Ester Period

Red

By Stephanie Nikolopoulos

Red enshrouds the olive trees that grow beyond the barbed wire. Ester knows she is an alien in a strange land, but now as she urges her legs forward to the refugee camp she imagines she has sought asylum on Mars. She feels so far from home. So far from everything she has ever known. 

She pauses, presses one of the leaves between her forefinger and thumb, slides her pointer across the grainy surface, and looks at her skin. Red. It reminds her of the rouge her grandmother used. She feels thankful that her grandmother died of cancer before the war broke out. Her grandmother had been a world traveler, a trailblazer. It would’ve broken her heart to know what had become of her beloved Syria. 

A tingle goes down Ester’s spine. Spring’s Sirocco winds are blowing across the Mediterranean Sea, depositing the sands of the Sahara Desert onto the Greek island of Lesvos. Ester squints her eyes and works her way back home. She catches herself calling Moria Refugee Camp home. She feels a deep chill down to her bones. She is exhausted and cold. She thought the sun would’ve dried her clothes after collecting life preservers from the ocean that morning, but her pants still feel wet.

She hugs her arms across her body. She feels exhausted. Waterlogged. It’s not just the physical exertion of the work she did trying to help clean the beach for the next wave of migrants coming in. It’s having to constantly be on high alert at the camp to avoid certain men. The deep sorrow of missing her family. The boredom of standing in long lines for a bowl of tepid avgolemono soup. 

She hears a group of barefooted children snickering as she walks past. 

“Dirty! Dirty girl!” they laugh and point.

She hasn’t bathed in four days. She can’t remember the last time she looked in a mirror and can feel the red sand caked on her face. The instinct to care about her appearance had been lost somewhere on the road. Now, she just wants to lie down. 

As she rounds the corner to go to the bathroom stalls before retiring to her tent, her stomach twists in knots. She dreads passing this area of the camp. Every woman does. She’s hasn’t been here long, yet she already knows a few particularly unsavory men hang out where all the women have to pass to use the bathroom. Despite their professed religious conservatism, they seem to make a game out of taunting the women as they pass by. She hears them sucking their teeth as she approaches. Feels their leering eyes on her body. She forces herself to keep her head held high and her shoulders back. 

Even back home there had been those who’d made it their jobs to police women’s attire. Damascus had been a modern, progressive city when she was growing up. In the early ’80s, President Hafez al-Assad had crushed an uprising by Islamists belonging to the Muslim Brotherhood, and when his son, Bashar, took over in 2000 he supported a secular, Baathist order. A lot of Muslim girls wore the hijab, but it was also common to see women without the headscarf at all. In 2010, President Assad had even banned the full niqab in schools, though some Muslim husbands still forced their wives to wear the face veil in public settings. These women, always accompanied by husbands or fathers or uncles or brothers, were occasionally seen on their way to the mosque, with just their eyes visible through a small slit in the heavy fabric. A year later, with pressure from the growing conservative movement, the ban on niqabs was lifted. 

Ester wasn’t sure if it were just her maturing into a woman that had made men take notice of her more or if it were the festering religious extremism, but she felt the tide had changed in the attitude of many men.

“Psst!” a skinny man hisses at her now.

“Hey, you!” says one of his bushy eye-browed companions.

The five men continue to taunt her. She tries not to let her fear show, as her stomach continues to churn. She doesn’t know if it’s better to ignore them or to put them in their places. Throughout the camp, stories have circulated of women who’ve been assaulted for doing both, and no matter which approach the women take, they are always the ones blamed for not doing the opposite. Ester doesn’t have the energy to fight today. Her body is beginning to ache. Just when she has passed them, when she thinks she is in the clear, she hears their tone shift.

“You have no shame.”

“Unclean! Filthy woman!”

There is a long line at the bathroom stalls. There always is. Even at the back of the line, she can already smell the stench of the urine and feces. She still hasn’t gotten used to the smell. Today the rancid odor hits her hard. She feels her stomach cramp up. As some older women join the line, she hears them whispering behind her. 

To pass the time, she watches a flock of red-rumped swallows perched in the branches of a tree. Like her, they are migrants on this island. Ester wishes for wings. She wishes she could fly far away. She isn’t sure where she’d go. She has no home to go back to now, and as asylum-seeking quotas are quickly being filled she doesn’t know if she’ll make it to America. She wonders how long she’ll live in this state of limbo—trapped between her past and her future. 

Her stomach aches. She thinks it is anxiety, or maybe the exertion of bending up and down to pick up life preservers. It’s been at least two hours since she’s been anywhere near the ocean, and she still felt wet. A horrible thought occurs to her. She starts to do the math. She’s been in Greece less than a month. She’d had her period right before she’d left. She’d timed it that way, not wanting to worry about crippling cramps and loading down her backpack with feminine products when she’d already be worried about border police and traffickers as she made the dangerous journey to Turkey to seek out a boat to cross the Mediterranean.  

In the stall now, as she hovers over the dirty toilet, careful not to let her skin touch anything, she blinks back tears at the sight of her blood-soaked underwear and sees the deep red stain that has reached all the way through her jeans. The one pair of pants she’d packed. 

The stress has caused her period to come early. There is no toilet paper. Nothing for her to wipe herself with. No way to clean up the mess. Hot tears roll down her cheeks. Where can she find feminine hygiene products in a refugee camp? As the women yell for her to hurry up, she pulls her pants back up and wipes her face. Her tears mix with the red sands of Africa into a paste on the back of her hand. Tying her cardigan around her waist, despite the chill of the Siricco wind, she goes to collect olive leaves she can use until she can figure out where to purchase pads.