Free Director's Cut by Arthur Japin

way he’d sat behind her on the bicycle, and when he saw her widely dilated eyes roll back at the start of the epileptic fit, he held her tight with all his strength.
    â€œLet it go, Gala, I’m here, sweetheart, I’m here, aren’t I? Gala darling, dear Gala, Gala darling, it’ll be all right.”
    They could have been wrestling with passion, catching each other and then slipping away from each other again, the way new lovers raise each other’s body only to press it down again. Shoulders, feet, arms, and legs banged against the bottom of the boat. Sweat began to flow and heavy breathing sounded in the night. If people had been walking along the quay, they would have smiled or felt a pang of jealousy, thinking back on the hours in which they themselves had been snared by that kind of love. The jolting of the young bodies spread over the water in circles that grew until they broke against the banks.
    On the bottom of the boat, Maxim measured his strength against Gala’s. He was stronger, but for the first few minutes she had the advantage of a madness that stopped at nothing. Even her fiercest swipes seemed involuntary, as if controlled by something beyond her. Over and over he was caught out by the erratic way her muscles contracted, hitting and kicking. Her movements were unpredictable. Dangerous. As if determined to inflict injury. Again and again her head bashed against the ribs of the boat, and whenever he leapt in between to cushion the blows there was always an arm or leg that lashed out with wood-splintering power, cutting and grazing itself in the process.
    But finally her body came to rest and rolled back. The muscles that had gone through such contortions relaxed, still quivering from the strain. Maxim leaned back with relief and gently let her slack body sag against his. Now moving only to the rhythm of his breathing, she lay there heavily. One by one, he dislodged the black hairs stuck to her forehead. He stroked her cheek and wiped the drops of blood away from the corner of her mouth. He spat on his thumb to wash away the smudged mascara under her lashes. Then he wrapped his arms around her, felt her breathing, and, for a few moments, felt so intimately linked to this woman that he thought they would never be separate again.
    When he became aware of the chafing and burning of his owninjuries, he rested his head. For a long time, he lay there like that with Gala’s head on his chest, looking at the moonlight, broken by all the facets of the diamond, differently every time, sparkling and unpredictable, falling inside the boat in countless rays and colors.
    The boat had been motionless for quite a while. Maxim opened the glass hatch, lifted Gala out, and laid her down carefully on the sand. They had run aground on a large sandbank just outside the city—maybe this is Amsterdam’s beach, he thought, with the sea far away, at low tide, or, if the city doesn’t happen to lie on the coast, we’ll make the broad, empty flats an excavation for the new harbor. Maxim took off his shirt and soaked it in the water. Then he thoroughly cleaned all those places where she had soiled herself in her trance, including the most intimate. He had never touched a woman there. He did it slowly and gently, but without hesitation or ulterior motives, because, all this time, the only thing he wanted was for Gala to regain consciousness feeling cool and clean and with nothing to be ashamed of.
    When she opened her eyes, he was sitting next to her on the ground and dabbing her forehead. It took a while before she could make herself understood. Meanwhile he tried to help by asking one question after the other—“How are you? What’s my name? What happened? Can you see how beautiful the moon is on the water? Are you thirsty? Does it hurt? Do you feel like crying? Shall I sing for you? Where are you now?”—not because he wanted answers, but because he was afraid that her