Catch-22 (20 page)

   Yossarian sighed barrenly, his day’s work done. He was
listless and sticky. The engines crooned mellifluously as McWatt throttled back
to loiter and allow the rest of the planes in his flight to catch up. The
abrupt stillness seemed alien and artificial, a little insidious. Yossarian
unsnapped his flak suit and took off his helmet. He sighed again, restlessly,
and closed his eyes and tried to relax.

   ‘Where’s Orr?’ someone asked suddenly over his intercom.

   Yossarian bounded up with a one-syllable cry that crackled
with anxiety and provided the only rational explanation for the whole
mysterious phenomenon of the flak at Bologna: Orr! He lunged forward over the
bombsight to search downward through the plexiglass for some reassuring sign of
Orr, who drew flak like a magnet and who had undoubtedly attracted the crack
batteries of the whole Hermann Goering Division to Bologna overnight from
wherever the hell they had been stationed the day before when Orr was still in
Rome. Aarfy launched himself forward an instant later and cracked Yossarian on
the bridge of the nose with the sharp rim of his flak helmet. Yossarian cursed
him as his eyes flooded with tears.

   ‘There he is,’ Aarfy orated funereally, pointing down
dramatically at a hay wagon and two horses standing before the barn of a gray
stone farmhouse. ‘Smashed to bits. I guess their numbers were all up.’
Yossarian swore at Aarfy again and continued searching intently, cold with a
compassionate kind of fear now for the little bouncy and bizarre buck-toothed
tentmate who had smashed Appleby’s forehead open with a ping-pong racket and
who was scaring the daylights out of Yossarian once again. At last Yossarian
spotted the two-engined, twin-ruddered plane as it flew out of the green
background of the forests over a field of yellow farmland. One of the
propellers was feathered and perfectly still, but the plane was maintaining
altitude and holding a proper course. Yossarian muttered an unconscious prayer
of thankfulness and then flared up at Orr savagely in a ranting fusion of
resentment and relief.

   ‘That bastard!’ he began. ‘That goddam stunted, red-faced,
big-cheeked, curly-headed, buck-toothed rat bastard son of a bitch!’

   ‘What?’ said Aarfy.

   ‘That dirty goddam midget-assed, apple-cheeked, goggle-eyed,
undersized, buck-toothed, grinning, crazy sonofabitchin-bastard!’ Yossarian
sputtered.

   ‘What?’

   ‘Never mind!’

   ‘I still can’t hear you,’ Aarfy answered.

   Yossarian swung himself around methodically to face Aarfy.
‘You prick,’ he began.

   ‘Me?’

   ‘You pompous, rotund, neighborly, vacuous, complacent…’ Aarfy
was unperturbed. Calmly he struck a wooden match and sucked noisily at his pipe
with an eloquent air of benign and magnanimous forgiveness. He smiled sociably
and opened his mouth to speak. Yossarian put his hand over Aarfy’s mouth and
pushed him away wearily. He shut his eyes and pretended to sleep all the way
back to the field so that he would not have to listen to Aarfy or see him.

   At the briefing room Yossarian made his intelligence report
to Captain Black and then waited in muttering suspense with all the others
until Orr chugged into sight overhead finally with his one good engine still
keeping him aloft gamely. Nobody breathed. Orr’s landing gear would not come
down. Yossarian hung around only until Orr had crash-landed safely, and then
stole the first jeep he could find with a key in the ignition and raced back to
his tent to begin packing feverishly for the emergency rest leave he had
decided to take in Rome, where he found Luciana and her invisible scar that
same night.

   He found Luciana sitting alone at a table
in the Allied officers’ night club, where the drunken Anzac major who had
brought her there had been stupid enough to desert her for the ribald company
of some singing comrades at the bar.

   ‘All right, I’ll dance with you,’ she said, before Yossarian
could even speak. ‘But I won’t let you sleep with me.’

   ‘Who asked you?’ Yossarian asked her.

   ‘You don’t want to sleep with me?’ she exclaimed with surprise.

   ‘I don’t want to dance with you.’ She seized Yossarian’s hand
and pulled him out on the dance floor. She was a worse dancer than even he was,
but she threw herself about to the synthetic jitterbug music with more
uninhibited pleasure than he had ever observed until he felt his legs falling
asleep with boredom and yanked her off the dance floor toward the table at
which the girl he should have been screwing was still sitting tipsily with one
hand around Aarfy’s neck, her orange satin blouse still hanging open slovenly
below her full white lacy brassière as she made dirty sex talk
ostentatiously with Huple, Orr, Kid Sampson and Hungry Joe. Just as he reached
them, Luciana gave him a forceful, unexpected shove that carried them both well
beyond the table, so that they were still alone. She was a tall, earthy,
exuberant girl with long hair and a pretty face, a buxom, delightful,
flirtatious girl.

   ‘All right,’ she said, ‘I will let you buy me dinner. But I
won’t let you sleep with me.’

   ‘Who asked you?’ Yossarian asked with surprise.

   ‘You don’t want to sleep with me?’

   ‘I don’t want to buy you dinner.’ She pulled him out of the
night club into the street and down a flight of steps into a black-market
restaurant filled with lively, chirping, attractive girls who all seemed to
know each other and with the self-conscious military officers from different
countries who had come there with them. The food was elegant and expensive, and
the aisles were overflowing with great streams of flushed and merry
proprietors, all stout and balding. The bustling interior radiated with
enormous, engulfing waves of fun and warmth.

   Yossarian got a tremendous kick out of the rude gusto with
which Luciana ignored him completely while she shoveled away her whole meal
with both hands. She ate like a horse until the last plate was clean, and then
she placed her silverware down with an air of conclusion and settled back
lazily in her chair with a dreamy and congested look of sated gluttony. She
drew a deep, smiling, contented breath and regarded him amorously with a
melting gaze.

   ‘Okay, Joe,’ she purred, her glowing dark eyes drowsy and
grateful. ‘Now I will let you sleep with me.’

   ‘My name is Yossarian.’

   ‘Okay, Yossarian,’ she answered with a soft repentant laugh.
‘Now I will let you sleep with me.’

   ‘Who asked you?’ said Yossarian.

   Luciana was stunned. ‘You don’t want to sleep with me?’
Yossarian nodded emphatically, laughing, and shot his hand up under her dress.
The girl came to life with a horrified start. She jerked her legs away from him
instantly, whipping her bottom around. Blushing with alarm and embarrassment,
she pushed her skirt back down with a number of prim, sidelong glances about
the restaurant.

   ‘Now I will let you sleep with me,’ she explained cautiously
in a manner of apprehensive indulgence. ‘But not now.’

   ‘I know. When we get back to my room.’ The girl shook her
head, eyeing him mistrustfully and keeping her knees pressed together. ‘No, now
I must go home to my mamma, because my mamma does not like me to dance with
soldiers or let them take me to dinner, and she will be very angry with me if I
do not come home now. But I will let you write down for me where you live. And
tomorrow morning I will come to your room for ficky-fick before I go to my work
at the French office. Capisci?’

   ‘Bullshit!’ Yossarian exclaimed with angry disappointment.

   ‘Cosa vuol dire bullshit?’ Luciana inquired with a blank
look.

   Yossarian broke into loud laughter. He answered her finally
in a tone of sympathetic good humor. ‘It means that I want to escort you now to
wherever the hell I have to take you next so that I can rush back to that night
club before Aarfy leaves with that wonderful tomato he’s got without giving me
a chance to ask about an aunt or friend she must have who’s just like her.’

   ‘Come?’

   ‘Subito, subito,’ he taunted her tenderly. ‘Mamma is waiting.
Remember?’

   ‘Si, si. Mamma.’ Yossarian let the girl drag him through the
lovely Roman spring night for almost a mile until they reached a chaotic bus
depot honking with horns, blazing with red and yellow lights and echoing with
the snarling vituperations of unshaven bus drivers pouring loathsome,
hair-raising curses out at each other, at their passengers and at the
strolling, unconcerned knots of pedestrians clogging their paths, who ignored
them until they were bumped by the buses and began shouting curses back.
Luciana vanished aboard one of the diminutive green vehicles, and Yossarian
hurried as fast as he could all the way back to the cabaret and the bleary-eyed
bleached blonde in the open orange satin blouse. She seemed infatuated with
Aarfy, but he prayed intensely for her luscious aunt as he ran, or for a
luscious girl friend, sister, cousin, or mother who was just as libidinous and
depraved. She would have been perfect for Yossarian, a debauched, coarse,
vulgar, amoral, appetizing slattern whom he had longed for and idolized for
months. She was a real find. She paid for her own drinks, and she had an
automobile, an apartment and a salmon-colored cameo ring that drove Hungry Joe
clean out of his senses with its exquisitely carved figures of a naked boy and
girl on a rock. Hungry Joe snorted and pranced and pawed at the floor in
salivating lust and groveling need, but the girl would not sell him the ring,
even though he offered her all the money in all their pockets and his
complicated black camera thrown in. She was not interested in money or cameras.
She was interested in fornication.

   She was gone when Yossarian got there. They were all gone,
and he walked right out and moved in wistful dejection through the dark,
emptying streets. Yossarian was not often lonely when he was by himself, but he
was lonely now in his keen envy of Aarfy, who he knew was in bed that very
moment with the girl who was just right for Yossarian, and who could also make
out any time he wanted to, if he ever wanted to, with either or both of the two
slender, stunning, aristocratic women who lived in the apartment upstairs and
fructified Yossarian’s sex fantasies whenever he had sex fantasies, the
beautiful rich black-haired countess with the red, wet, nervous lips and her
beautiful rich black-haired daughter-in-law. Yossarian was madly in love with
all of them as he made his way back to the officers’ apartment, in love with
Luciana, with the prurient intoxicated girl in the unbuttoned satin blouse, and
with the beautiful rich countess and her beautiful rich daughter-in-law, both
of whom would never let him touch them or even flirt with them. They doted kittenishly
on Nately and deferred passively to Aarfy, but they thought Yossarian was crazy
and recoiled from him with distasteful contempt each time he made an indecent
proposal or tried to fondle them when they passed on the stairs. They were both
superb creatures with pulpy, bright, pointed tongues and mouths like round warm
plums, a little sweet and sticky, a little rotten. They had class; Yossarian
was not sure what class was, but he knew that they had it and he did not, and
that they knew it, too. He could picture, as he walked, the kind of
underclothing they wore against their svelte feminine parts, filmy, smooth,
clinging garments of deepest black or of opalescent pastel radiance with
flowering lace borders fragrant with the tantalizing fumes of pampered flesh
and scented bath salts rising in a germinating cloud from their blue-white
breasts. He wished again that he was where Aarfy was, making obscene, brutal,
cheerful love with a juicy drunken tart who didn’t give a tinker’s dam about
him and would never think of him again.

   But Aarfy was already back in the apartment when Yossarian
arrived, and Yossarian gaped at him with that same sense of persecuted
astonishment he had suffered that same morning over Bologna at his malign and
cabalistic and irremovable presence in the nose of the plane.

   ‘What are you doing here?’ he asked.

   ‘That’s right, ask him!’ Hungry Joe exclaimed in a rage.
‘Make him tell you what he’s doing here!’ With a long, theatrical moan, Kid
Sampson made a pistol of his thumb and forefinger and blew his own brains out.
Huple, chewing away on a bulging wad of bubble gum, drank everything in with a
callow, vacant expression on his fifteen-year old face. Aarfy was tapping the
bowl of his pipe against his palm leisurely as he paced back and forth in
corpulent self-approval, obviously delighted by the stir he was causing.

   ‘Didn’t you go home with that girl?’ Yossarian demanded.

   ‘Oh, sure, I went home with her,’ Aarfy replied. ‘You didn’t
think I was going to let her try to find her way home alone, did you?’

   ‘Wouldn’t she let you stay with her?’

   ‘Oh, she wanted me to stay with her, all right.’ Aarfy
chuckled. ‘Don’t you worry about good old Aarfy. But I wasn’t going to take
advantage of a sweet kid like that just because she’d had a little too much to
drink. What kind of a guy do you think I am?’

   ‘Who said anything about taking advantage of her?’ Yossarian
railed at him in amazement. ‘All she wanted to do was get into bed with
someone. That’s the only thing she kept talking about all night long.’

   ‘That’s because she was a little mixed up,’ Aarfy explained.
‘But I gave her a little talking to and really put some sense into her.’

   ‘You bastard!’ Yossarian exclaimed, and sank down tiredly on
the divan beside Kid Sampson. ‘Why the hell didn’t you give her to one of us if
you didn’t want her?’

   ‘You see?’ Hungry Joe asked. ‘There’s something wrong with
him.’ Yossarian nodded and looked at Aarfy curiously. ‘Aarfy, tell me
something. Don’t you ever screw any of them?’ Aarfy chuckled again with
conceited amusement. ‘Oh sure, I prod them. Don’t you worry about me. But never
any nice girls. I know what kind of girls to prod and what kind of girls not to
prod, and I never prod any nice girls. This one was a sweet kid. You could see
her family had money. Why, I even got her to throw that ring of hers away right
out the car window.’ Hungry Joe flew into the air with a screech of intolerable
pain. ‘You did what?’ he screamed. ‘You did what?’ He began whaling away at
Aarfy’s shoulders and arms with both fists, almost in tears. ‘I ought to kill
you for what you did, you lousy bastard. He’s sinful, that’s what he is. He’s
got a dirty mind, ain’t he? Ain’t he got a dirty mind?’

   ‘The dirtiest,’ Yossarian agreed.

   ‘What are you fellows talking about?’ Aarfy asked with
genuine puzzlement, tucking his face away protectively inside the cushioning
insulation of his oval shoulders. ‘Aw, come on, Joe,’ he pleaded with a smile
of mild discomfort. ‘Quit punching me, will you?’ But Hungry Joe would not quit
punching until Yossarian picked him up and pushed him away toward his bedroom.
Yossarian moved listlessly into his own room, undressed and went to sleep. A
second later it was morning, and someone was shaking him.

   ‘What are you waking me up for?’ he whimpered.

   It was Michaela, the skinny maid with the merry disposition
and homely sallow face, and she was waking him up because he had a visitor
waiting just outside the door. Luciana! He could hardly believe it. And she was
alone in the room with him after Michaela had departed, lovely, hale and
statuesque, steaming and rippling with an irrepressible affectionate vitality
even as she remained in one place and frowned at him irately. She stood like a
youthful female colossus with her magnificent columnar legs apart on high white
shoes with wedged heels, wearing a pretty green dress and swinging a large,
flat white leather pocketbook, with which she cracked him hard across the face
when he leaped out of bed to grab her. Yossarian staggered backward out of
range in a daze, clutching his stinging cheek with bewilderment.

   ‘Pig!’ She spat out at him viciously, her nostrils flaring in
a look of savage disdain. ‘Vive com’ un animale!’ With a fierce, guttural,
scornful, disgusted oath, she strode across the room and threw open the three
tall casement windows, letting inside an effulgent flood of sunlight and crisp
fresh air that washed through the stuffy room like an invigorating tonic. She
placed her pocketbook on a chair and began tidying the room, picking his things
up from the floor and off the tops of the furniture, throwing his socks,
handkerchief and underwear into an empty drawer of the dresser and hanging his
shirt and trousers up in the closet.

   Yossarian ran out of the bedroom into the bathroom and
brushed his teeth. He washed his hands and face and combed his hair. When he
ran back, the room was in order and Luciana was almost undressed. Her
expression was relaxed. She left her earrings on the dresser and padded
barefoot to the bed wearing just a pink rayon chemise that came down to her
hips. She glanced about the room prudently to make certain there was nothing
she had overlooked in the way of neatness and then drew back the coverlet and
stretched herself out luxuriously with an expression of feline expectation. She
beckoned to him longingly, with a husky laugh.

   ‘Now,’ she announced in a whisper, holding both arms out to
him eagerly. ‘Now I will let you sleep with me.’ She told him some lies about a
single weekend in bed with a slaughtered fiancé in the Italian Army,
and they all turned out to be true, for she cried, ‘finito!’ almost as soon as
he started and wondered why he didn’t stop, until he had finitoed too and
explained to her.