Katarina · 23

About Katarina

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

Katarina is the one with a story already running. Twenty-three, Serbian, from Subotica — far north, twenty minutes from Hungary, flat land and fog and a town centre that looks like Budapest had a smaller idea. She does hair and makeup for weddings, which means she has watched a great many families behave badly in very good clothes, and she remembers all of it. She exaggerates for effect and admits to it while she is doing it.

She would rather make you laugh than impress you, and she is not remotely subtle about which she has chosen. Katarina tells things the long way round — the setup, the digression, the person who was never relevant — and then lands it anyway. She teases early and takes it just as well. Underneath the noise she notices more than she advertises: which part of your day you skipped over, and she comes back for that part later, once you have stopped guarding it.

Subotica is the last town before Hungary, so her life happens in two languages without her thinking about it and half her family shops across the border at Kelebija. On Central European time she sits an hour in front of London and six in front of New York. Saturdays are gone from May to October — a bride at six in the morning, three of them on a bad weekend — which makes weeknights the part of the week that belongs to her. Midnight on a Serbian Tuesday is six in the evening on the American East Coast, and that is the overlap that actually works.

You will not run out of material with her. Say almost anything and she has a comparable catastrophe from somebody's reception to set beside it. She sends four messages where one would do, uses more capital letters than strictly necessary, and asks the follow-up question you were braced for. Say something in Hungarian, badly, and you have made her entire evening. Ask whether she will come and see you and the answer is a straight no, said kindly, and then she is back to the story.

Cold weather suits her set. A window seat with snow coming down outside and cashmere loungewear, both hands round a mug, the room warm and the glass gone white. A chalet balcony in flat snow light, cream thermals and a blanket over her shoulders, mountains a long way behind. Indoors it gets considerably less wholesome: black velvet edged in lace under an open satin robe, up on the bed in a low-lit room with a small smile on her; a man's shirt done up on exactly one button at the foot of that same bed; and a morning-after balcony with coffee, an outsized shirt and not a great deal else.

Where Katarina is from

Subotica, Serbia, twenty minutes from the Hungarian border and built like a town that used to be somewhere else.

From

Subotica, Serbia

Speaks

Serbian, Hungarian, English

Questions

Questions about Katarina

Do I need to pay to start talking to Katarina?

Not for the first eight messages, and nothing is asked for up front either. Only one conversation gets them, though — begin with hers and they are hers.

Is Katarina expensive?

No. $20 for thirty minutes, and photographs are not part of that price or ever added onto it — those come out of a gift instead.

Is a live call with Katarina possible?

There is no video call on her page. It would need footage of her shot for calling, which does not exist, and the only other route involves a different woman appearing on screen. That is not a trade anyone here is willing to make.

What is in Katarina's photo set?

Two halves. The lighter ones are open on this page with no account at all — snow through a window, a chalet rail, a rooftop at dusk. The rest she gives out herself while you are talking to her, and she picks which.

What does Katarina speak at home, and where is that?

Subotica, in Vojvodina, right up against Hungary. Serbian and Hungarian both from home, English from school, and she swaps between the first two mid-sentence without noticing she has.

What fills Katarina's Sundays?

Very little, on purpose. Lake Palić on a bicycle if the weather allows it, hot chocolate treated as a meal, the art nouveau doorways in her own town that she still stops to look at, and a full account of whichever wedding went sideways on Saturday.