Ljuba Lukic - Deca

That night, Ljuba couldn’t sleep. He heard the wind whistling through a crack in the loft wall. The next morning, before the children arrived, he climbed up with a hammer and a strip of old sheepskin. He nailed it over the crack. Then he noticed the loft ladder was slippery. He spent an hour carving small, rough footholds into each rung.

Ljuba grunted. He didn’t know much about children. He knew about wind, frost, and the weight of a saw. But he looked past her at the road, where twenty small faces stared up at him with a mixture of fear and curiosity. He stepped aside.

The first day was chaos. The children were afraid of his silence, and he was afraid of their noise. They knocked over his neatly stacked firewood and a little girl named Milica cried when she saw his old hunting knife on a shelf. ljuba lukic deca

When the schoolhouse was finally fixed, Marija came to thank him. The children lined up to say goodbye. Milica, the one who had cried at the knife, ran back and hugged his leg. “Don’t be lonely, dedo,” she whispered. “We are your deca now.”

One autumn, the school in the next town over broke down. A pipe burst, flooding the only classroom. Desperate, the young teacher, Marija, knocked on Ljuba’s door. “Dedo Ljuba,” she said, using the respectful term for grandfather. “Could we borrow your hayloft? Just for a few weeks. The deca need a roof.” That night, Ljuba couldn’t sleep

He smiled. He had spent his whole life cutting things down. But that autumn, twenty small seeds had grown in his house. And for the first time in a long time, his home was full.

Ljuba Lukić was once the strongest man in his village, a woodcutter who could split an oak in half with three swings of his axe. But time had softened his muscles and quieted his home. His own children had grown and moved to the city, leaving him with a house that echoed. He nailed it over the crack

Ljuba Lukić stood in the empty hayloft. He looked at the sheepskin over the crack, the carved ladder rungs, and a tiny, crooked drawing of a man with an axe left behind on a beam.