Catch-22 (52 page)

   ‘Si, Marchese,’ said Luigi. ‘The profit in illegal tobacco is
so high that the smuggling is almost impossible to control.’

   ‘Is there really that much profit in illegal tobacco?’ Milo
inquired with keen interest, his rust-colored eyebrows arching avidly and his
nostrils sniffing.

   ‘ Milo,’ Yossarian called to him. ‘Pay attention to me, will
you?’

   ‘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 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
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 before the second woman reached the curb. The nasty,
small, gloating smile with which she glanced back at the laboring old woman was
both wicked and apprehensive. Yossarian knew he could help the troubled old
woman if she would only cry out, knew he could spring forward and capture the
sturdy first woman and hold her for the mob of policemen nearby if the second
woman would only give him license with a shriek of distress. But the old woman
passed by without even seeing him, mumbling in terrible, tragic vexation, and soon
the first woman had vanished into the deepening layers of darkness and the old
woman was left standing helplessly in the center of the thoroughfare, dazed,
uncertain which way to proceed, alone. Yossarian tore his eyes from her and
hurried away in shame because he had done nothing to assist her. He darted
furtive, guilty glances back as he fled in defeat, afraid the old woman might
now start following him, and he welcomed the concealing shelter of the
drizzling, drifting, lightless, nearly opaque gloom. Mobs… mobs of
policemen—everything but England was in the hands of mobs, mobs, mobs. Mobs
with clubs were in control everywhere.