The Old Drift

by Namwali Serpell

  The next day was a misery. Sibilla had to clean Villa Serra beside her mother as if nothing had changed. She wore a shift to conceal the marks on her back from the Colonel’s knife, but she could not hide her fatigue, and she kept glancing up at the chandelier – the salon looked even shabbier now that she had seen it glowing under those dewdrops of light. That evening, Sibilla asked her mother to leave the larder door unlocked, just in case she needed the outhouse. She lay in the blue-lit room, kicking impatiently at her pillow, waiting.

  When the moon peeked its head in through the small upper window, Sibilla crept out and down the corridor and stood before the wooden doors of the salon. She pressed her ear to the grain of one. The sounds of the party were so muffled they seemed to be coming from inside the door itself – the wood’s tale or the woodworms’ ruckus. She knocked and the door snarled open at once. The Signora peered around it. Her eyes widened green, then narrowed black.

  ‘Benvenuta,’ she said wryly. ‘You will once again be the bright star of our constellation.’ Then she opened the doors wide, her palm floating in sardonic welcome.

  This became what Sibilla did every night. As soon as she entered the salon, the air took on a quiet frenzy, a withheldness, as everyone waited for her to spin. Was that why she came? Or for a respite from the weight and shade of her hair? Or was it for the brothers Corsale with their steady hands? Every night, Sibilla would spin and stop and faint and wake to them – the Colonel with his moustache, the Sergeant with his codino. Every night, one would cut her from her soft tomb and the other would tend to her wounds. Afterwards, Sibilla would lie in a daze and ponder the difference.

  * * *

  For years, Sibilla’s nights glowed and blurred, tintinnabulary with the sound of wine glasses, while her days remained cracked and dirty, gritty and grey as mopwater. Then one morning, when she was fifteen, her nighttime stepped into her daytime and undid the dichotomous pattern. She had dragged a bucket of laundry outside to hang on the clothes line in the garden. During the occupation, her mother had planted all manner of vegetables here to feed the king’s men. But since the war, it had languished and nothing grew here now but a midden of kitchen scraps.

  Today – the first day of winter, the last day of autumn, a sunken bridge between seasons – even the trees were bare. They looked gawky and sheepish, caught with their leaves down. Despite the shift she wore and the hair beneath, Sibilla was not warm enough. She wished she had borrowed her mother’s coat, though its purple lining had shredded to webbing. She quickly grappled the wind-tossed linens onto the line, the cold speeding her fingers. As she hurried back inside, she noticed a shape in the corner of the garden – it was a man, squatting with his back to her, his hair in a stringy tail. The Sergeant. She knew him, and she didn’t. He had dabbed a wet cloth down the knots of her spine every night for years, but they had barely exchanged a word.

  She dawdled over to him, twisting the ends of her hair. He didn’t notice her at first. He was busy raking the dirt, mumbling. Once in a while, he would touch his ponytail and sniff his fingers, then grabble at the earth again, rocking with the effort. She listened for a moment.

  ‘Is what growing?’ she asked finally.

  ‘Hair!’ he said, blinking at her, seeming not the least surprised by her presence. Mortified by this direct allusion to her condition, Sibilla made to leave but the Sergeant grabbed at her and caught a fistful of her locks. Hair rose on her arms.

  ‘You see?’ He let go of her and extended his palm. ‘Hair! From the ground.’

  Sibilla crouched beside him and watched him stir a little pile of dirt and stones and, yes, hair in his hand. She intruded her finger into the clutter and their fingers touched on his palm. They looked at each other.

  ‘Sì, it is hair,’ she said, pulling her hand away.

  ‘Is it yours?’

  ‘Sì, it is mine,’ she said slowly, savouring this new flavour of power.

  ‘But why is it coming out of the ground?’

  ‘I cut it every day and scatter it in the soil. It makes things grow.’

  ‘But then why—’ He gazed at her. His light brown eyes looked gold and silver at once, the colour of sunlight behind a cloud. ‘Why,’ he shoved his palm under her nose, ‘is some of it green?’

  Sibilla smiled. ‘Because those, Sergeant,’ she looked up into his eyes, ‘are pine needles.’

  They stood up and walked through the dead garden together, her hair like filigree around them. He told her that when he had come out to relieve himself this morning, he had been surprised to feel hair prickling his ankles. His first thought had been of the girl who spun in the parlour each night: that she had died and been buried, that the hair marked her hasty grave, that they hadn’t even managed to cover her up properly. It was like the sloppy graves dug during the Partisan War – storms often washed up bones in these parts. He was so pleased, he said, to discover that she was still alive. She was pleased too, Sibilla conceded.

  The hairs he had plucked from her putative grave were a few centimetres long. As they walked and talked, he carried them in his hand like the headless stems of flowers. There were no real flowers in this garden, just blighted brakes muttering a brittle ditty. Sibilla could smell it in the air – the steely harbinger of winter. When they reached a corner of the garden, they turned and walked along the other wall. The moment of parting encroached upon them, and each step was a vanishing arrow they shot towards it. He was telling her about his mother’s sewing box.

  ‘White with red and yellow and blue flowers, round. Like this.’ He put his wrists together and mimed a hinged lid. ‘And she kept her pins inside. She wouldn’t let me touch them.’

  ‘And so you did?’

  ‘Certo. So, one day, she was cooking a meal. My mother never cooks! This was for my brother. He had just come back from Abyssinia. I could smell it: the mud on his boots, his sweat, the blood caramelising. Venison!’ The Sergeant closed his eyes dreamily. ‘Now, my mother always takes her time cooking. Hunger is her only spice. So I say to myself, “Federico, here is your chance!”’

  Sibilla mouthed the Sergeant’s name to herself. It was like a charm – when she turned to look at him again, it was as if he had become clearer and sharper.

  ‘—silver sewing pins,’ he was saying, ‘I pour them out and they go skitti-skitti-skitti on the table.’ His hand scrambled across the air. ‘I roll them back and forth. I put one on my tongue.’ He glanced at her. ‘Then two, then three. Three pins tastes different from two. The best is four.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘E beh, the sound.’

  Sibilla considered this and nodded.

  ‘So this is how it felt to me,’ he continued. ‘Your hair. Like those pins.’ He opened his hand to show her the hairs once more. But the frozen bits of soil had softened and grown muddy in his palm, and the hair was now serpentine. ‘Or it did,’ he said apologetically. ‘Before.’

  Sibilla smiled. They’d reached the end of another wall. She walked off, gesturing ruefully at the linens on the line and picking up the empty laundry basket – the day was young, there was work to do. He watched her go. At the kitchen door, she gathered her hair like a skirt, and trotted up the steps. Then she paused and turned.

  ‘And how do they compare?’ she called across the swiftening air. ‘My hairs, to your delicious pins?’

  ‘I will taste them now!’ Federico cried out, raising the fist that clutched her hair. Sibilla smiled and closed the door but not all the way. She peeked out through the crack, watching him open his fist and bring his hand to his lips. But before he could put those thin strands to his tongue, the wind nudged them, frazzled them, and snatched them clean away.

  * * *

  The kitchen door shuddered open. Adriana turned to it from her potato peeling. It was Sibilla, with her new teenagery smell. The yawning and dragging feet were bad enough. But the change in her daughter’s odour
irked Adriana the most. No mother dislikes the smell of her child, which is generally within the spectrum of your own smells – a shade here, a riff there, like your breath when you’ve tried a new food. But as she had matured, Sibilla’s smell had grown rank and legion. Even when she wasn’t in the room, it curled from corners where stray hairs had knitted, a melony-lemony-biscuity scent that Adriana found both puerile and daunting.

  It seemed worse than usual today. Adriana plopped the last potato in the boiling water. Maybe it was because Sibilla’s shift was hanging half off her and her time in the windy garden had teased her hair to a tangle. She was still standing at the door, peering out through a crack, her back to the room.

  That was when Adriana saw it. She marched over, grabbed Sibilla by the neck, dragged her to a window, and pulled the collar of the girl’s shift down. Under the light, Adriana examined her daughter’s scars – the white stitches, black buttons and red and gold medallions running down her spine. Then she turned Sibilla to face her, bent down, and with the presumption of motherhood, parted the curtain of hair between the girl’s legs. Nothing unusual, though it was no longer bare there and the sickly sweet musk grew slightly stronger. Adriana tilted back up and demanded an explanation.

  Sibilla knew better than to lie to her mother so she spoke honestly about the nightly soirées at Villa Serra, using a monotone to temper the revelation. She obviously had no idea how familiar these parties were to her mother, even beyond the dread archaeology of cleaning them up every morning. When Adriana had first started working for the Signora at Villa Serra, she had in fact attended these very same soirées. She had mostly stood in the corner, dressed in borrowed clothes, too drunk on the spectacle to bother with the wine. She could still picture the salon in its glamorous heyday, the burgundy curtains lush as blood, the chandelier’s bitterbright jewels. She still remembered Giacomo’s eyes the night he recognised her from the butcher’s stall and asked her to dance…

  As Sibilla spoke, this elaborate tapestry of memory was weaving itself in the steamy kitchen air before Adriana. Sibilla, on the other side, could of course only see its back: knots and strings and washed-out colours giving semblance to the barest of shifting shapes. She did not seem aware that something other than her own little story was happening here in the Signora’s kitchen. She prattled on, dribbling out her little stories about spinning and hair, freedom and softness. Then she said something about the Colonel and his hunting knife, and as if it had appeared in the flesh, in the very mettle, the word ‘knife’ pierced it all – the tapestry tumbled.

  Oh how Adriana wept! Oh how she castigated Sibilla for her recklessness! But even as she ranted, Adriana was not thinking of her daughter, but of the Gavuzzis. Adriana no longer loved Giacomo. She had barely mourned him when he died, a casualty not of the war, but of the flu that had swept through Alba in ’43. He had merely been a conduit for something beyond Adriana’s cuttingly narrow life to enter her world – something as big as a war and as small as a man. She had always known deep down that he was a trifling person. And as for the Signora, Adriana could see now that it had just been a piece of amusement for Lina: to invite maids to parties they would be obliged to clean up.

  This blip in the Gavuzzis’ relentless pursuit of distraction had been the peak and the tragedy of Adriana’s life. And now the curse that had issued from it was standing before her, smelling up the kitchen, boasting about the bright nights on the other side of their drudge days. Did Sibilla not realise that she was not a guest at those parties, but a sideshow? Adriana knew now that the Gavuzzis would never accept her daughter. It was time for Sibilla to come home.

  * * *

  Had they left Villa Serra immediately that day, perhaps things would have turned out differently. As it was, there was still work to be done, so Adriana locked Sibilla in the larder to wait until nightfall. It was several hours before she came back to fetch her daughter for the journey home. As Adriana unlocked the door, she found herself oddly nervous – ashamed in advance for what she was about to do – and so she started chattering about the mess she’d had to clean up today.

  ‘A brassiere clogged a drain and the Colonel, you cannot imagine, he brought the Signora the most bizarre gift, some kind of African bird. Grey, dirty. What noise! What shit!’ Adriana bustled into the larder. ‘What—’ She stopped short. Sibilla was kneeling on her oriental pillow, facing away, gazing up at the one high window. And she was completely shorn, her head bald, her arms and neck a little patchy. She looked like a penitent in her shift.

  ‘But how—?’ Adriana stuttered. She felt a pang as she saw the rusty old knife on the ground next to a mound of hair. How much pain Sibilla must have endured to shave and scrape it all from her body! How raw! Adriana shook her head. Was this what she had always wanted? The daughter without the curse? Sibilla did not look more human for it. Her skin was greenish and shadowed with tiny black holes, almost the texture of the snowflakes that were now falling steadily across the high window of the larder.

  Sibilla stood and turned around. Adriana’s pity bled briefly into anger – was the girl trying to punish her with guilt? But no. Sibilla’s gaze was kind, gentle even. Christ, she was beautiful! You could see the planes of her face, how articulate it was in the language of form.

  ‘Don’t preoccupy yourself, Mama,’ Sibilla said mildly. She looked casual, her hands in the pockets of her shift. ‘It will grow back.’

  * * *

  The moment Adriana trapped her daughter at home, she lost her forever. Sibilla had become a servant and service does strange things to a person. It denies you a sense of self even as it frees you from taking hold of yourself. It stills the mind by busying the hands; if those hands are then stilled, the mind erupts. What will I do? Sibilla fretted as she stalked the cabin. What will I do with my hands?

  She began each morning by cleaning the house. Her hands knew how to do this. Then she cut the ends off her hair. It sprouted faster than ever these days, as if to spite her, the locks slithering through the grip of the shears even as she closed them. Her daily trim took almost an hour. She put the leavings in a pail for her mother to scatter in the garden. She ate lunch. Then she sat and stared at the locked door, waiting.

  Over the course of their final walk from the Signora’s – Sibilla stunned by the cold, her numb fingers barely managing to unspool the hair from the pocket of her shift – Adriana had tried to replant seeds of fear in her daughter’s mind: boys and rocks, torture and drowning, old partisans who had acquired the taste for guns and women, the world is no Villa, you know, they’ll set you aflame like a beast, they’ll burn you up quick as a blink. Yes, and then? Sibilla thought. Until then, what will I do with these hands?

  To have nothing to do was like having your fingernails pulled out, one by one. Sibilla examined them. They were spatulate, each tipped with a quarter-moon, clouded by fur from her fingers. Were fingernails dead or alive? What about hair? What was the exact nature of these felt but unfeeling edges of her body, where the inside met the outside? The Colonel had told her once that human hair keeps growing after death. He had seen it on corpses in the deserts of Abyssinia during the war. Did that make hair the ghost of the body? What did it mean then that Sibilla was covered with it? Better hair than fingernails, she supposed.

  She stared out of the small window at the drifting snow, as if the night sky were sloughing its stars. It was winter now. Mama would be home soon. And still he had not come.

  * * *

  It took Sergeant Corsale a while to notice that Sibilla was gone. Everyone was distracted by the Villa’s latest amusement: the Signora’s African grey. Federico found the parrot repellant – it was scrawny and dishevelled, its beak like a witch’s toenail – but it was amusing to listen to its drawling echo. The guests at the Signora’s parties snickered about the secrets it would spill. Only after the novelty had worn off did anyone think to ask where the spinning girl had gone.

  ‘Sleeping.
’ Lina tossed her head dismissively. ‘Puttana pigra. Come, Sergeant. Let us fetch her.’

  Federico picked up a candelabra and followed his hostess as she zigzagged out of the salon, bouncing between guests like a bee drunk on springtime. When they finally reached the kitchen, they found the door to the larder open. They stared at the rumpled, dimpled old pillow. Not a trace of Sibilla to be found. Except – Federico leaned down with his candelabra and pointed – ‘A hair!’

  Lina rolled her eyes. ‘Of course there’s hair. The girl sheds like a dog. Too many animals in this house, what with my little Paolucci…’ She turned, already bored with the missing girl, and trotted back to her sotted guests.

  Federico stayed. He knelt on the floor of the larder and pulled the hair from the pillow but it caught. He tugged. Aha! It was several hairs, braided together, and tied to a heavy jar on the floor of the larder. From there, it hooked around the corner of the entrance and snaked along the kitchen floor, all the way to the back door – he opened it – and down the steps into the garden, the wintry garden where just a week ago, he and Sibilla had walked and talked together.

  Federico was too drunk to pursue the thread that night. But the next morning, he picked it up and followed it out through the creaky garden gate. He discovered that the braid, or rather the series of braids – Sibilla had cleverly knotted them end to end – continued into the distance, wrapped around tree stumps and posts, as the road switched up and back, climbing the hill to the forest.

  * * *

  Being trapped in the cabin made Sibilla’s hair restive. It undulated like gracile tentacles, and sometimes pythoned around her when she wasn’t paying attention. She knew it wasn’t out to destroy her, though. It protected her, kept her from coming undone, formed a roped arena for the spinning she had discovered inside her in the Signora’s salon. If that inner whorl was a tornado, her hair was the vault of the sky – it held her to a horizon. But as her days of confinement dragged on, the tension between inner force and outer constraint grew. Waiting made it worse. Anticipation was an enchantment: every creak was a footstep, every birdcall a greeting.