman was gasping for breath as she minced along
and muttering to herself in distracted agitation. There was no mistaking the nature of the
scene; it was a chase. The triumphant first woman was halfway across the wide avenue