Bianco paused, and Abrams leaned forward.

“They were full of cans of food,” Bianco said. “Cans and cans. Beans and figs, fish, and some kind of meat paste. Meat, Doctor. In Belzec in 1945. They were from Poland, Germany, Latvia, and I picked them up and looked at them like I’d never seen a can before. I tore open the other cartons and found more food, enough to feed a platoon. I sat there on my haunches, a little dazed and trying to figure where they got the stuff. Who they murdered or bribed. Then I saw some gray stuff on the wall in front of me; and I stood up to look closer at it. It was faint, but there all right, and I touched it gingerly because it could have been any kind of crap. It was powdery, and it came off on my fingers. I looked around and saw that it was everywhere. You just had to look for it. It was under the windows, embedded in the wood grain of the wall and floor. Everywhere. The sun had stayed out, the barracks was getting hot, and I started to sweat. But not just from booze and sun. There was something about the place all of a sudden. About those cans of food, and that gray stuff all over. I didn’t like having it on me for some reason, so I bent down and ran my fingers against the floor to get it off. But more got on me from the floorboards, and I was really getting spooked. Then I heard something behind me and I pulled my gun. I don’t know what I thought I’d see, but there was this hazy figure in a dusty beam of sunlight, and I was so shaky I almost fired at it; but it was the little Jew. He stepped out of the sun and looked at me, then at the torn-open boxes.

“I said, ‘I found this food.’ And he nodded and said something in German. I don’t know what. Then I said, ‘Where’d it come from?’ and he smiled at me—the sweetest, gentlest smile I’ve ever seen—and he said in broken English that it came from God.