What does happen now, and this is quite alarming, is that out of nowhere suddenly appear a full dancing-chorus of Herero men. They are dressed in white sailor suits designed to show off asses, crotches, slim waists and shapely pectorals, and they are carrying a girl all in silver lamé, a loud brassy dame after the style of Diamond Lil or Texas Guinan. As they set her down, everyone begins to dance and sing:

Pa—ra—nooooiiiia, Pa-ra-noia!

Ain’t it grand ta see, that good-time face, again!

Pa-ra-noi-ya, boy oh boy, yer

Just a bit of you-know-what

From way back when!

Even Goya, couldn’t draw ya,

Not the way you looked, just kickin’ in that door—

Call a lawyer, Paranoia,

Lemme will my ass to you, for-ever-more!

Then Andreas and Pavel come out in tap shoes (liberated from a rather insolent ENSA show that came through in July) to do one of those staccato tap-and-sing numbers:

Pa- ra- noi—(clippety-clippety-clippety cl[ya,]op!)

Pa- ra- noi—(shufflestomp! shufflestomp! shufflestomp!

[and] cl[ya,]op! clickety cl[Ain’t]ick) it grand (clop)

ta (clop) see (clippyclop) yer good-time face again! etc.

Well, Katje realizes long before the first 8 bars of all this that the brazen blonde bombshell is none other than herself: she is doing a dance routine with these black sailors-ashore. Having gathered also that she is the allegorical figure of Paranoia (a grand old dame, a little wacky but pure heart), she must say that she finds the jazzy vulgarity of this music a bit distressing. What she had in mind was more of an Isadora Duncan routine, classical and full of gauzes, and—well, white. What Pirate Prentice briefed her on was folklore, politics, Zonal strategies—but not blackness. When that was what she most needed to know about. How can she pass now through so much blackness to redeem herself? How can she expect to find Slothrop? among such blackness (subvocalizing the word as an old man might speak the name of a base public figure, letting it gutter out into real blackness: into being spoken no more). There is that stubborn, repressive heat to her thoughts. It is none of your heavy racist skin-prickling, no, but a feeling of one more burden, along with the scarcity of food in the Zone, the chicken-coop, cave or basement lodgings at sunfall, the armed-occupation phobias and skulkings as bad as Holland last year, comfortable in here at least, lotos-snuggly, but disastrous out in the World of Reality she still believes in and will never give up hoping to rejoin someday. All that’s not bad enough, no, now she must also endure blackness. Her ignorance of it must see her through.

With Andreas she is charming, she radiates that sensuality peculiar to women who are concerned with an absent lover’s safety. But then she must see Enzian. Their first meeting. Each in a way has been loved by Captain Blicero. Each had to arrive at some way of making it bearable, just bearable, for just long enough, one day by one… .