What can I say about Geertje? First, I guess, I should tell you that her name starts with a guttural, throat-clearing sound like the ch in German, or like that found in the Scottish word loch. Then it glides into "care CHA." I hear that it's a fairly common name in the Netherlands.
But the woman herself? It's hard for me to put together a coherent picture of her or of her life - she was not a gal who felt obligated to enslave herself to the truth.
She was not so much a person that you might know, she was more an event that happened to you. What do I know about her with any certainty? Well, she was going to college the whole time I knew her, which was about three years. I have no idea what she was studying, or even if she actually attended classes. I saw her eating in the cafeteria. I visited her in her dorm. I saw her carrying books. I heard her talk about writing papers. She fancied herself to be a poetess.
She was clever with numbers, she could speak at least four languages. She wore her ash blond hair long and straight. Her eyes were green with a bit of gold foil around the pupils, but her irises never spun like Catherine wheels that I ever noticed. She was trim and sexy with a little girl's smile, and usually dressed to thrill. At times, as many as nine guys considered her their girlfriend.
She kept multiple addresses and she seemed to be known by a variety of names. Once, during a one month period, four different men - none of whom knew any of the others - told me that she was living with them. I'm sure she was. I knew of at least one woman who had fallen hopelessly in love with her, and was appalled, confused, and humiliated that she had.
I never knew her to do any work, although she had a talent for getting jobs. Jobs with company cars. Jobs with commissions from other people's sales. Jobs that paid remarkably well for a women barely into her twenties.
I was never more than a casual friend to her, one of her stable of teenager tranquilizers. I knew that the only reason she had anything to do with me at all was because in that era I was a magnificent animal with muscular legs and a small waist. She would show up, or have me over wherever she was staying at the time, knock me down and have her way with me, then disappear or kick me out. Sometimes it made me feel a bit tawdry, but I was young and full of lust and jism, and she had some truly breathtaking ways of dealing with that.
She was a sort of a juggernaut, a two-handed engine that existed only to bring about her own comfort and well-being. I guess she reckoned that a friend was someone you practiced your lying on. One did best to simply not be where she wanted to go. She never got angry that I knew about, but with no malice at all, she ruined relationships and complicated people's lives as it served her ends.
So. What does she have to do with all this? Not very much at all, but she shows up later, and I don't want anyone confused about who she is.