I pulled a few sheets of paper from my imitation-leather briefcase. (I felt a disagreeable sensation every time I used this briefcase, but I hadn’t been able to find anything else, because of the restrictions. I had asked Thomas’s advice, but he had laughed in my face: “I wanted a leather office set, you know, with a writing pad and a penholder. I wrote to a friend in Kiev, a guy who was in the Group and who stayed on with the BdS, to ask him if he could have one made for me. He answered that ever since we had killed all the Jews, you couldn’t even get a pair of boots resoled in the Ukraine.”)
