Authors: Joseph Heller
Yossarian was warm when the cold weather
came and whale-shaped clouds blew low through a dingy, slate-gray sky, almost
without end, like the droning, dark, iron flocks of B-17 and B-24 bombers from
the long-range air bases in Italy the day of the invasion of southern France
two months earlier. Everyone in the squadron knew that Kid Sampson’s skinny
legs had washed up on the wet sand to lie there and rot like a purple twisted
wishbone. No one would go to retrieve them, not Gus or Wes or even the men in
the mortuary at the hospital; everyone made believe that Kid Sampson’s legs
were not there, that they had bobbed away south forever on the tide like all of
Clevinger and Orr. Now that bad weather had come, almost no one ever sneaked
away alone any more to peek through bushes like a pervert at the moldering
stumps.
There were no more beautiful days. There were no more easy
missions. There was stinging rain and dull, chilling fog, and the men flew at
week-long intervals, whenever the weather cleared. At night the wind moaned.
The gnarled and stunted tree trunks creaked and groaned and forced Yossarian’s
thoughts each morning, even before he was fully awake, back on Kid Sampson’s
skinny legs bloating and decaying, as systematically as a ticking clock, in the
icy rain and wet sand all through the blind, cold, gusty October nights. After
Kid Sampson’s legs, he would think of pitiful, whimpering Snowden freezing to
death in the rear section of the plane, holding his eternal, immutable secret
concealed inside his quilted, armor-plate flak suit until Yossarian had
finished sterilizing and bandaging the wrong wound on his leg, and then
spilling it out suddenly all over the floor. At night when he was trying to
sleep, Yossarian would call the roll of all the men, women and children he had
ever known who were now dead. He tried to remember all the soldiers, and he
resurrected images of all the elderly people he had known when a child—all the
aunts, uncles, neighbors, parents and grandparents, his own and everyone else’s,
and all the pathetic, deluded shopkeepers who opened their small, dusty stores
at dawn and worked in them foolishly until midnight. They were all dead, too.
The number of dead people just seemed to increase. And the Germans were still
fighting. Death was irreversible, he suspected, and he began to think he was
going to lose.
Yossarian was warm when the cold weather came because of
Orr’s marvelous stove, and he might have existed in his warm tent quite
comfortably if not for the memory of Orr, and if not for the gang of animated
roommates that came swarming inside rapaciously one day from the two full
combat crews Colonel Cathcart had requisitioned—and obtained in less than
forty-eight hours—as replacements for Kid Sampson and McWatt. Yossarian emitted
a long, loud, croaking gasp of protest when he trudged in tiredly after a
mission and found them already there.
There were four of them, and they were having a whale of a
good time as they helped each other set up their cots. They were horsing around.
The moment he saw them, Yossarian knew they were impossible. They were frisky,
eager and exuberant, and they had all been friends in the States. They were
plainly unthinkable.
They were noisy, overconfident, empty-headed kids of
twenty-one. They had gone to college and were engaged to pretty, clean girls
whose pictures were already standing on the rough cement mantelpiece of Orr’s
fireplace. They had ridden in speedboats and played tennis. They had been
horseback riding. One had once been to bed with an older woman. They knew the
same people in different parts of the country and had gone to school with each
other’s cousins. They had listened to the World Series and really cared who won
football games. They were obtuse; their morale was good. They were glad that
the war had lasted long enough for them to find out what combat was really
like. They were halfway through unpacking when Yossarian threw them out.
They were plainly out of the question, Yossarian explained
adamantly to Sergeant Towser, whose sallow equine face was despondent as he
informed Yossarian that the new officers would have to be admitted. Sergeant
Towser was not permitted to requisition another six-man tent from Group while
Yossarian was living in one alone.
‘I’m not living in this one alone,’ Yossarian said with a
sulk. ‘I’ve got a dead man in here with me. His name is Mudd.’
‘Please, sir,’ begged Sergeant Towser, sighing wearily, with
a sidelong glance at the four baffled new officers listening in mystified
silence just outside the entrance. ‘Mudd was killed on the mission to Orvieto.
You know that. He was flying right beside you.’
‘Then why don’t you move his things out?’
‘Because he never even got here. Captain, please don’t bring
that up again. You can move in with Lieutenant Nately if you like. I’ll even
send some men from the orderly room to transfer your belongings.’ But to
abandon Orr’s tent would be to abandon Orr, who would have been spurned and
humiliated clannishly by these four simple-minded officers waiting to move in.
It did not seem just that these boisterous, immature young men should show up
after all the work was done and be allowed to take possession of the most
desirable tent on the island. But that was the law, Sergeant Towser explained,
and all Yossarian could do was glare at them in baleful apology as he made room
for them and volunteer helpful penitent hints as they moved inside his privacy
and made themselves at home.
They were the most depressing group of people Yossarian had
ever been with. They were always in high spirits. They laughed at everything.
They called him ‘Yo-Yo’ jocularly and came in tipsy late at night and woke him
up with their clumsy, bumping, giggling efforts to be quiet, then bombarded him
with asinine shouts of hilarious good-fellowship when he sat up cursing to
complain. He wanted to massacre them each time they did. They reminded him of
Donald Duck’s nephews. They were afraid of Yossarian and persecuted him
incessantly with nagging generosity and with their exasperating insistence on
doing small favors for him. They were reckless, puerile, congenial, naive,
presumptuous, deferential and rambunctious. They were dumb; they had no
complaints. They admired Colonel Cathcart and they found Colonel Korn witty.
They were afraid of Yossarian, but they were not the least bit afraid of
Colonel Cathcart’s seventy missions. They were four clean-cut kids who were
having lots of fun, and they were driving Yossarian nuts. He could not make
them understand that he was a crotchety old fogey of twenty-eight, that he
belonged to another generation, another era, another world, that having a good
time bored him and was not worth the effort, and that they bored him, too. He
could not make them shut up; they were worse than women. They had not brains enough
to be introverted and repressed.
Cronies of theirs in other squadrons began dropping in
unashamedly and using the tent as a hangout. There was often not room enough
for him. Worst of all, he could no longer bring Nurse Duckett there to lie down
with her. And now that foul weather had come, he had no place else! This was a
calamity he had not foreseen, and he wanted to bust his roommates’ heads open
with his fists or pick them up, each in turn, by the seats of their pants and
the scruffs of their necks and pitch them out once and for all into the dank,
rubbery perennial weeds growing between his rusty soupcan urinal with nail
holes in the bottom and the knotty-pine squadron latrine that stood like a
beach locker not far away.
Instead of busting their heads open, he tramped in his
galoshes and black raincoat through the drizzling darkness to invite Chief
White Halfoat to move in with him, too, and drive the fastidious, clean-living
bastards out with his threats and swinish habits. But Chief White Halfoat felt
cold and was already making plans to move up into the hospital to die of
pneumonia. Instinct told Chief White Halfoat it was almost time. His chest
ached and he coughed chronically. Whiskey no longer warmed him. Most damning of
all, Captain Flume had moved back into his trailer. Here was an omen of
unmistakable meaning.
‘He had to move back,’ Yossarian argued in a vain effort to
cheer up the glum, barrel-chested Indian, whose well-knit sorrel-red face had
degenerated rapidly into a dilapidated, calcareous gray. ‘He’d die of exposure
if he tried to live in the woods in this weather.’
‘No, that wouldn’t drive the yellowbelly back,’ Chief White
Halfoat disagreed obstinately. He tapped his forehead with cryptic insight.
‘No, sirree. He knows something. He knows it’s time for me to die of pneumonia,
that’s what he knows. And that’s how I know it’s time.’
‘What does Doc Daneeka say?’
‘I’m not allowed to say anything,’ Doc Daneeka said
sorrowfully from his seat on his stool in the shadows of a corner, his smooth,
tapered, diminutive face turtle-green in the flickering candlelight. Everything
smelled of mildew. The bulb in the tent had blown out several days before, and
neither of the two men had been able to muster the initiative to replace it. ‘I’m
not allowed to practice medicine any more,’ Doc Daneeka added.
‘He’s dead,’ Chief White Halfoat gloated, with a horse laugh
entangled in phlegm. ‘That’s really funny.’
‘I don’t even draw my pay any more.’
‘That’s really funny,’ Chief White Halfoat repeated. ‘All
this time he’s been insulting my liver, and look what happened to him. He’s
dead. Killed by his own greed.’
‘That’s not what killed me,’ Doc Daneeka observed in a voice
that was calm and flat. ‘There’s nothing wrong with greed. It’s all that lousy
Dr. Stubbs’ fault, getting Colonel Cathcart and Colonel Korn stirred up against
flight surgeons. He’s going to give the medical profession a bad name by
standing up for principle. If he’s not careful, he’ll be black-balled by his
state medical association and kept out of the hospitals.’ Yossarian watched
Chief White Halfoat pour whiskey carefully into three empty shampoo bottles and
store them away in the musette bag he was packing.
‘Can’t you stop by my tent on your way up to the hospital and
punch one of them in the nose for me?’ he speculated aloud. ‘I’ve got four of
them, and they’re going to crowd me out of my tent altogether.’
‘You know, something like that once happened to my whole
tribe,’ Chief White Halfoat remarked in jolly appreciation, sitting back on his
cot to chuckle. ‘Why don’t you get Captain Black to kick those kids out?
Captain Black likes to kick people out.’ Yossarian grimaced sourly at the mere
mention of Captain Black, who was already bullying the new fliers each time
they stepped into his intelligence tent for maps or information. Yossarian’s
attitude toward his roommates turned merciful and protective at the mere
recollection of Captain Black. It was not their fault that they were young and
cheerful, he reminded himself as he carried the swinging beam of his flashlight
back through the darkness. He wished that he could be young and cheerful, too.
And it wasn’t their fault that they were courageous, confident and carefree. He
would just have to be patient with them until one or two were killed and the
rest wounded, and then they would all turn out okay. He vowed to be more
tolerant and benevolent, but when he ducked inside his tent with his friendlier
attitude a great blaze was roaring in the fireplace, and he gasped in horrified
amazement. Orr’s beautiful birch logs were going up in smoke! His roommates had
set fire to them! He gaped at the four insensitive overheated faces and wanted
to shout curses at them. He wanted to bang their heads together as they greeted
him with loud convivial cries and invited him generously to pull up a chair and
eat their chestnuts and roasted potatoes. What could he do with them?
And the very next morning they got rid of the dead man in his
tent! Just like that, they whisked him away! They carried his cot and all his
belongings right out into the bushes and simply dumped them there, and then
they strode back slapping their hands briskly at a job well done. Yossarian was
stunned by their overbearing vigor and zeal, by their practical, direct
efficiency. In a matter of moments they had disposed energetically of a problem
with which Yossarian and Sergeant Towser had been grappling unsuccessfully for
months. Yossarian was alarmed—they might get rid of him just as quickly, he
feared—and ran to Hungry Joe and fled with him to Rome the day before Nately’s
whore finally got a good night’s sleep and woke up in love.
He missed Nurse Duckett in Rome. There was
not much else to do after Hungry Joe left on his mail run. Yossarian missed
Nurse Duckett so much that he went searching hungrily through the streets for
Luciana, whose laugh and invisible scar he had never forgotten, or the boozy,
blowzy, bleary-eyed floozy in the overloaded white brassière and
unbuttoned orange satin blouse whose naughty salmon-colored cameo ring Aarfy
had thrown away so callously through the window of her car. How he yearned for both
girls! He looked for them in vain. He was so deeply in love with them, and he
knew he would never see either again. Despair gnawed at him. Visions beset him.
He wanted Nurse Duckett with her dress up and her slim thighs bare to the hips.
He banged a thin streetwalker with a wet cough who picked him up from an alley
between hotels, but that was no fun at all and he hastened to the enlisted
men’s apartment for the fat, friendly maid in the lime-colored panties, who was
overjoyed to see him but couldn’t arouse him. He went to bed there early and
slept alone. He woke up disappointed and banged a sassy, short, chubby girl he
found in the apartment after breakfast, but that was only a little better, and
he chased her away when he’d finished and went back to sleep. He napped till
lunch and then went shopping for presents for Nurse Duckett and a scarf for the
maid in the lime-coloured panties, who hugged him with such gargantuan
gratitude that he was soon hot for Nurse Duckett and ran looking lecherously
for Luciana again. Instead he found Aarfy, who had landed in Rome when Hungry
Joe returned with Dunbar, Nately and Dobbs, and who would not go along on the
drunken foray that night to rescue Nately’s whore from the middle-aged military
big shots holding her captive in a hotel because she would not say uncle.
‘Why should I risk getting into trouble just to help her
out?’ Aarfy demanded haughtily. ‘But don’t tell Nately I said that. Tell him I
had to keep an appointment with some very important fraternity brothers.’ The
middle-aged big shots would not let Nately’s whore leave until they made her
say uncle.
‘Say uncle,’ they said to her.
‘Uncle,’ she said.
‘No, no. Say uncle.’
‘Uncle,’ she said.
‘She still doesn’t understand.’
‘You still don’t understand, do you? We can’t really make you
say uncle unless you don’t want to say uncle. Don’t you see? Don’t say uncle
when I tell you to say uncle. Okay? Say uncle.’
‘Uncle,’ she said.
‘No, don’t say uncle. Say uncle.’ She didn’t say uncle.
‘That’s good!’
‘That’s very good.’
‘It’s a start. Now say uncle.’
‘Uncle,’ she said.
‘It’s no good.’
‘No, it’s no good that way either. She just isn’t impressed
with us. There’s just no fun making her say uncle when she doesn’t care whether
we make her say uncle or not.’
‘No, she really doesn’t care, does she? Say “foot.”
‘
‘Foot.’
‘You see? She doesn’t care about anything we do. She doesn’t
care about us. We don’t mean a thing to you, do we?’
‘Uncle,’ she said.
She didn’t care about them a bit, and it upset them terribly.
They shook her roughly each time she yawned. She did not seem to care about
anything, not even when they threatened to throw her out the window. They were
utterly demoralized men of distinction. She was bored and indifferent and
wanted very much to sleep. She had been on the job for twenty-two hours, and
she was sorry that these men had not permitted her to leave with the other two
girls with whom the orgy had begun. She wondered vaguely why they wanted her to
laugh when they laughed, and why they wanted her to enjoy it when they made
love to her. It was all very mysterious to her, and very uninteresting.
She was not sure what they wanted from her. Each time she
slumped over with her eyes closed they shook her awake and made her say ‘uncle’
again. Each time she said ‘uncle,’ they were disappointed. She wondered what
‘uncle’ meant. She sat on the sofa in a passive, phlegmatic stupor, her mouth
open and all her clothing crumpled in a corner on the floor, and wondered how much
longer they would sit around naked with her and make her say uncle in the
elegant hotel suite to which Orr’s old girl friend, giggling uncontrollably at
Yossarian’s and Dunbar’s drunken antics, guided Nately and the other members of
the motley rescue party.
Dunbar squeezed Orr’s old girl friend’s fanny gratefully and
passed her back to Yossarian, who propped her against the door jamb with both
hands on her hips and wormed himself against her lasciviously until Nately
seized him by the arm and pulled him away from her into the blue sitting room,
where Dunbar was already hurling everything in sight out the window into the
court. Dobbs was smashing furniture with an ash stand. A nude, ridiculous man
with a blushing appendectomy scar appeared in the doorway suddenly and
bellowed.
‘What’s going on here?’
‘Your toes are dirty,’ Dunbar said.
The man covered his groin with both hands and shrank from
view. Dunbar, Dobbs and Hungry Joe just kept dumping everything they could lift
out the window with great, howling whoops of happy abandon. They soon finished
with the clothing on the couches and the luggage on the floor, and they were
ransacking a cedar closet when the door to the inner room opened again and a
man who was very distinguished-looking from the neck up padded into view
imperiously on bare feet.
‘Here, you, stop that,’ he barked. ‘Just what do you men
think you’re doing?’
‘Your toes are dirty,’ Dunbar said to him.
The man covered his groin as the first one had done and
disappeared. Nately charged after him, but was blocked by the first officer,
who plodded back in holding a pillow in front of him, like a bubble dancer.
‘Hey, you men!’ he roared angrily. ‘Stop it!’
‘Stop it,’ Dunbar replied.
‘That’s what I said.’
‘That’s what I said,’ Dunbar said.
The officer stamped his foot petulantly, turning weak with
frustration. ‘Are you deliberately repeating everything I say?’
‘Are you deliberately repeating everything I say?’
‘I’ll thrash you.’ The man raised a fist.
‘I’ll thrash you,’ Dunbar warned him coldly. ‘You’re a German
spy, and I’m going to have you shot.’
‘German spy? I’m an American colonel.’
‘You don’t look like an American colonel. You look like a fat
man with a pillow in front of him. Where’s your uniform, if you’re an American
colonel?’
‘You just threw it out the window.’
‘All right, men,’ Dunbar said. ‘Lock the silly bastard up.
Take the silly bastard down to the station house and throw away the key.’ The
colonel blanched with alarm. ‘Are you all crazy? Where’s your badge? Hey, you!
Come back in here!’ But he whirled too late to stop Nately, who had glimpsed
his girl sitting on the sofa in the other room and had darted through the
doorway behind his back. The others poured through after him right into the
midst of the other naked big shots. Hungry Joe laughed hysterically when he saw
them, pointing in disbelief at one after the other and clasping his head and
sides. Two with fleshy physiques advanced truculently until they spied the look
of mean dislike and hostility on Dobbs and Dunbar and noticed that Dobbs was
still swinging like a two-handed club the wrought-iron ash stand he had used to
smash things in the sitting room. Nately was already at his girl’s side. She
stared at him without recognition for a few seconds. Then she smiled faintly
and let her head sink to his shoulder with her eyes closed. Nately was in
ecstasy; she had never smiled at him before.
‘Filpo,’ said a calm, slender, jaded-looking man who had not
even stirred from his armchair. ‘You don’t obey orders. I told you to get them
out, and you’ve gone and brought them in. Can’t you see the difference?’
‘They’ve thrown our things out the window, General.’
‘Good for them. Our uniforms too? That was clever. We’ll
never be able to convince anyone we’re superior without our uniforms.’
‘Let’s get their names, Lou, and—’
‘Oh, Ned, relax,’ said the slender man with practiced
weariness. ‘You may be pretty good at moving armored divisions into action, but
you’re almost useless in a social situation. Sooner or later we’ll get our
uniforms back, and then we’ll be their superiors again. Did they really throw
our uniforms out? That was a splendid tactic.’
‘They threw everything out.’
‘The ones in the closet, too?’
‘They threw the closet out, General. That was that crash we
heard when we thought they were coming in to kill us.’
‘And I’ll throw you out next,’ Dunbar threatened.
The general paled slightly. ‘What the devil is he so mad
about?’ he asked Yossarian.
‘He means it, too,’ Yossarian said. ‘You’d better let the
girl leave.’
‘Lord, take her,’ exclaimed the general with relief. ‘All
she’s done is make us feel insecure. At least she might have disliked or
resented us for the hundred dollars we paid her. But she wouldn’t even do that.
Your handsome young friend there seems quite attached to her. Notice the way he
lets his fingers linger on the inside of her thighs as he pretends to roll up
her stockings.’ Nately, caught in the act, blushed guiltily and moved more quickly
through the steps of dressing her. She was sound asleep and breathed so
regularly that she seemed to be snoring softly.
‘Let’s charge her now, Lou!’ urged another officer. ‘We’ve
got more personnel, and we can encircle—’
‘Oh, no, Bill,’ answered the general with a sigh. ‘You may be
a wizard at directing a pincer movement in good weather on level terrain
against an enemy that has already committed his reserves, but you don’t always
think so clearly anywhere else. Why should we want to keep her?’
‘General, we’re in a very bad strategic position. We haven’t
got a stitch of clothing, and it’s going to be very degrading and embarrassing
for the person who has to go downstairs through the lobby to get some.’
‘Yes, Filpo, you’re quite right,’ said the general. ‘And
that’s exactly why you’re the one to do it. Get going.’
‘Naked, sir?’
‘Take your pillow with you if you want to. And get some
cigarettes, too, while you’re downstairs picking up my underwear and pants,
will you?’
‘I’ll send everything up for you,’ Yossarian offered.
‘There, General,’ said Filpo with relief. ‘Now I won’t have
to go.’
‘Filpo, you nitwit. Can’t you see he’s lying?’
‘Are you lying?’ Yossarian nodded, and Filpo’s faith was
shattered. Yossarian laughed and helped Nately walk his girl out into the
corridor and into the elevator. Her face was smiling as though with a lovely
dream as she slept with her head still resting on Nately’s shoulder. Dobbs and
Dunbar ran out into the street to stop a cab.
Nately’s whore looked up when they left the car. She
swallowed dryly several times during the arduous trek up the stairs to her
apartment, but she was sleeping soundly again by the time Nately undressed her
and put her to bed. She slept for eighteen hours, while Nately dashed about the
apartment all the next morning shushing everybody in sight, and when she woke
up she was deeply in love with him. In the last analysis, that was all it took
to win her heart—a good night’s sleep.
The girl smiled with contentment when she opened her eyes and
saw him, and then, stretching her long legs languorously beneath the rustling
sheets, beckoned him into bed beside her with that look of simpering idiocy of
a woman in heat. Nately moved to her in a happy daze, so overcome with rapture
that he hardly minded when her kid sister interrupted him again by flying into
the room and flinging herself down onto the bed between them. Nately’s whore
slapped and cursed her, but this time with laughter and generous affection, and
Nately settled back smugly with an arm about each, feeling strong and
protective. They made a wonderful family group, he decided. The little girl
would go to college when she was old enough, to Smith or Radcliffe or Bryn
Mawr—he would see to that. Nately bounded out of bed after a few minutes to
announce his good fortune to his friends at the top of his voice. He called to
them jubilantly to come to the room and slammed the door in their startled
faces as soon as they arrived. He had remembered just in time that his girl had
no clothes on.
‘Get dressed,’ he ordered her, congratulating himself on his
alertness.
‘Perchè?’ she asked curiously.
‘Perchè?’ he repeated with an indulgent chuckle.
‘Because I don’t want them to see you without any clothes on.’
‘Perchè no?’ she inquired.
‘Perchè no?’ He looked at her with astonishment.
‘Because it isn’t right for other men to see you naked, that’s why.’
‘Perchè no?’
‘Because I say no!’ Nately exploded in frustration. ‘Now
don’t argue with me. I’m the man and you have to do whatever I say. From now
on, I forbid you ever to go out of this room unless you have all your clothes
on. Is that clear?’ Nately’s whore looked at him as though he were insane. ‘Are
you crazy? Che succede?’
‘I mean every word I say.’
‘Tu sei pazzo!’ she shouted at him with incredulous
indignation, and sprang out of bed. Snarling unintelligibly, she snapped on
panties and strode toward the door.
Nately drew himself up with full manly authority. ‘I forbid
you to leave this room that way,’ he informed her.
‘Tu sei pazzo!’ she shot back at him, after he had left,
shaking her head in disbelief. ‘Idiota! Tu sei un pazzo imbecille!’
‘Tu sei pazzo,’ said her thin kid sister, starting out after
her in the same haughty walk.