Two days later I flew my first mission, to a bridge at a place called Piambino. I regretted there was no flak.
Not until I saw a kid my own age, Snowden, bleed and die just a few yards away from me in the back of a plane did the truth finally dawn that they were trying to kill me too, really trying to kill me. People I did not know were shooting cannons at me almost every time I went up on a mission to drop bombs on them, and it was not funny anymore. After that I wanted to go home. There were other things that weren't funny either, because the number of missions I had to complete had gone up first from fifty to fifty-five and then to sixty and sixty-five, and might go up even further before I could get there, with the ghastly chance I might not survive that far. I had thirty-seven missions then, and twenty-three more to fly, then twenty-eight. They had gotten rougher too, and after Snowden, I prayed on every one as soon as we were aloft and I had taken my place on my bicycle seat in the tail, facing backward, before I prepared to load and test-fire my machine gun when we were in formation and setting out over the water. I remember my prayer: "Dear God, please get me home safe, and I swear I will never go into an airplane again." Later on I broke that promise for a sales conference without a second thought. I never told Glenda or anyone else I ever prayed.
My second week there I found myself riding to Bastia in a jeep with a lieutenant named Pinkard I'd already made friends with on a mission, who had the car from the motor pool and invited me along to see the place. When we weren't on missions our time was our own. Not long after that, Pinkard went down over Ferrara in the plane with Kraft and was presumed dead with the rest. Along the straight road heading north on the level terrain near the beaches we came upon two grinning girls hitchhiking, and he screeched to a stop to take them aboard. A few minutes later he turned off the road into a flat patch of ground shielded by bushes, where he brought the car to another skidding stop, pointing out and downward and talking gibberish.
"Ficky-fick?" the elder of the two inquired, when she guessed she understood.
"Ficky-fick," Pinkard answered.
The girls glanced at each other and agreed, and we dismounted and paired off in different directions. I had the older one and we walked with our arms around each other. Mine went to the ground near the rusting pair of railroad tracks that ran down that coast of the island and were no longer in use. Between the tracks lay the metal pipeline that brought us our gasoline from the docks in Bastia. She knew what to do. She prepared herself quickly and put me inside. I did not feel as much contact as I had expected would be there, but I had no doubt I was at last doing it. I even reared up once and enjoyed looking down to make sure. I finished before Pinkard did, but I was ready for a second one sooner. By then we were back in the jeep and none of the others wanted to stop again.
A week or so after that the Germans pulled out of Rome and the Americans came in, by coincidence on D day in France. Within hours, it seemed, the executive officer in our squadron-I still don't know what an executive officer is, but ours was a major named de Coverley-rented two apartments there for us to use on short leaves, the one for the officers an elegant establishment of four bedrooms for four men, appointed with marble, mirrors, curtains, and sparkling bathroom fixtures on a broad thoroughfare called Via Nomentana, which was out of the way and a fairly long walk. Ours lay on two entire floors at the top of a building with a creeping elevator just off the Via Veneto in the center of; the city, and because of the convenience of location, the officers on leave at the same time were there a lot, even to eat and occasionally to make time with the girls who were always around. We came in larger groups with supplies of food rations, and thanks to Milo and Major de Coverley, there were women to cook for us all day long. We had maids to clean who had a good time working there and being with us, and friends of theirs would come to visit and stay the evening, often the night, for the food and the fun. Any unplanned urge could be appeased simply. Once I walked into Snowden's room and came upon Yossarian in bed on top of a maid still holding her broom, whose green panties were on the mattress beside them.
I'd never had so good a time as those I had in that apartment; I doubt I've had many better ones since.
On the second day of my first leave there I returned from a short stroll alone and came back just as the pilot called Hungry Joe was getting down from a horse-drawn cab with two girls who looked lively and lighthearted. He had a camera.
"Hey, Singer, Singer, come along," he yelled out at me in the excited, high-pitched voice with which he always seemed to say everything. "We'll need two rooms up there. I'll pay, I'll treat you. They said they'd pose."
He let me start out with the pretty one-black hair, plump, round face with dimples, good-sized breasts-and it was very good, as Hemingway might say, thrilling, relaxing, fulfilling. We liked each other. When we switched and I was with the wiry one, it was even better. I saw it was true that women could enjoy doing it too. And after that it has always been pretty easy for me, especially after I'd moved into New York in my own small apartment and was cheerily at work in the promotion department at Time magazine. I could talk, I could flirt, I could spend, I could seduce women into deciding to seduce me, which is how I lured Glenda into luring me into moving in with her after many weekends away together and then marrying.
Back at the squadron after that, I felt secure and adventurous, a ladies' man, almost a swashbuckler. I had a decent role in a pretty good film. We called them movies then. Everything ran very well, it seemed to me, with no effort on my part. We had our fresh eggs every morning, the bombs had already been loaded each time we came to our plane. Everything necessary was seen to by others, and none of the logistical work that went into it was mine. I was living with Gentiles and getting along.
Among us when I arrived were a number of aerial gunners and officers who had already completed their combat tours. They had flown their fifty missions and many had been wheedled into going on one or two more when personnel for some reason or another was short for a day or so, and they were waiting for the orders to come that would ship them back to the States. Before the transfer of the bomb group from the mainland to the island, they had been on missions to Monte Cassino and Anzio while the Germans still had fighter planes in the region to attack them, and more recently, with most of the others there before me, to hot targets they talked about like Perugia and Arezzo. Ferrara, Bologna, and Avignon still lay ahead, in my future. When the number of missions constituting a tour of duty was raised from fifty to fifty-five, those who'd not yet shipped out to Naples for the trip home to the States were ordered back to combat duty to fly the additional missions now designated. And they went, I noted, these veteran combat fliers with more knowledge than I had, without dread or outrage, with some irritation at inconvenience, but with no panic or protest. I found that encouraging. They survived without harm and in time went home. Most were not much older than I was. They had come through untouched. I would too. I felt my life as a grown-up was about to begin. I stopped masturbating.
18 Dante
"In what language?"
"In translation, of course. I know you don't read Italian."
"Three or four times," Yossarian remembered about Dante's Divine Comedy, as they waited for the elevator after Michael had dropped off the finished artwork. "Once as a kid-I used to read more than you ever wanted to. One time in a course in Renaissance literature, with Noodles Cook. Maybe a couple of times since, just the Inferno part. I never did get as much satisfaction out of it as I should have. Why?"