(vignette 7) A Memory of Holonomy,or, Sergei Gukov's Theroem

The physicists have it wrong.  She murmured to herself, her head in her hands, listening to voices outside.  They keep crashing atoms into one another.  They should be bending them instead, one around another.

   

   

It was the late 1940s.  War in Europe had just ended.  And, the farmer's daughter was called outside, to help.
   

The moment took her, the way a child is taken ...   into the jaws of a wolf while strolling through a forest.  It was the warmth that most surprised her.  The warmth of the blood as it poured into the bag that she held beneath the pig's throat.  Her father had hung the beast, by its hind legs, from a branch of an oak tree in the yard.  How it protested before he slit its throat.  Her’s was a task that had been her brothers’.  But, they had been called up, to war from which they’d been fated not to return.  The blood’s warmth, she felt certain, would grow cold as childhood memories already had.

   

   

In later retelling of the story, it was she who had held the pig, not only after death but in the moment of death as well.  Hold still, now.  Her father commanded.  These were the last words she could recall before the sound of it, of the gun blast.  Not deafening, but, piercing, as the moment a needle passes through cloth and, instead of drawing a stitch, draws blood from the tip of a finger.  The pig shuttered and fell silent, then still, where it once stood.  She felt, she’d become responsible for its death.

   

   

Years later now, all she felt were the little daily pains that made climbing the stairs difficult.  Each of her ailments, sourced in her bones.  She was becoming Lot’s wife, unable to leave the past behind.  Unable to remember it clearly, she carried it with her like a bag of shells ground into a fine lime plaster.  Memory, was an ancient seabed, now beneath dry land, quarried by grandchildren.  How, she wondered, had so much died here, that its pit lay so deeply layered beneath the surface of the woman she’d become?

At the top of the stairs, she could no longer stand to see; but, through the opened windows, came the crisp clear voices of grown sons playing in the court below.  Their wives — themselves no longer young, and, who’d built carriers of raising their own sons and daughters — were busy, storing regrets of their own.