Julia Lukshina's "Grandpa" is now up at The Bangalore Review

Julia’s “Grandpa” was one of the first of her stories I ever translated. Its quiet surface hides turmoil in the depths. I realized I was hooked on Julia’s writing when I found myself staring at the wall trying to decide how best to render the “ну” in “ну и так далее” given the way the character Anna Ivanovna speaks and behaves in the story. (Reader, I ended up going with “She sighed and said, ‘And so on.’”). I should add that although I’m not fond of many of Grandpa’s qualities, I do wish I was as spry in the knees as he is…

Then Grandpa walked in. Tall—he just cleared the lintel—and smiling, undoubtedly well over seventy, but quite strong. He was holding a prickly plaid lap blanket. He handed it to me and stepped over to the stove.

“So then, girls, getting colder?”

He squatted before the stove, opened the stove door, and dug around inside it with a poker. He shut the door. He stood up. Easily, like a forty-year-old.