Catch As Catch Can

by Joseph Heller

  “The airfield was right here,” I explained. “The bombers used to come back from Italy and France and land right out that way.”

  “I’m thirsty,” said my daughter.

  “It’s hot,” said my wife.

  “I want to go back,” said my son.

  “We aren’t going back to Île Rousse,” I said. “We’re spending the night in Bastia.”

  “I mean back to New York!” he exclaimed angrily. “I’m not interested in your stupid airfield. The only airfield I want to see is John F. Kennedy.”

  “Be nice to Daddy,” my daughter said to him, with a malicious twinkle. “He’s trying to recapture his youth.”

  I gave my daughter a warning scowl and looked about again, searching for a propeller, a wing, an airplane wheel, for some dramatic marker to set this neglected stretch of wasteland apart from all the others along the shore. I saw none; and it would have made no difference if I had. I was a man in search of a war, and I had come to the wrong place. My war was over and gone, and even my ten-year-old son was smart enough to realize that. What the grouchy kid didn’t realize, though, was that his military service was still ahead; and I could have clasped him in my arms to protect him as he stood there, hanging half outside the car with his look of sour irritation.

  “Can’t we go?” he pleaded.

  “Sure, let’s go,” I said, and told François to take us straight to Bastia.

  François shot away down the road like a rocket and screeched to a stop at the first bar he came to. He had, he mumbled quickly, to go see his aunt, and he bounded outside the car before we could protest. He was back in thirty seconds, licking his upper lip and looking greatly refreshed. He stopped three more times at bars on the way in, to see his mother-in-law, his best friend and his old police captain, returning with a larger smile and a livelier step from each brief visit.

  François was whistling, and we were limp with exhaustion, by the time we arrived in the city, where the heat was unbearable. Add humidity to Hell, and you have the climate of Bastia in early July.

  François and I went to the nearest bar for a farewell drink.

  He was jaunty and confident again. “New York?” he asked hopefully.

  I shook my head. He shrugged philosophically and lifted his glass in a toast.

  “Tchin-tchin,”he said, and insisted on paying for the drinks.

  The first time I came to Corsica was in May, 1944, when I joined the bomb group as a combat replacement. After four days I was assigned to my first mission, as a wing bombardier. The target was the railroad bridge at Poggibonsi.

  Poor little Poggibonsi. Its only crime was that it happened to lie outside Florence along one of the few passageways running south through the Apennine Mountains to Rome, which was still held by the Germans. And because of this small circumstance, I had been brought all the way across the ocean to help kill its railroad bridge.

  The mission to Poggibonsi was described to us in the briefing room as a milk run—that is, a mission on which we were not likely to encounter flak or enemy planes. I was not pleased to hear this. I wanted action, not security. I wanted a sky full of dogfights, daredevils and billowing parachutes. I was twenty-one years old. I was dumb. I tried to console myself with the hope that someone, somewhere along the way, would have the good grace to open fire at us. No one did.

  As a wing bombardier, my job was to keep my eyes on the first plane in our formation, which contained the lead bombardier. When I saw his bomb-bay doors open, I was to open mine. The instant I saw his bombs begin to fall, I would press a button to release my own. It was as simple as that—or should have been.

  I guess I got bored. Since there was no flak at Poggibonsi, the lead bombardier opened his bomb-bay doors early and took a long, steady approach. A lot of time seemed to pass. I looked down to see how far we were from the target. When I looked back up, the bombs from the other planes were already falling. I froze with alarm for another second or two. Then I squeezed my button. I closed the bomb-bay doors and bent forward to see where the bombs would strike, pleading silently for the laws of gravitational acceleration to relax just enough to allow my bombs to catch up with the others.

  The bombs from the other planes fell in an accurate, concentrated pattern that blasted a wide hole in the bridge. The bombs from my plane blasted a hole in the mountains several miles beyond.

  It was my naïve hope that no one would notice my misdemeanor; but in the truck taking us from the planes a guy in a parachute harness demanded:

  “Who was the bombardier in the number two plane?”

  “I was,” I answered sheepishly.

  “You dropped late,” he told me, as though it could have escaped my attention. “But we hit the bridge.”

  Yeah, I thought, but I hit the mountain.

  A few days after I returned to Italy from Corsica with my family, we rode through Poggibonsi on our way south to Siena to see an event there called the Palio. The railroad bridge at Poggibonsi has been repaired and is now better than ever. The hole in the mountains is still there.

  As soon as we checked in at our busy hotel in Siena, a flushed, animated woman in charge smiled and said, “Watch out for pickpockets! They’ll steal your money, your checks, your jewelry and your cameras! Last year we had three guests who were robbed!”

  She uttered this last statistic in a triumphant whoop, as though in rivalry with another hotel that could boast only two victims. The woman cradled an infant in her arms, her grandchild; her daughter, a tall, taciturn girl in her twenties, worked at a small tabulating machine. Our own children, in one of those miraculous flashes of intuition, decided not to attend the Palio but to remain at the hotel.

  Something like forty thousand people packed their way into the standing-room section of the public square to watch the climax of this traditional competition between the city’s seventeen contrade, or wards. Soon many began collapsing from heat exhaustion and were carried beneath the stands by running teams of first-aid workers. Then, up behind the last row of seats in our section, there appeared without warning a big, fat, bellowing, intoxicated, two-hundred-pound goose with crumbs in his mouth and a frog in his throat. He was not really a goose but an obese and obnoxious drunk who wore the green and white colors of his own contrada, which was, I believe, that of the goose or duck or some other bird. He had bullied his way past the ticket taker to this higher vantage point, from which to cheer his contrada as it paraded past and to spray hoarse obscenities at the others. Immediately in back of us, and immediately in front of him, was a row of high-school girls from North Carolina, touring Europe under the protection of a slender young American gentleman who soon began to look as though he wished he were somewhere else. One of the girls complained steadily to him in her southern accent.

  “How do you say ‘policeman’ in Italian? I want you to call that policeman, do you hear? That Italian is spitting on me every time he yells something. And he smells. I don’t want that smelly Italian standing up here behind me.”

  With us at the Palio were Prof. Frederick Karl, the Conrad authority from City College in New York, and his beautiful wife, the Countess D’Orestiglio, who is an Italian from Caserta. The countess, who has a blistering temper, was ready to speak out imperiously, but could not decide to whom. She found both principals in this situation equally offensive. Before she could say anything, the horse race started, and a great roar went up from the crowd that closed off conversation.

  We did not see who won, and we did not particularly care. But the outcome apparently made a very big difference to other people, for as soon as the race was over three men seized one of the losing jockeys and began to punch him severely. Suddenly fist fights were breaking out all over, and thousands of shouting people were charging wildly in every direction. Here was the atmosphere of a riot, and none of us in the reserved seats dared descend. As we sat aghast, as exposed and helpless on our benches as stuffed dolls in a carnival gallery, a quick shriek sounded behind me, and then I was struck by a
massive weight.

  It was the drunken goose, who had decided to join his comrades below by the most direct route. He had simply lunged forward through the row of girls, almost knocking the nearest ones over, and tumbled down on us. With instinctive revulsion, Professor Karl and I rolled him away onto the people in the row ahead of us, who spilled him farther down, on the people below them. In this fashion our drunken goose finally landed sprawling at the bottom. He staggered to his feet with clenched fists, looking for a moment as though he would charge into us, but then allowed himself to be swept along by the torrents of people.

  Somehow, after ten or twenty minutes, all the fighting resolved itself into a collective revelry in which people from different contrade embraced each other, joined in song and pushed ahead to take part in a procession through the city behind the victorious horse. The sense of danger faded. In a little while we went down and moved toward the exit, passing pasty-faced people lying on stretchers and an occasional Peeping Tom staring up solemnly at the legs of women who were still in the stands. Once outside, we kept near the walls of the buildings, clutching our money, jewelry and cameras, and returned to the hotel, where our two bored and rested children told us they wanted to return to Florence that same night and where the woman in charge was exclaiming rapturously about the race and the three men who had beaten up a jockey.

  While my wife went upstairs to pack, I drew the woman aside to talk to her about the war. Tell me about it, I asked; you were here. No, she wasn’t. She was in Bologna during the war, which was even better; she was at the railroad station there with her little girl the day American bombers came to destroy it in a saturation attack. She ran from the station and took shelter on the ground somewhere beside a low wall. When the attack was over and she returned to the station, she could not find it. She could not distinguish the rubble of the railroad station from the rubble of the other buildings that had stood nearby. Only then did she grow frightened. And the thought that terrified her— she remembered this still—was that now she would miss her train, for she did not know when it would leave, or from where.

  But all that was so far in the past. There was her little girl, now grown up, tall and taciturn at the adding machine, and the woman would much sooner talk about the Palio or about Siena, which at the request of the Pope had been spared by both sides during the war—for Siena is the birthplace of Saint Catherine, patron saint of Italy. So the Germans made their stand a bit farther north, at Poggibonsi, which was almost completely leveled.

  Poor Poggibonsi. During those first few weeks we flew missions to rail and highway bridges at Perugia, Arezzo, Orvieto, Cortona, Tivoli and Ferrara. Most of us had never heard of any of these places. We were very young, and few of us had been to college. For the most part, the missions were short—about three hours—and relatively safe. It was not until June 3, for example, that our squadron lost a plane, on a mission to Ferrara. It was not until August 3, over Avignon, in France, that I finally saw a plane shot down in flames, and it was not until August 15, again over Avignon, that a gunner in my plane was wounded and a copilot went a little berserk at the controls and I came to the startling realization— Good God! They’re trying to killme, too! And after that it wasn’t much fun.

  When we weren’t flying missions, we went swimming or played baseball or basketball. The food was good—better, in fact, than most of us had ever eaten before—and we were getting a lot of money for a bunch of kids twenty-one years old. Like good soldiers everywhere, we did as we were told. Had we been given an orphanage to destroy (we weren’t), our only question would have been, “How much flak?” In vehicles borrowed from the motor pool we would drive to Cervione for a glass of wine or to Bastia to kill an afternoon or evening. It was, for a while, a pretty good life. We had rest camps at Capri and Île Rousse. And soon we had Rome.

  On June 4, 1944, the first American soldiers entered Rome. And no more than half a step behind them, I think, must have come our own squadron’s resourceful executive officer, for we received both important news flashes simultaneously: the Allies had taken Rome, and our squadron had leased two large apartments there, one with five rooms for the officers and one with about fifteen rooms for the enlisted men. Both were staffed with maids, and the enlisted men, who brought their food rations with them, had women to cook their meals.

  Within less than a week friends were returning with fantastic tales of pleasure in a big, exciting city that had girls, cabarets, food, drinking, entertainment and dancing. When my turn came to go, I found that every delicious story was true. I don’t think the Colosseum was there then, because no one ever mentioned it.

  Rome was a functioning city when the Germans moved out and the Allies moved in. People had jobs and homes, and there were shops, restaurants, buses, even movie theaters. Conditions, of course, were far from prosperous; food, cigarettes and candy were in short supply, and so was money. Clothing was scarce, although most girls succeeded in keeping their dresses looking pretty. Electric power was rationed, limiting elevator service, and there was a curfew that drove Italian families off the street—men, women, children and tenors—just as they were beginning to enjoy the cool Roman evenings.

  Then, as now, the busiest part was the area of the Via Veneto. What surprised me very strongly was that Rome today is pretty much the same as it was then. The biggest difference was that in the summer of 1944 the people in uniform were mainly American and the civilians all Italian, while now the people in uniform were Italian and the civilians mainly American. The ambience there was one of pleasure, and it still is. This was vastly different from Naples, where it was impossible to avoid squalor, poverty and human misery, about which we could do nothing except give a little money. In this respect, Naples too is unchanged.

  On the Via Veneto today the same buildings stand and still serve pretty much the same purpose. The American Red Cross building, at which we would meet for breakfast and shoeshines, was in the Bernini-Bristol Hotel, at the bottom of the Via Veneto; American rest camps were established in the Eden, the Ambasciatori and, I think, the Majestic. The Hotel Quirinale on Via Nazionale was taken over by New Zealanders, and a man at the desk still neatly preserves a letter of praise he received from their commander. The men who now work in the motor pool at the American embassy are the same men who worked as civilian chauffeurs for the American military command then, and they are eager to relate their war experiences as automobile drivers during the liberation. They could not agree on the location of the Allied Officers Club, a huge nightclub and dance hall whose name, I think, was Broadway Bill’s. For the war itself, one must go outside the center of the city, to the Fosse Ardeatine, where more than three hundred Italian hostages were massacred by German soldiers.

  During the war we came from Corsica by plane and stayed five or six days each time. Often we would take short walks during the day in search of curiosities and new experiences. One time on a narrow street, a sultry, dark-eyed girl beckoned seductively to me and a buddy from behind a beaded curtain covering the entrance to a store. We followed her inside and got haircuts.

  Another time we were seized by a rather beefy and aggressive young man, who pushed and pulled us off the sidewalk into his shop, where he swiftly drew caricatures of our heads on printed cartoon torsos. He asked our names and titled the pictures Hollywood Joe I and Hollywood Joe II. Then he took our money, and then he threw us out. The name of the place was the Funny Face Shop, and the name of the artist was Federico Fellini. He has made better pictures since.

  Only once in all the times I came there as a soldier did I attempt any serious sight-seeing; then I found myself on a bus with gray-haired majors and with Army nurses who were all at least twenty years older. The stop at the catacombs was only the second on the schedule, but by the time we moved inside, I knew I’d already had enough. As the rest of the group continued deeper into the darkness, I eased myself secretly back toward the entrance and was never heard from again.

  Today, of course, it’s a different matter
in Rome, for the great presence there, I think, is Michelangelo. He complained a lot, but he knew what he was doing. His Moses is breathtaking, particularly if you can see it before the groups of guided tourists come swarming up and the people in charge give the same apocryphal explanations of the horns on the head and the narrow scar in the marble of the leg. The story about the latter is that Michelangelo, overwhelmed by the lifelike quality of his statue, hurled his ax at it and cried, “Speak! Why won’t you speak?”

  The story isn’t true. I have seen that statue, and I know that if Michelangelo ever hurled an ax at it, Moses would have picked up the ax and hurled it right back.

  With the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, however, I have recurring trouble. The gigantic fresco has been called the greatest work ever undertaken by a single artist. No summer tourist will ever be able to tell, for no summer tourist will ever be able to see it, his view obstructed by hundreds of others around him. The lines outside are as long as at Radio City Music Hall, and the price of admission is high. Once inside, you walk a mile to get there. And once you arrive, you find yourself in a milling crush of people who raise a deafening babble. Women faint and are stretched out to recover on the benches along the side. Attendants shout at you to keep quiet or keep moving. Jehovah stretches a hand out to Adam and pokes his finger into the head of the Korean in front of you. If you do look up, you soon discover it’s a pain in the neck. The ideal way to study the ceiling would be to lie down in the center of the floor. Even then the distance is probably too great for much sense to be made of that swirling maelstrom above. E. M. Forster defined a work of art as being greater than the sum of its parts: I suspect that just the reverse may be true of the Sistine ceiling, that it is much greater in its details than in total.

  However, Michelangelo’s fresco of the Last Judgment, on a wall in the same chapel, is another matter entirely. The wall is forty-four feet wide and forty-eight feet high, and the painting is the most powerful I know. It is the best motion picture ever made. There is perpetual movement in its violent rising and falling, and perpetual drama in its agony and wrath. To be with Michelangelo’s Last Judgment is to be with Oedipus and King Lear. I want that wall. I would like to have enough money and time someday to fly to Rome just to look at it whenever I felt a yearning to. I know it would always be worth the trip. Better still, I would like to put that wall in my own apartment, where it would always be just a few steps away. But my landlord won’t let me.