Geneva in October is its own particular quality.
The lake steel grey and the mountains beginning their seasonal disappearance into cloud and the city doing the specific, organized thing it does in autumn, pulling inward, becoming more itself, the summer openness replaced by the particular, settled warmth of a place that knows how to hold the cold. Irina's street in the old city is more itself too in October, the window boxes changed, the light different, the quality of the air carrying the first genuine cold of the season.
She opens the door before we ring the bell.
She has been watching from the window. Of course she has. Thirty years of watching from windows, the habit does not change overnight, it simply changes its distance. From thirty years to the second floor of a Geneva building
