He wasn’t a guy of big words, and he seemed to live entirely in his own world. I remember that during the days he worked with us none of us exactly knew who he was, where he came from or what he was looking for, and afterwards he disappeared. Nobody knew where he had gone, what he was doing or if he had friends or a f***ly to stay with. I guess, we didn’t even know his name—and even if we did, I’ve forgotten it anyway.
Those days were more than hard for all of us. There seemed to be no escape from the greyness of our everyday life which was the only colour that surrounded us. The huge concrete blocks we lived in was grey, the grey of the factory dust, even the colour of our clothes, that once might have been white was grey. It must have been a bright and shining white... and I can’t exactly recall how much time I spent trying to imagine the kind of white it might have been. Since white was the colour of the kind of paradise I so much longed to live in some day, grey left behind nothing more than a bitter taste of emptiness and depression. I can remember how I noticed once, that any other colour must be a symbol for something, a feeling or whatever. Only grey seemed to stand for absolutely nothing. This was the world I lived in, and so did he.
Having our job in the factory was still luxury though, considering the fact that most of us had f***lies to feed. And not long after he started to work there, I would always find him working at the machine next to mine. We’d work for hours next to each other, staying quiet, with our thoughts drifting away to a different place but still aware of our hands doing the same movements over and over again. We were doing that until the bell would ring to end the work for the day. I used to work in a mechanical way, following the same rhythm over and over again, and so did he. But every time I was about to give up, he would lift his head and give me a little smile, as if he could guess my thoughts. I think it was actually his eyes that impressed me most. They were so