Colonel
Goddammit, are you going to start pumping me again?
Clevinger
No, sir. I’m sorry, sir.
Colonel
Then answer the question. When didn’t you say we couldn’t find you guilty?
Clevinger
Late last night in the latrine, sir.
Colonel
Is that the only time you didn’t say it?
Clevinger
No, sir. I always didn’t say you couldn’t find me guilty, sir. What I did say was—
Colonel
Nobody asked you what you did say. We asked you what you didn’t say. We’re not at all interested in what you did say. Is that clear?
Clevinger
Yes, sir.
Colonel
Then we’ll go on. What did you say?
Clevinger
I said, sir, that you couldn’t find me guilty of the offense with which I am charged and still be faithful to the cause of…
Colonel
Of what? You’re mumbling.
Metcalf
Stop mumbling.
Clevinger
Yes, sir.
Metcalf
And mumble “sir” when you do.
Colonel
Metcalf, you bastard!
Clevinger
Yes, sir. Of justice, sir. That you couldn’t find—
Colonel
Justice? What is justice?
Clevinger
Justice, sir, is—
Colonel
That’s not what justice is. That’s what Karl Marx is. I’ll tell you what justice is. Justice is a knee in the gut from the floor on the chin at night sneaky with a knife brought up down on the magazine of a battleship sandbagged underhanded in the dark without a word of warning. Garroting. That’s what justice is when we’ve all got to be tough enough and rough enough to fight Billy Petrolle. From the hip. Get it?
Clevinger
No, sir.
Colonel
Don’t “sir” me.
Clevinger
Yes, sir.
Metcalf
And say “sir” when you don’t.
Colonel
You’re guilty, Clevinger, or you would not have been accused. And since the only way we can prove it is to find you guilty, it’s our patriotic duty to do so. Clevinger, by a unanimous vote of the three judges, I find you guilty of all charges and sentence you to walk fifty-six punishment tours.
Clevinger
What’s a punishment tour?
Colonel
Make that fifty-seven. A punishment tour is sixty minutes of pacing back and forth in the hot sun with an unloaded, heavy World War I rifle on your shoulder. Is there anything you wish to say before I pass sentence?
Clevinger
You just did!
Colonel
That? That was nothing.
Clevinger
Sir, I believe I have the right of appeal.
Colonel
I just took it away from you. Make that a hundred and fifty-seven. First you want to face your accuser, next you want to appeal. Have you anything else to say in a bid for clemency? If you do, I’ll double your punishment. (Clevinger shakes his head.) Then grab a rifle and start walking. Faster, faster. I want you to try to cut those sixty minutes of each hour down as much as you can.
Clevinger
(Pacing with the rifle again)I don’t understand.
Colonel
I can see that. In sixty days you’ll be fighting Billy Petrolle, and you’ve got nothing better to do than stand there walking back and forth, back and forth, with a useless rifle on your shoulder. Well, justice is done? Are we all through?
Metcalf
Sir? Who is Billy Petrolle?
Colonel
I’m glad you asked that.
Scheisskopf
I was going to ask that too, sir.
Colonel
I’m sure you were, Sh—
Scheisskopf
Scheisskopf.
Colonel
Scheisskopf. Billy Petrolle was a professional boxer who was born in Berwick, Pennsylvania in 1905. He fought a hundred and fifty-seven bouts and won eighty-nine of them, sixty-three by knockouts. On November fourth, 1932, he fought for the world lightweight championship in New York against Tony Canzoneri and lost the deci sion in a fight that went fifteen rounds. He was also known as the Fargo Express. Fargo is in North Dakota. I’m glad you’ve all learned something from this experience. This court is adjourned.
Stenographer
What about me?
You? Who’s you?
Scheisskopf
Popinjay, sir. You said you’d punish him, too.
Colonel
That’s right, I did—
Scheisskopf.
Colonel
Scheisskopf. Lock him up to teach him a lesson.
That’s quick thinking, Captain. I think you’ll go far.
Scheisskopf
I’m a lieutenant, sir.
Colonel
I’m promoting you, Captain. I’m promoting you to major.
Scheisskopf
Gee—I am going far! Move along, Popinjay. Get your toothbrush and a clean handkerchief, and report to the stockade.
(Scheisskopf takes Popinjay’s arm and points him offstage.)
Colonel
See how right I was about him, Metcalf? I said he’d go far, and he has.
Metcalf
If he’s a major, what does that make me?
Colonel
Metcalf, it makes you the guy that will have to go to the Solomon Islands to bury bodies.
Metcalf
Me?
Colonel
There are bodies. Would you rather be a corpse or bury one?
(Metcalf shakes his head. He takes up the shovel, shoulders it as he would a rifle, and paces offstage, passing Clevinger, who paces in the opposite direction. Scheisskopf rejoins the colonel as Yossarian re-enters. Clevinger turns and paces back.)
Clevinger
(To Yossarian)I still can’t understand it.
Yossarian
What?
Colonel
(As Clevinger’s pacing brings him near)I hate you.
(Clevinger’s pacing takes him back toward Yossarian.)
Scheisskopf
So do I.
Clevinger
They hate me.
Colonel
I hated you before you came, hated you while you were here.
Scheisskopf
Me too.
Colonel
And we’re going to keep on hating you after we go.
Scheisskopf
I would have lynched him if I could.
Clevinger
They were three grown men, and I was a boy, and they hated me.
Colonel
And wish you dead.
Clevinger
They speak the same language I do and wear the same uniform, but nowhere in the whole world are there people who hate me more.
Colonel
And wish you dead.
Scheisskopf
Me too.
Colonel
I like to see justice done.
Yossarian
(Pacing along with Clevinger)I tried to warn you, kid. They hate Jews.
Clevinger
I’m not Jewish.
Yossarian
It will make no difference to them.
Colonel
We’re after everybody.
Yossarian
You see?
Colonel
And do you know why I like to see justice done, Shi—
Scheisskopf
Scheisskopf.
Colonel
…Scheisskopf ? Because— (as Yossarian paces near)
I said everybody.
(Yossarian halts, ponders, and gets the message. He goes to the rifle rack, shoulders the other rifle, and begins walking penalty tours behind Clevinger.)
&n
bsp; Colonel
…Because I’m the one that does it.
(The colonel exits laughing with Scheisskopf in one direction, as Clevinger and then Yossarian pace offstage in the other.)
CURTAIN
CATCH - 22REVISITED*
Bastia, the largest city in Corsica, was empty, hot and still when we arrived. It was almost one o’clock, and the people in Corsica, like those in Italy, duck for cover at lunchtime and do not emerge until very late in the afternoon, when the harsh and suffocating summer heat has begun to abate. The hotel in Île Rousse, on the other side of the island, had sent a taxi for us. And driving the taxi was François, a sporty, jaunty, chunky, barrel-chested, agreeable ex-cop. He was in his forties, and he wore a white mesh sport shirt, neat slacks and new leather sandals.
There were two roads from Bastia to Île Rousse, a high road and a low road. “Take the low road,” said my wife, who has a fear of dying.
“D’accord,”François agreed, and began driving straight up. In a minute or two the city of Bastia lay directly below us.
“Is this the low road?” asked my wife.
It was the high road, François informed us. He had decided, for our own good, that we should take the scenic high road to Île Rousse and then, if we still insisted, the low road coming back. François was indeed an agreeable person; he agreed to everything we proposed and then did what he thought best.
I had remembered from my military service that there were mountains in Corsica, but I had never appreciated how many there were or how high they rose. For the record, there is one peak nine thousand feet high and eight more than eight thousand. It was one of these eight-thousand-foot mountains we were now crossing. The higher we drove, the more the land began to resemble the American West. We soon saw cactus growing beside the road, and then eagles wheeling in the sky—down below us!
After about two hours we had crossed the island and came to the other coast, still riding high above it. We drove southward now, passing, on a small beach, some German pillboxes no one had bothered to remove. Soon we saw Île Rousse resting in a haze below us between the mountains and the shore. The road descended slowly. We continued through the town and out to the hotel, which stood almost at the end of a narrow spit.
My main purpose in coming to Corsica again was to visit the site of our air base, to tramp the ground where our tents had stood and see what changes had occurred to the airstrip on which our planes had taken off and landed so many times. This was not in Île Rousse but back on the other side of the island, about fifty miles south of Bastia. I had come to Île Rousse now because it’s a summer resort and because the Air Force had a rest camp there during the war. I was disappointed in what I found now. The Napoléon Bonaparte, the large luxury hotel that had accommodated the officers, was not open. The hotel in which enlisted men had stayed was dilapidated. There was not, of course, any of the wartime noise, energy and excitement. With the exception of Rome and Naples, almost all the towns and cities I was to visit that were associated with my war experiences brought me the same disappointment. They no longer had any genuine connection with the war, but it was only through the war that I was acquainted with them.
We went swimming that afternoon. A jukebox at the beach played records by Bob Dylan, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and Nancy Sinatra. At the tables were a number of teenage girls and boys, good-looking and ultra cool, down for the season from Nice, Marseilles and even Paris. They were inert and blasé, determinedly paying no more attention to us than they did to each other.
That evening I was taken to dinner by a man who had been an important public official in Île Rousse for eighteen years and would be one still if he had not grown weary of the honor. We drove down the coast several miles to the village of Algajola, where we had dinner in a small new hotel perched on a hill overlooking the water. He introduced me to an old man who had worked at the Hotel Napoléon Bonaparte as a bartender when it was an American rest camp. The old man had nothing unpredictable to offer in the way of recollections. There was much liquor and few women, except for occasions when Army nurses were brought in for dances from other parts of Corsica.
More interesting than the rest camp was my host himself, a stout, generous, dark-complexioned man in his fifties who had been in his youth an authentic bon vivant. He had gone to school in Paris and had planned to spend the rest of his life there in pleasure and idleness. Then, in a short period, he had lost his father, uncles and grandfather, and it was necessary for him to return to Corsica to take charge of the family’s business affairs. He had lived in Corsica ever since. He really loved Corsica, he told me without conviction, although he missed the opera, the ballet, the theater, literature, good food and wine, and the chance to talk about these things with others who enjoyed them as much as he did. He smiled frequently as he spoke, but his geniality was clouded with a tremendous regret. He had a grown son who was supposed to return for us with the car at ten o’clock. He would arrive here on time, I was assured. And precisely at ten his son appeared.
“He is always on time,” my host remarked sorrowfully as we rose to go. “He does not even have enough imagination to come late once in a while.” Here, in a small village in Corsica, I had found Ethan Frome, for this was truly a tale of blasted hopes and wasted years that he had related.
Early the next day we headed back across the island in search of the old air base. François made us listen as he sounded the horn of the car. It was a Klaxon. He had installed it for the journey back over the low road, so that we all might be more at ease. Each time we whizzed into a blind curve, I instructed François, “Sonnez le Klaxon,” and he was delighted to oblige.
The low road from Île Rousse was very high for part of the way. But the land soon leveled out, and we found ourselves whizzing along comfortably on flat ground. Jokingly, I remarked to François that I might bring him back with me to New York, where I knew he would excel in the Manhattan traffic. François pounced so readily on this chance at the big time that I had to discourage him quickly. A New York taxi driver, I told him, works for other people, makes little money and n’est pas content, jamais content, and only someone very rich, like Alan Arkin, could afford his own car and chauffeur. While François was still pondering this information solemnly, the fan belt snapped, and a wild clatter sounded from the front of the car. François eased the car softly to a stop at the side of the road, in back of a small truck already parked there. Two men lifted grease-stained faces from beneath the truck’s open hood and looked at us questioningly. It turned out that we had been forced to come to a stop, purely by chance, directly in front of the only garage in miles.
In minutes we were ready to proceed. François, while asking directions to the old American air base, chanced to mention that I was one of the officers who had been stationed there. Both mechanics turned to me with huge grins, and one of them called for his wife to come out of the house to see me. To François this reaction was electrifying; it had not occurred to him that he was driving a potential dignitary whose presence could enlarge his own importance. Chest out, the cop in authority again, he pushed his way between me and this welcoming crowd of three, keeping them back as he screened their questions. After a minute he declared abruptly, to us as well as to them, that it was necessary for us to go. They waved after us as we went driving away.
I was unable to spy anything more familiar than the Mediterranean. Instead of the ageless landmarks I recalled, I saw Fire Island cottages that I know had not been there during the war. We did, however, find the crossroad to Cervione, another mountain village to which we used to drive in a jeep every now and then for a glass of wine in a cool, darkened bar. The bar was still there. It was larger now, and much brighter. Coca-Cola was advertised, and a refrigerated case offered gelati allemagne, German ice cream, direct from Leghorn, in Italy. The several patrons inside were a generation or two younger than the silent, brown, old men in work clothes I remembered. These wore summer sport shirts and wash-and-wear trousers.
&nbs
p; François entered first and announced to all in the room that he had brought them an American officer who had been stationed at the airfield below and had returned for a visit after so many years because he loved Corsica and loved the people of Cervione. The response was tumultuous. Ice cream and cold soda appeared for my wife and children; beer, wine and other flavorful alcoholic drinks appeared for me. I was, it turned out, the only American from the air base who had ever returned, which helped account for the exuberant celebration. My wife asked through the noise whether we could have lunch in Cervione. A meal was ordered by telephone, and we walked to the restaurant ten minutes later, following François, who swaggered ahead with such inflated self-importance that I was certain he had exaggerated enormously the part I had played in beating Hitler and vanquishing Japan.
The only restaurant in Cervione was on the second floor of the only hotel, and it seemed to be part of the living quarters of the family who ran it. A large table had been made ready for us in the center. Food began arriving the moment we sat down, and some of the things looked pretty strange.
“Don’t drink the water,” my wife warned the children, who ignored her, since they were thirsty, and no other suitable beverage was available.
“Don’t drink the water,” François said to me, and popped open a bottle of wine.
My wife and children got by on cooked ham, bread and cheese. I ate everything set before me and asked for more. The main dish was a slice of what seemed like pan-broiled veal, which was probably goat, since kid is a specialty of the island.
Back at the bar we had coffee, and then a strange and unexpected ceremony took place. The entire room fell silent while a shy, soft-spoken young man stepped toward us hesitantly and begged permission to give us a cadeau, a gift, a large, beautiful earthenware vase from the small pottery shop from which he gained his livelihood. It was touching, sobering; I was sorry I had nothing with which to reciprocate.
After Cervione, the airfield, when we finally found it, was a great disappointment. A lighthouse that had served as a landmark for returning planes left no doubt we had the right place, but there was nothing there now but reeds and wild bushes. And standing among them in the blazing sunlight was no more meaningful, and no less eccentric, than standing reverently in a Canarsie lot. I felt neither glad nor sorry I had come; I felt only foolish that I was there.
“Is this what we came to see?” grumbled my son.
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