Her name was Katerina Alexandrovna and she was the widow of a Turkish officerwhich was presumably the source of her notoriety, as her actual habits were beyond reproach. She lived with her two young daughters in a big yellow frame house on the outskirts of town. The fact that nobody was quite sure how she supported her family did little to enhance her reputation. On the one hand, there were rumors that she had inherited money from her father, Alexander Constantinovich Orlov, a landowner who sold all his property and invested the proceeds in the local mines. On the other hand, he had returned to town only occasionally and was known to be a frequent guest in the fashionable parlors of Moscow and St. Petersburg. As a result, there was no lack of spiteful gossip to the effect that he had ended his days frittering away his fortune on women and gambling (his wife, the daughter of an impoverished master tailor, had died prematurely of consumption), leaving only a large debt behind. According to this version of events, Katerina had inherited nothing but the ramshackle house, nothing at least that could provide for the needs of her family. Since a number of people claimed to have seen her entertaining distinguished gentlemen, merchants all the way from Jekaterinburg, it wasn’t long before insinuations, unambiguous in their import and sometimes highly explicit, began to fly.
For her part, Katerina appeared more or less unfazed by the malicious talk. Robust, shapely, and vivacious, she had a pair of candid blue eyes that could transfix, if not downright hypnotize, the produce vendors at the market as she bombarded them with questions about the quality of their wares and brazenly wrangled over price. She was renowned for her bargaining skills, an accomplishment that only provided additional fodder for the particularly malevolent detractors who harped on her alleged stinginess. As a matter of fact, merchants weren’t the only victims of her penetrating gazewhoever she met on the way to town ended up peering into her unyielding eyes while she merrily exclaimed, ‘Good morning, Ivan Petrovich’ or ‘Good afternoon, Irina Vlasevna.’ Some of the townspeople would simply ignore her, while others returned her greeting with an embarrassed mumble, but there were few who walked away unaffected. Of course, she exerted the most power of all over the opposite sex. Many men no doubt dreamed about her at night, though they would scarcely admit it to their wives. And even during the time when I was totally captivated by Rosa, Katerina had succeeded in making a definite impression on me as well.
Although Katerina was ten years my senior, she exuded a kind of youthful charm that belied her age. There was something childlike about her round face with its full, eternally pink cheeks. Her petite little nose turned up ever so slightly. She had a broad mouth and ample lips. Despite a barely noticeable twist in the middle, her eyebrows were thin and finely etched. Her forehead was high and flat. She wore her curly chestnut hair in a bun. All in all, she possessed an ageless Russian beauty, as though she had just stepped out of a portrait by an old master. With the exception of her sallies to the market, she rarely made an appearance in town, spending nearly all her time with her daughters. Even Katerina’s most ardent critics had to admit that she was an accomplished seamstress. As a little girl, she had learned the craft from her mother, who in turn had picked it up from her father, the master. Katerina was just as adept with lightweight materials like silk and cotton as with ordinary cloth. She purchased her fabrics from remote places, and her orders would also come from faraway towns, frequently outside our district. The townspeople who were more benevolently inclineda distinct, if scarcely significant, minoritysoon realized that the strange gentlemen about whom so many tongues wagged were either cloth merchants with their wares in tow or customers who had come to be fitted. Nor did she lack local clients, some of whom even numbered among her mockers. They would order coats and jackets, gowns and suits. Your mother, by the way, received one of Katerina’s lovely brown satin dresses as a graduation present.
Translated by Ken Schubert.