Not only is her song “On the Good Ship Lollipop,” but she is also now commencing, without a trace of shame, to grunt her way through it, in perfect mimickry of young Shirley Temple—each straining baby-pig inflection, each curl-toss, unmotivated smile, and stumbling toe-tap… her delicate bare arms have begun to grow fatter, her frock shorter—is somebody fooling with the lights? But the billowings of asexual child-fat have not changed her eyes: they remain as they were, mocking, dark, her own….

Much applause and alcoholic bravo-ing when it’s finally over. Thanatz abstains, fatherly head wagging, great eyebrows in a frown. “She’s never going to be a woman if this goes on….”

“And now, liebling,” Margherita with a rare, and somewhat phony, smile, “let’s hear ‘Animal Crackers in My Soup’!”

“‘Super Animals in My Crack,’” hollers a humorist from the crowd.

“No,” groans the child.

“Bianca—”

“You bitch,” spike heel ringing on the steel deck. It’s an act. “Haven’t you humiliated me enough?”

“Not nearly enough,” pouncing on her daughter, grabbing her by the hair and shaking her. The little girl has fallen to her knees, struggling, trying to get away.

“Oh, delightful,” cries the meat-cleaver lady, “Greta’s going to punish her.”

“How I’d like to,” murmurs a striking mulatto girl in a strapless gown, pushing forward to watch, tapping Slothrop’s cheek with her jeweled cigarette holder as satin haunches whisper across his thigh. Someone has provided Margherita with a steel ruler and an ebony Empire chair. She drags Bianca across her lap, pushing up frock and petticoats, yanking down white lace knickers. Beautiful little-girl buttocks rise like moons. The tender crevice tightens and relaxes, suspender straps shift and stretch as Bianca kicks her legs, silk stockings squeak together, erotic and audible now that the group have fallen silent and found the medium of touch, hands reaching out to breasts and crotches, Adam’s apples bobbing, tongues licking lips… where’s the old masochist and monument Slothrop knew back in Berlin? It’s as if Greta is now releasing all the pain she’s stored up over the past weeks onto her child’s naked bottom, the skin so finely grained that white centimeter markings and numerals are being left in mirror-image against the red stripes with each blow, crisscrossing, building up a skew matrix of pain on Bianca’s flesh. Tears go streaming down her inverted and reddening face, mixing with mascara, dripping onto the pale lizard surfaces of her mother’s shoes… her hair has loosened and spills to the deck, dark, salted with the string of little seed pearls. The mulatto girl has backed up against Slothrop, reaching behind to fondle his erection, which has nothing between it and the outside but somebody’s loosely-pleated tuxedo trousers. Everyone is kind of aroused, Thanatz is sitting up on the bar having his own as yet unsheathed penis mouthed by one of the white-gloved Wends. Two of the waiters kneel on deck lapping at the juicy genitals of a blonde in a wine velvet frock, who meantime is licking ardently the tall and shiny French heels of an elderly lady in lemon organza busy fastening felt-lined silver manacles to the wrists of her escort, a major of the Yugoslav artillery in dress uniform, who kneels with nose and tongue well between the bruised buttocks of a long-legged ballerina from Paris, holding up her silk skirt for him with docile fingertips while her companion, a tall Swiss divorcée in tight-laced leather corselette and black Russian boots, undoes the top of her friend’s gown and skillfully begins to lash at her bared breasts with the stems of half a dozen roses, red as the beads of blood which spring up and soon are shaking off the ends of her stiff nipples to splash into the eager mouth of another Wend who’s being jerked off by a retired Dutch banker sitting on the deck, shoes and socks just removed by two adorable schoolgirls, twin sisters in fact, in identical dresses of flowered voile, with each of the banker’s big toes inserted now into a downy little furrow as they lie forward along his legs kissing his shaggy stomach, pretty twin bottoms arched to receive in their anal openings the cocks of the two waiters who have but lately been, if you recall, eating that juicy blonde in that velvet dress back down the Oder River a ways….