He always came back for an early dinner and gave me his notebooks to transcribe. They were full of scribbles about survival. He had many unfinished musings on how the word changed in different forms and tenses. Survivor. Survived. Surviving. To survive someone. He described the industrial area where he had spent most of his time. He described days of arduous work in the present tense, the past tense, and the future tense. He wrote a disconcerting number of lines about injury, but it was hard for me to tell if they were literal, or if they were metaphors for living with an illusive yet ubiquitous sense of repression. I, at any rate, preferred to think of them as illustrations of the violence of being undervalued and underpaid. The notes clearly conveyed that he had been intimate with the people he met there; it made sense; his own background could never make him disingenuous. Even though the entries were mostly descriptive, there was an autobiographical heaviness, and I eventually began to decipher the cause: He never expected his life to be so well-defined, his connections so vivid.
