"Miss MacIntosh?" Gaffney arched his black eyebrows almost into marks of punctuation.
"Miss MacIntosh is not my fiancee," Yossarian remonstrated. "She's only my nurse."
Gaffney tossed his head in a gesture of laughter. "You have no nurse, Yo-Yo," he insisted almost prankishly. "You've told me that a dozen times. Should I check back and count?"
"Gaffney, go north with your Irish linen or south with your blazer and flannel pants. And take those shadows with you."
"In time. You like the German composers, don't you?"
"Who else is there?" answered Yossarian. "Unless you want to count Italian opera."
"Chopin?"
"You'll find him in Schubert," said Yossarian. "And both in Beethoven."
"Not entirely. And how about the Germans themselves?" asked Gaffney.
"They don't much like each other, do they?" replied Yossarian. "I can't think of another people with such vengeful animosities toward each other."
"Except our own?" suggested Gaffney.
"Gaffney, you know too much."
"I've always been interested in learning things." Gaffney confessed this with an air of restraint. "It's proved useful in my work. Tell me, John," he continued, and fixed his eyes on Yossarian significantly. "Have you ever heard of a German composer named Adrian Leverkuhn?"
Yossarian looked back at Gaffney with tense consternation. "Yes, I have, Jerry," he answered, searching the bland, impenetrable dark countenance before him for some glimmer of clarification. "I've heard of Adrian Leverkuhn. He did an oratorio called Apocalypse."
"I know him for a cantata, The Lamentations of Faust."
"I didn't think that one had ever been performed."
"Oh, yes. It has that very touching children's chorus, and that hellish section in glissandos of adult voices laughing ferociously. The laughter and sad chorus always remind me of photos of Nazi soldiers during the war, your war, herding to death those Jewish children in the ghettos."
"That's the Apocalypse, Jerry."
"Are you sure?"
"I'm positive."
"I'll have to check. And don't forget your shoe."
"What shoe?"
25
Washington
"A fucking shoe?" Wintergreen ridiculed Yossarian on the next leg of his Rhine Journey. "What's so great about a fucking shoe?"
"It's only a fucking thought," said Yossarian, in one of the hotel suites constituting the Washington offices of M & M E & A. For himself with Melissa he had favored a newer hotel of comparable prestige and livelier clientele that boasted, he recalled with a kind of blissful vanity as he lay in the hospital with his condition stable and the danger of brain damage and paralysis past, a more various choice of superior-grade XXX-rated films in all the languages of UN member nations. "You've been saying you wanted a consumer product."
"But a shoe? By now there must be fifty fucking shoe companies turning out shoes for fucking feet for fucks like us."
"But none with an exclusive franchise for an official U.S. Government shoe."
"Men's shoes or women's shoes?" pondered Milo.
"Both, now that women get killed in combat too." Yossarian was sorry he had started. "Forget it. There's much about business I don't understand. I still can't see how you guys bought eggs for seven cents apiece, sold them for five cents, and made a profit."