The Closed City

Everyone around says: you haven’t lived long enough, boy—you haven’t smelled life properly. You’re still so young. But I think differently. It’s you who haven’t smelled life. I don’t know how you managed to live it—maybe it was better than mine. I don’t know. But after what I went through in a closed city, you can’t teach me. I had real teachers, real friends, real heroes, and my first real love. Get lost, all of you! With your moralizing. Nothing worse than that could happen there. They did everything so you could live like a human. You’ll never learn what happened there in truth. They won’t let you know that. The diary—everything is written in the diary. The real truth, the way I saw it.