Catch-22

by Joseph Heller

  'Well, frankly, I don't know how long America is going to last,' he proceeded dauntlessly. 'I suppose we can't last forever if the world itself is going to be destroyed someday. But I do know that we're going to survive and triumph for a long, long time.'

  'For how long?' mocked the profane old man with a gleam of malicious elation. 'Not even as long as the frog?'

  'Much longer than you or me,' Nately blurted out lamely.

  'Oh, is that all! That won't be very much longer then, considering that you're so gullible and brave and that I am already such an old, old man.'

  'How old are you?' Nately asked, growing intrigued and charmed with the old man in spite of himself.

  'A hundred and seven.' The old man chuckled heartily at Nately's look of chagrin. 'I see you don't believe that either.'

  'I don't believe anything you tell me,' Nately replied, with a bashful mitigating smile. 'The only thing I do believe is that America is going to win the war.'

  'You put so much stock in winning wars,' the grubby iniquitous old man scoffed. 'The real trick lies in losing wars, in knowing which wars can be lost. Italy has been losing wars for centuries, and just see how splendidly we've done nonetheless. France wins wars and is in a continual state of crisis. Germany loses and prospers. Look at our own recent history. Italy won a war in Ethiopia and promptly stumbled into serious trouble. Victory gave us such insane delusions of grandeur that we helped start a world war we hadn't a chance of winning. But now that we are losing again, everything has taken a turn for the better, and we will certainly come out on top again if we succeed in being defeated.' Nately gaped at him in undisguised befuddlement. 'Now I really don't understand what you're saying. You talk like a madman.'

  'But I live like a sane one. I was a fascist when Mussolini was on top, and I am an anti-fascist now that he has been deposed. I was fanatically pro-German when the Germans were here to protect us against the Americans, and now that the Americans are here to protect us against the Germans I am fanatically pro-American. I can assure you, my outraged young friend'--the old man's knowing, disdainful eyes shone even more effervescently as Nately's stuttering dismay increased--'that you and your country will have a no more loyal partisan in Italy than me--but only as long as you remain in Italy.'

  'But,' Nately cried out in disbelief, 'you're a turncoat! A time-server! A shameful, unscrupulous opportunist!'

  'I am a hundred and seven years old,' the old man reminded him suavely.

  'Don't you have any principles?'

  'Of course not.'

  'No morality?'

  'Oh, I am a very moral man,' the villainous old man assured him with satiric seriousness, stroking the bare hip of a buxom black-haired girl with pretty dimples who had stretched herself out seductively on the other arm of his chair. He grinned at Nately sarcastically as he sat between both naked girls in smug and threadbare splendor, with a sovereign hand on each.

  'I can't believe it,' Nately remarked grudgingly, trying stubbornly not to watch him in relationship to the girls. 'I simply can't believe it.'

  'But it's perfectly true. When the Germans marched into the city, I danced in the streets like a youthful ballerina and shouted, "Heil Hitler!" until my lungs were hoarse. I even waved a small Nazi flag that I snatched away from a beautiful little girl while her mother was looking the other way. When the Germans left the city, I rushed out to welcome the Americans with a bottle of excellent brandy and a basket of flowers. The brandy was for myself, of course, and the flowers were to sprinkle upon our liberators. There was a very stiff and stuffy old major riding in the first car, and I hit him squarely in the eye with a red rose. A marvelous shot! You should have seen him wince.' Nately gasped and was on his feet with amazement, the blood draining from his cheeks. 'Major--de Coverley!' he cried.

  'Do you know him?' inquired the old man with delight. 'What a charming coincidence!' Nately was too astounded even to hear him. 'So you're the one who wounded Major - de Coverley!' he exclaimed in horrified indignation. 'How could you do such a thing?' The fiendish old man was unperturbed. 'How could I resist, you mean. You should have seen the arrogant old bore, sitting there so sternly in that car like the Almighty Himself, with his big, rigid head and his foolish, solemn face. What a tempting target he made! I got him in the eye with an American Beauty rose. I thought that was most appropriate. Don't you?'

  'That was a terrible thing to do!' Nately shouted at him reproachfully. 'A vicious and criminal thing! Major--de Coverley is our squadron executive officer!'

  'Is he?' teased the unregenerate old man, pinching his pointy jaw gravely in a parody of repentance. 'In that case, you must give me credit for being impartial. When the Germans rode in, I almost stabbed a robust young Oberleutnant to death with a sprig of edelweiss.' Nately was appalled and bewildered by the abominable old man's inability to perceive the enormity of his offence. 'Don't you realize what you've done?' he scolded vehemently. 'Major--de Coverley is a noble and wonderful person, and everyone admires him.'

  'He's a silly old fool who really has no right acting like a silly young fool. Where is he today? Dead?' Nately answered softly with somber awe. 'Nobody knows. He seems to have disappeared.'

  'You see? Imagine a man his age risking what little life he has left for something so absurd as a country.' Nately was instantly up in arms again. 'There is nothing so absurd about risking your life for your country!' he declared.

  'Isn't there?' asked the old man. 'What is a country? A country is a piece of land surrounded on all sides by boundaries, usually unnatural. Englishmen are dying for England, Americans are dying for America, Germans are dying for Germany, Russians are dying for Russia. There are now fifty or sixty countries fighting in this war. Surely so many countries can't all be worth dying for.'

  'Anything worth living for,' said Nately, 'is worth dying for.'

  'And anything worth dying for,' answered the sacrilegious old man, 'is certainly worth living for. You know, you're such a pure and naive young man that I almost feel sorry for you. How old are you? Twenty-five? Twenty-six?'

  'Nineteen,' said Nately. 'I'll be twenty in January.'

  'If you live.' The old man shook his head, wearing, for a moment, the same touchy, meditating frown of the fretful and disapproving old woman. 'They are going to kill you if you don't watch out, and I can see now that you are not going to watch out. Why don't you use some sense and try to be more like me? You might live to be a hundred and seven, too.'

  'Because it's better to die on one's feet than live on one's knees,' Nately retorted with triumphant and lofty conviction. 'I guess you've heard that saying before.'

  'Yes, I certainly have,' mused the treacherous old man, smiling again. 'But I'm afraid you have it backward. It is better to live on one's feet than die on one's knees. That is the way the saying goes.'

  'Are you sure?' Nately asked with sober confusion. 'It seems to make more sense my way.'

  'No, it makes more sense my way. Ask your friends.' Nately turned to ask his friends and discovered they had gone. Yossarian and Dunbar had both disappeared. The old man roared with contemptuous merriment at Nately's look of embarrassed surprise. Nately's face darkened with shame. He vacillated helplessly for a few seconds and then spun himself around and fled inside the nearest of the hallways in search of Yossarian and Dunbar, hoping to catch them in time and bring them back to the rescue with news of the remarkable clash between the old man and Major--de Coverley. All the doors in the hallways were shut. There was light under none. It was already very late. Nately gave up his search forlornly. There was nothing left for him to do, he realized finally, but get the girl he was in love with and lie down with her somewhere to make tender, courteous love to her and plan their future together; but she had gone off to bed, too, by the time he returned to the sitting room for her, and there was nothing left for him to do then but resume his abortive discussion with the loathsome old man, who rose from his armchair with jesting civility and excused himself for the night, abandoning Nate
ly there with two bleary-eyed girls who could not tell him into which room his own whore had gone and who padded off to bed several seconds later after trying in vain to interest him in themselves, leaving him to sleep alone in the sitting room on the small, lumpy sofa.

  Nately was a sensitive, rich, good-looking boy with dark hair, trusting eyes, and a pain in his neck when he awoke on the sofa early the next morning and wondered dully where he was. His nature was invariably gentle and polite. He had lived for almost twenty years without trauma, tension, hate, or neurosis, which was proof to Yossarian of just how crazy he really was. His childhood had been a pleasant, though disciplined, one. He got on well with his brothers and sisters, and he did not hate his mother and father, even though they had both been very good to him.

  Nately had been brought up to detest people like Aarfy, whom his mother characterized as climbers, and people like Milo, whom his father characterized as pushers, but he had never learned how, since he had never been permitted near them. As far as he could recall, his homes in Philadelphia, New York, Maine, Palm Beach, Southampton, London, Deauville, Paris and the south of France had always been crowded only with ladies and gentlemen who were not climbers or pushers. Nately's mother, a descendant of the New England Thorntons, was a Daughter of the American Revolution. His father was a Son of a Bitch.

  'Always remember,' his mother had reminded him frequently, 'that you are a Nately. You are not a Vanderbilt, whose fortune was made by a vulgar tugboat captain, or a Rockefeller, whose wealth was amassed through unscrupulous speculations in crude petroleum; or a Reynolds or Duke, whose income was derived from the sale to the unsuspecting public of products containing cancer-causing resins and tars; and you are certainly not an Astor, whose family, I believe, still lets rooms. You are a Nately, and the Natelys have never done anything for their money.'

  'What your mother means, son,' interjected his father affably one time with that flair for graceful and economical expression Nately admired so much, 'is that old money is better than new money and that the newly rich are never to be esteemed as highly as the newly poor. Isn't that correct, my dear?

  Nately's father brimmed continually with sage and sophisticated counsel of that kind. He was as ebullient and ruddy as mulled claret, and Nately liked him a great deal, although he did not like mulled claret. When war broke out, Nately's family decided that he would enlist in the armed forces, since he was too young to be placed in the diplomatic service, and since his father had it on excellent authority that Russia was going to collapse in a matter of weeks or months and that Hitler, Churchill, Roosevelt, Mussolini, Gandhi, Franco, Peron and the Emperor of Japan would then all sign a peace treaty and live together happily ever after. It was Nately's father's idea that he join the Air Corps, where he could train safely as a pilot while the Russians capitulated and the details of the armistice were worked out, and where, as an officer, he would associate only with gentlemen.

  Instead, he found himself with Yossarian, Dunbar and Hungry Joe in a whore house in Rome, poignantly in love with an indifferent girl there with whom he finally did lie down the morning after the night he slept alone in the sitting room, only to be interrupted almost immediately by her incorrigible kid sister, who came bursting in without warning and hurled herself onto the bed jealously so that Nately could embrace her, too. Nately's whore sprang up snarling to whack her angrily and jerked her to her feet by her hair. The twelve-year-old girl looked to Nately like a plucked chicken or like a twig with the bark peeled off her sapling body embarrassed everyone in her precocious attempts to imitate her elders, and she was always being chased away to put clothes on and ordered out into the street to play in the fresh air with the other children. The two sisters swore and spat at each other now savagely, raising a fluent, deafening commotion that brought a whole crowd of hilarious spectators swarming into the room. Nately gave up in exasperation. He asked his girl to get dressed and took her downstairs for breakfast. The kid sister tagged along, and Nately felt like the proud head of a family as the three of them ate respectably in a nearby open-air café. But Nately's whore was already bored by the time they started back, and she decided to go streetwalking with two other girls rather than spend more time with him. Nately and the kid sister followed meekly a block behind, the ambitious youngster to pick up valuable pointers, Nately to eat his liver in mooning frustration, and both were saddened when the girls were stopped by soldiers in a staff car and driven away.

  Nately went back to the café and bought the kid sister chocolate ice cream until her spirits improved and then returned with her to the apartment, where Yossarian and Dunbar were flopped out in the sitting room with an exhausted Hungry Joe, who was still wearing on his battered face the blissful, numb, triumphant smile with which he had limped into view from his massive harem that morning like a person with numerous broken bones. The lecherous and depraved old man was delighted with Hungry Joe's split lips and black-and-blue eyes. He greeted Nately warmly, still wearing the same rumpled clothes of the evening before. Nately was profoundly upset by his seedy and disreputable appearance, and whenever he came to the apartment he wished that the corrupt, immoral old man would put on a clean Brooks Brothers shirt, shave, comb his hair, wear a tweed jacket, and grow a dapper white mustache so that Nately would not have to suffer such confusing shame each time he looked at him and was reminded of his father.

  Catch-22

  Milo

  April had been the best month of all for Milo. Lilacs bloomed in April and fruit ripened on the vine. Heartbeats quickened and old appetites were renewed. In April a livelier iris gleamed upon the burnished dove. April was spring, and in the spring Milo Minderbinder's fancy had lightly turned to thoughts of tangerines.

  'Tangerines?'

  'Yes, sir.'

  'My men would love tangerines,' admitted the colonel in Sardinia who commanded four squadrons of B-26s.

  'There'll be all the tangerines they can eat that you're able to pay for with money from your mess fund,' Milo assured him.

  'Casaba melons?'

  'Are going for a song in Damascus.'

  'I have a weakness for casaba melons. I've always had a weakness for casaba melons.'

  'Just lend me one plane from each squadron, just one plane, and you'll have all the casabas you can eat that you've money to pay for.'

  'We buy from the syndicate?'

  'And everybody has a share.'

  'It's amazing, positively amazing. How can you do it?'

  'Mass purchasing power makes the big difference. For example, breaded veal cutlets.'

  'I'm not so crazy about breaded veal cutlets,' grumbled the skeptical B-25 commander in the north of Corsica.

  'Breaded veal cutlets are very nutritious,' Milo admonished him piously. 'They contain egg yolk and bread crumbs. And so are lamb chops.'

  'Ah, lamb chops,' echoed the B-25 commander. 'Good lamb chops?'

  'The best,' said Milo, 'that the black market has to offer.'

  'Baby lamb chops?'

  'In the cutest little pink paper panties you ever saw. Are going for a song in Portugal.'

  'I can't send a plane to Portugal. I haven't the authority.'

  'I can, once you lend the plane to me. With a pilot to fly it. And don't forget--you'll get General Dreedle.'

  'Will General Dreedle eat in my mess hall again?'

  'Like a pig, once you start feeding him my best white fresh eggs fried in my pure creamery butter. There'll be tangerines too, and casaba melons, honeydews, filet of Dover sole, baked Alaska, and cockles and mussels.'

  'And everybody has a share?'

  'That,' said Milo, 'is the most beautiful part of it.'

  'I don't like it,' growled the unco-operative fighter-plane commander, who didn't like Milo either.

  'There's an unco-operative fighter-plane commander up north who's got it in for me,' Milo complained to General Dreedle. 'It takes just one person to ruin the whole thing, and then you wouldn't have your fresh eggs fried in my pure cre
amery butter any more.' General Dreedle had the unco-operative fighter-plane commander transferred to the Solomon Islands to dig graves and replaced him with a senile colonel with bursitis and a craving for litchi nuts who introduced Milo to the B-17 general on the mainland with a yearning for Polish sausage.

  'Polish sausage is going for peanuts in Cracow,' Milo informed him.

  'Polish sausage,' sighed the general nostalgically. 'You know, I'd give just about anything for a good hunk of Polish sausage. Just about anything.'

  'You don't have to give anything. Just give me one plane for each mess hall and a pilot who will do what he's told. And a small down payment on your initial order as a token of good faith.'

  'But Cracow is hundreds of miles behind the enemy lines. How will you get to the sausage?'

  'There's an international Polish sausage exchange in Geneva. I'll just fly the peanuts into Switzerland and exchange them for Polish sausage at the open market rate. They'll fly the peanuts back to Cracow and I'll fly the Polish sausage back to you. You buy only as much Polish sausage as you want through the syndicate. There'll be tangerines too, with only a little artificial coloring added. And eggs from Malta and Scotch from Sicily. You'll be paying the money to yourself when you buy from the syndicate, since you'll own a share, so you'll really be getting everything you buy for nothing. Doesn't that makes sense?'

  'Sheer genius. How in the world did you ever think of it?'