When a momentary equilibrium was established, Cold Cuts became voluble and sang in sixteen various languages (including alcoholic esperanto), becoming in quick succession a French street singer, a German opera singer, a Viennese organ grinder singer, etc.

Then he returned to sit with Jay and Sabina.

"Tonight Mambo cut off my food supply earlier than usual. Why, do you think? I shouldn't be so loyal to him. But he doesn't want me to lose my job. At midnight I must be fit to receive the dead politely. I mustn’t stutter or bungle anything. The dead are sensitive. Oh, I have a perfect suicide to report to the exiles: a European singer who was spoiled and pampered in her own country. She strangled herself with all her colored scarves tied together. Do you think she wanted to imitate the death of Isadora Duncan?"

"I don't believe that," said Jay. "I can reconstruct the scene. She was a failure as a singer here. Her present life was gray, she was forgotten and not young enough to conquer a second time perhaps... She opened her trunk full of programs of past triumphs, full of newspaper clippings praising her voice and her beauty, full of dried flowers which had been given to her, full of love letters grown yellow, full of colored scarves which brought back the perfumes and the colors of her past successes, and by contrast her life today became unbearable."

"You're absolutely right," said Cold Cuts. "I'm sure that's the way it happened. She hung herself on the umbilical cord of the past." He sputtered as if all the alcohol he contained had begun to bubble within him, and he said to Sabina: "Do you know why I'm so loyal to Mambo? I'll tell you. In my profession people would rather forget me. No one wants to be reminded of death. Maybe they don't want to ignore me, but the company I keep. Now I don't mind this the rest of the year, but I do mind it at Christmas. Christmas comes and I'm the only one who never gets a Christmas card. And that's the one thing about my work at the morgue which I can't stand. So a few days before Christmas I said to Mambo: 'Be sure and send me a Christmas card. I've got to receive at least one Christmas card. I've got to feel one person at least thinks of me at Christmas time, as if I were a human being like any other.' But you know Mambo... He promised, he smiled, and then once he starts drumming it's like a jag of some kind, and you can't sober him up. I couldn't sleep for a week thinking he might forget and how I would feel on Christmas day to be forgotten as if I were dead... Well, he didn't forget."