London may be stony, labyrinthine, and cold, but behind its forbidding walls men and women are at work writing books, painting paintings, composing music. That leaves London, where South Africans do not need to carry papers and where people speak English. As for Vienna, Vienna is for Jews coming back to reclaim their birthright: logical positivism, twelve-tone music, psychoanalysis. But to live in Paris one must have gone to the kind of upper-class school that teaches French. Paris comes first: city of love, city of art. There are two, perhaps three places in the world where life can be lived at its fullest intensity: London, Paris, perhaps Vienna. Though he has covered his feet with a cushion, they remain icy. Through a gap in the curtain glares a night sky of sodium orange tinged with violet. On the other side of the room, in the proper bed, Paul has begun to snore. In the faded blue sleeping-bag he has brought from South Africa, he is lying on the sofa in his friend Paul’s bedsitter in Belsize Park.
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