Geneva, and what is left

Back where we started. One thing left, which is the ending.

On the tenth of September eighteen ninety-eight she was walking to a steamer on the lake at Geneva, travelling the way she always travelled, under another name and with almost no protection. A young Italian anarchist stepped up and struck her with a sharpened file. He had come to kill someone royal, and she happened to be the one in front of him. She got up, walked on board, and said she thought she had been robbed. She died an hour later.

She had spent forty-four years getting out of this city. Vienna took her back, buried her, raised a monument to her and turned her into a face on a tin.

What is actually left of her is quieter than that. The poems nobody was allowed to read. The horses. The Greek. And the walking, hours of it, every day, away from whatever was behind her.

Thank you for walking with us.