Unfinished

Summer days pass with a may-fly's drunken clamour, no longer than the spaces in a lazy conversation. I couldn't tell you what happened yesterday any more than I could tell you what will happen tomorrow, except that both will be good. Rafi, clothed in sunlight, stooping to dive into the river. Pawel, the stillness of the air in his eyes. Both as much a part of nature as a pebble on a river bed.

They're helping me recover from the operations, day by day. Pawel helps me to shave my chin, and Rafi my legs. Both of them have barely been outside this village, so that while the grocer may refuse to serve me, Pawel cycles to my cottage on his bike without gears, laden with bread and fruit. Rafi sits in church with her face as pure as silk, her hand clasped in mine.

Pawel's father came into his room one day, and demanded why he hadn't invited a girl to the dance. Pawel, a school boy, decided to take Rafi, who was a fully-grown woman. They span soundlessly in the midst of the marine lights, their heads on each others' shoulders. Afterwards Pawel's father beat him ruthlessly, and Pawel came to me crying angry tears.

"I want to escape this place."

"But the life you have here is so beautiful. You swim every day -"

"You don't see me how I am, but how you want me to be!" Rafi sat in the corner reading.

"What do you mean?"

"I'm a misfit. I can't be free like you."

"Well then, we'll go to the city together," I say. Rafi looked at Pawel from the corner, the brightness of the day in her eyes.

The memory of my final operation is a haze of instruments I know I could never have seen, and the recollection of Pawel's face, then Rafi's. Mainly I recall a human body lying in pure whiteness, changing without ageing, its wounds gaining the strength of flowers. When I awoke smiled to see I had two little angels at the foot of my bed, praying for me.

That night, I remember our dark hotel room glimmering in city light, where we sat at the window gazing out. The stars seemed to be propping up the heavy night sky - overloaded, they began to fall, one by one, in a shower as beautiful as any of us had seen. Each star disappeared into the thin dull glow of the city until the sky, punctured by starlight, settled back into a black mass.

Rafi came up to my cottage a few days later with a painting she had been working on. It was of all of us, myself in the centre, and Rafi and Pawel on either side with an arm round me. I called to Pawel, who was eating in my kitchen, to come and look at the painting. At that moment, I heard a knocking at the door. I went to my window and saw Pawel's father standing there.

"Pawel! I know you're in there!"

I went to comfort Pawel, but Rafi went out to confront his father. I saw them through the kitchen window, with Rafi talking to him quietly but angrily, and then I heard him say:

"You're not my son!"

He turned and left. I saw that Pawel was near the painting, and had smeared it with his hand so that his face was obscured.

Since that day, Pawel has left the village forever. Rafi is an artist, and she has never tried to redo that painting of the three of us, even though it is one of her best. I see her cycle along every day on her old bike with no gears, I can almost smell the salt in her hair: and I think I know why. Every single person is a work of art, unfinished.