Dutch Drama

As a 22 year-old college senior, I had to give up the sweet one-bedroom apartment I had all to myself so I could quit my part-time job and blitz out my very last semester. I was driving around different apartment complexes near my university; at one that I liked, I spotted a tenant throwing trash in the dumspter, and rolled down my window to ask her where the leasing office was. She approached me and responded in a howlingly loud voice, “EETZ RIIIIGHT OVAH THEEEEEEEAH. DO YOU WAAANT TO MOOOVE HEEEAH AND BE MY ROOOOOOOM MAAAAATE?” Turns out, Svetka was a 32-year old community college student who was here from the Netherlands, studying herbology, operating on a theory that people could survive by ingesting only herbal supplements instead of eating actual food. She told me all this in the first 10 minutes of our meeting. And I agreed to move in with her anyway.

I soon found out that the herbal supplement-only diet wasn’t cutting it; about once every two weeks, Svetka would stop at the Burger King drive-through, order one of everything on the menu and bring it all home to eat over a period of three or four days. This meant rotting, nasty burgers and fries laying out on our kitchen counters, accumulating flies and ants; she would still eat all of it. Our kitchen smelled like grease and bad gas the entire time I lived there. She looked like the blonde girl from ABBA and carried a picture of ABBA in her wallet at all times. Her opening remarks to most new acquaintances was: “DOOONT YOO THIIIIINK I LOOOOOK LIKE ABBA?” Instead of staying in her own room to talk to her family back home in the middle of the night, she chose to roam the hall in front of my bedroom to talk loudly and even shout sometimes.

Most disturbingly, Svetka asked me for “relationship” advice all the time about her infatuation with a bartender in our town, who had a live-in girlfriend and showed no interest in her whatsoever. When I told her it sounded like she was wasting her time, she would literally pretend I hadn’t said anything and would ask me the question again. To attract his attention, she bought “naughty bunny”-themed lingerie and wore it to the bar on Halloween. With no clothes over it. She kissed a random stranger at the bar in an attempt to make him jealous; the stranger had a bad cold sore, and Svetka caught herpes from him. Then, one school night, I was woken up by the sound outside my bedroom door of someone dragging something heavy across the floor. I didn’t want to deal with whatever Svetka was doing at that moment and went back to bed. I awoke the next day to hear a man talking on the balcony that connected Svetka’s and my rooms. I eavesdropped enough to hear that it was the bartender, telling someone on his cell phone that he was unsure how he had gotten to Svetka’s apartment, that his head felt groggy. Svetka had apparently somehow drugged him at the bar and kidnapped him at our apartment!

The second my lease was up, I bolted from that apartment, passive-aggressively leaving most of my horribly tacky and heavy furniture for Svetka to deal with. I found out via e-mail about three months later that she had been deported for violating the terms of her visa.