“Catch-22” By Joseph - Khamkoo

“Catch-22” By Joseph Heller 44
dead. They had hated him before he came, hated him while he was there, hated him
after he left, carried their hatred for him away malignantly like some pampered treasure
after they separated from each other and went to their solitude.
Yossarian had done his best to warn him the night before. ‘You haven’t got a chance,
kid,’ he told him glumly. ‘They hate Jews.’
‘But I’m not Jewish,’ answered Clevinger.
‘It will make no difference,’ Yossarian promised, and Yossarian was right. ‘They’re
after everybody.’ Clevinger recoiled from their hatred as though from a blinding light.
These three men who hated him spoke his language and wore his uniform, but he saw
their loveless faces set immutably into cramped, mean lines of hostility and understood
instantly that nowhere in the world, not in all the fascist tanks or planes or submarines,
not in the bunkers behind the machine guns or mortars or behind the blowing flame
throwers, not even among all the expert gunners of the crack Hermann Goering
Antiaircraft Division or among the grisly connivers in all the beer halls in Munich and
everywhere else, were there men who hated him more.
Major Major Major Major
Major Major Major Major had had a difficult time from the start.
Like Minniver Cheevy, he had been born too late—exactly thirty-six hours too late for
the physical well-being of his mother, a gentle, ailing woman who, after a full day and a
half’s agony in the rigors of childbirth, was depleted of all resolve to pursue further the
argument over the new child’s name. In the hospital corridor, her husband moved ahead
with the unsmiling determination of someone who knew what he was about. Major
Major’s father was a towering, gaunt man in heavy shoes and a black woolen suit. He
filled out the birth certificate without faltering, betraying no emotion at all as he handed
the completed form to the floor nurse. The nurse took it from him without comment and
padded out of sight. He watched her go, wondering what she had on underneath.
Back in the ward, he found his wife lying vanquished beneath the blankets like a
desiccated old vegetable, wrinkled, dry and white, her enfeebled tissues absolutely still.
Her bed was at the very end of the ward, near a cracked window thickened with grime.
Rain splashed from a moiling sky and the day was dreary and cold. In other parts of the
hospital chalky people with aged, blue lips were dying on time. The man stood erect
beside the bed and gazed down at the woman a long time.
‘I have named the boy Caleb,’ he announced to her finally in a soft voice. ‘In
accordance with your wishes.’ The woman made no answer, and slowly the man smiled.
He had planned it all perfectly, for his wife was asleep and would never know that he
had lied to her as she lay on her sickbed in the poor ward of the county hospital.
From this meager beginning had sprung the ineffectual squadron commander who
was now spending the better part of each working day in Pianosa forging Washington
Irving’s name to official documents. Major Major forged diligently with his left hand to
elude identification, insulated against intrusion by his own undesired authority and
camouflaged in his false mustache and dark glasses as an additional safeguard against
detection by anyone chancing to peer in through the dowdy celluloid window from which
some thief had carved out a slice. In between these two low points of his birth and his
success lay thirty-one dismal years of loneliness and frustration.
Major Major had been born too late and too mediocre. Some men are born mediocre,
some men achieve mediocrity, and some men have mediocrity thrust upon them. With
Major Major it had been all three. Even among men lacking all distinction he inevitably
stood out as a man lacking more distinction than all the rest, and people who met him
were always impressed by how unimpressive he was.
Major Major had three strikes on him from the beginning—his mother, his father and
Henry Fonda, to whom he bore a sickly resemblance almost from the moment of his
birth. Long before he even suspected who Henry Fonda was, he found himself the
subject of unflattering comparisons everywhere he went. Total strangers saw fit to