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