A Woman from the Homeland.. A Short Story by Omaima Abdelaziz on Survival and Dignity
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Omaima Abdelaziz
In a remote village on the banks of the river, Nadia lived among piles of books written in Russian. A young professor of Russian literature, she taught the children of farmers to love Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, planting in them the values of dignity and self-worth. One of her most repeated sayings was: the soul can neither be bought nor sold.
On a bitter autumn dawn, armed gangs stormed the village. Bullets and screams left no time for mercy. Nadia was abducted along with thirty girls and women. They were forced into rusty trucks and driven across the desert for days.
They arrived at a slave market in a border town. There, Nadia stood like a statue carved from ice, staring into the glassy eyes of the buyers. She was sold to the first man who approached: an overweight arms dealer who said nothing, only paid in gold and pushed her into a dark room. Later, he sold her again to other corrupt men.
With every transfer, Nadia memorized their faces as if they were characters in a miserable novel. Deep within herself, she whispered lines from Crime and Punishment, as though suffering itself could be read in a low voice inside the prison of the soul.
After years of captivity, the army freed her during a sudden raid on one of the gangs’ camps. Military doctors found her weak and exhausted, carrying three small children with no known fathers, and a fourth child hidden in her womb.
Nadia returned to her burned village. She did not cry. She did not ask about the past. She opened her scattered library, gathered her four children around her, and said:
“You belong to no one. You are free. Life is waiting for you to leave your mark with dignity and pride. You are my new story, the one we will write together.”
Nadia withdrew from the world and began writing in her crumbling house. She wrote about women who bend like wheat after a storm, then rise and grow again. She wrote about children without fathers, about roots that do not know the soil that planted them, yet still know how to bloom.
At the end of every book, she dedicated the novel: “To four souls who did not know the way, but taught me the way.”
