Anja · 24

About Anja

Who she is, and what a night with her is like

Anja is 24 and Serbian, from a village on the flat land outside Novi Sad. She is the least mysterious woman here and treats that as a feature: she says what she wants, in the order she thought of it, and she will not leave you working out where you stand by Thursday. Her days are weather, plants, the river and her phone. Whatever level you open at is the level she answers at, from the very first line.

There is no puzzle here, and she would find building one exhausting. Anja says things out loud — that she is in a good mood, that she would rather be outside, that a subject has stopped interesting her. It makes her unusually easy company, which reads as strange for a minute if the last few women you wrote to were performing something. The one thing she will not tolerate is being handled: softened up, steered, walked politely around. Give her the blunt version of whatever it is and she is on your side inside a message.

Novi Sad sits an hour up the Danube from Belgrade, in Vojvodina, and she keeps Serbian hours while being a morning person, which nobody there forgives her for. At nine in the evening in Chicago it is four in the morning where she is and she is asleep; by the time you are on a first coffee she has already been outside. Her country is the flat kind — poplar rows, maize to the horizon, a sand beach on the river that the whole city uses in July, fog that sits on Fruška Gora until noon. She has a grandmother in the village, a greenhouse with the glass gone soft, and no ambition at all to live in a capital.

She opens at whatever level you do. A cautious hello gets a real answer and a question back; something forward gets met head-on in the same breath, because she has no patience for the week of pretending that usually comes first. She writes in bursts, slightly out of order, and one of them will be a photograph of the sky because it went pink. Her questions are specific and vague answers irritate her. If the talk turns to arranging something in the real world she says no once, plainly, without inventing an excuse, and then picks up precisely where the two of you were.

She was photographed where she actually spends her time. White cotton on an unmade bed, string lights along a dark headboard, a strapless bodysuit with her legs folded under her — and black lace with the phone still in her hand, which is what she is doing in a good half of them. Then outside: a greenhouse with the glass fogged over, a wooden deck built out across a lake, a porch with rain arriving, a towel with the sun full on her. The cold ones are the best of the set — a chalet with snow banked against the door, snow coming down while she stands in it, and weather going on behind the glass she is leaning against.

Where Anja is from

Novi Sad, in Vojvodina, where the land is flat enough that you can watch tomorrow's weather arriving.

From

Novi Sad, Serbia

Speaks

Serbian, Hungarian, English

Questions

Questions about Anja

What does it cost to say hello to Anja?

Not for the first eight messages. Those eight belong to whichever chat you open first and they do not split across several, so decide before you start typing.

How is Anja's time priced?

$22 buys thirty minutes with her. Pictures, clips and voice notes sit outside that meter completely — they come through gifts instead of minutes — and the meter does not begin until the free eight have been used.

Why is there no call button on Anja's page?

Not available for her. That feature only switches on once a woman's real face has been filmed for calling, and Anja's has not been, so nothing appears where the button would go rather than a stranger appearing on the screen. Her voice, her photographs and her clips do not depend on it.

What does Anja speak, and where exactly is she?

Novi Sad, in the Vojvodina region of northern Serbia. Serbian at home, English with you, and enough Hungarian from school and neighbours to argue in it. She reads Cyrillic and Latin without noticing which one she is looking at.

Will Anja bring up what I told her before?

She does, and she is direct with it: the name of your manager, the date of the scan, what the letter said. Expect to be asked about it before you have got your coat off.

When is Anja usually awake?

Early, which is unusual for this roster. Her morning runs while North America sleeps and her evening lands in the American afternoon, so she is the one to write to over breakfast rather than at midnight.