My grandfather was a card cheater...

My grandfather was a card cheater. I don’t know how honest or dishonest he really was. Did he make anyone poor? Maybe not. Maybe he only won from the rich and the crooked — I like to think so.

I never met him. I only saw one photograph: a thin man with hollow cheeks, sitting in a hospital chair, dying of tuberculosis. My father looks exactly like him. And I look like my father. So, in a way, I look like my grandfather too.

He died at fifty-five, already an old man. That generation aged quickly — no comfort, no medicine, no time to rest. Yet I feel deep respect for him. My father was only five when he lost his dad, so his influence was more like a shadow — present, but unreachable.

All I know is that he never worked with his hands. Somehow he managed to feed a family of four sons just by playing cards. That talent, that spark of risk and cunning, passed through the blood. All the men in my father’s family play cards well. Luckily, none of them made it their profession.

And I — his granddaughter — feel that same thrill, though I channel it differently. I sense in myself the same instinct: to find the shortcut, the smart way out, the unexpected move. Maybe that’s not always honesty. Maybe it’s survival.

When I look at a deck of cards, I think of him — and of the fine line between luck and danger, between magic and temptation. Cards are like portals: they let you slip for a moment into another world.

Maybe that’s what I inherited from him — the gift of turning chance into story.