The Clasp
By Kemal Varol
Translated by Dayla Rogers
“You know what they say, Gobi? They say this age of ours—eleven, twelve—is going to follow us for the rest of our lives.”
“So what?” said Gobi. “Let it follow us.”
“You don’t get it, man,” I said, shaking my head. “I mean, whatever we go through at this age is supposed to stick to us like a curse. All of it. Even when we’re forty, we’ll still be the same pieces of crap we are today.”
He gave me a firm slap on the back of the neck.
“You worry too much!” he said.
“I’m telling you,” I went on, “one day we’ll be married, have kids and a house, everything will be just peachy, and then one night we’ll wake up in a cold sweat and throw ourselves out a window.”
“And then what?”
“While we’re standing by the window, miserably smoking a cigarette, this age of ours will come strolling by and wave at us. ‘I was left unfulfilled,’ It’ll say. ‘Come, complete me.’”
Gobi could care less about what I was talking about. We were sitting under the old acacia tree beside the road leading to the liquor factory. We wore our tattered pants and torn T-shirts. Stink wafted up from our rubber sandals. We looked down the road with a mix of boredom and unease. Tired fathers trudged by, and weary mothers plodded along, their patchwork dresses sweeping the ground. Gobi held a cheap matchstick. He lit it, placed it atop his tongue, and put it out by closing his mouth around it. Then he spat out the extinguished stick and joyfully blew the smoke into the air.
“I bet you stole that line from one of those books of yours,” he said.
Gobi never took the things I said seriously.
He rested his back against the tree and gazed at the smoke spewing from the chimneys of the liquor factory.
“Got a cig?” he asked.
I stuck my hand in my pocket and pulled out a half-smoked Maltepe. I rolled the cigarette between my fingers, trying to soften the filter, which had been wet by someone else’s lips at one point but then dried out in my pocket.
“Light it up,” said Gobi, holding out a match.
I burst into a fit of coughing on my first drag. My eyes felt like they were about to pop out of my sockets. Gobi gave me a couple slaps on the back, took the cigarette, and rested it on the edge of his lips like a cowboy. Once my coughing had subsided, I spat and looked at Gobi, who was shifting the cigarette right and left with his tongue.
Gobi was my closest pal. He’d moved to town from the village a few years ago. He had curly hair. But rather than springing up in bouncy locks, it clung to his head like felt. His nose looked like it had been pressed down right in the center, making his nostrils flare out. This, combined with his pointy canine teeth made him look kind of scary. And he had a mouth like a sewer. Though he flew off the handle from time to time, if you ask me, he was soft as cotton on the inside.
We spent the whole day pacing around town with our hands in our pockets. On some days we amused ourselves with crazies in the square. Their numbers were on the rise because of the villages being cleared out by the fighting. And sometimes we tried to tag along with the local communist dudes. But in those days, they’d lost the taste for the cause, and as things with the state got worse, their numbers thinned out. We had no choice but to return to our manure-stinking neighborhood. We spent the day sitting on the wall of the briquette factory, trying to keep our balance, waiting for time to pass. We listened to the occasional announcements from the city hall speakers. We watched the passersby, and then turned our ears back to the sounds of the neighborhood’s goats and cows. As they were run out of their villages, people didn’t just bring their crazies along, but their livestock, too.
Gobi was the first to notice the peddler. His finger crooked into a question mark and pointed in the guy’s direction.
“Hey man, what’s he selling?” he asked. “Those ladies are swarming all around him.”
Atop a big, wooden cart were piled all kinds of socks, undershirts, headscarves, long johns and underpants. The peddler lifted his head and started servicing the women gathered around him.
“You blind?” I said. “He’s selling underwear and stuff.”
“I’m not talking about the underwear!” said Gobi. “I’m asking about that thing the ladies keep lifting in the air.”
Atop the cart, next to the piles of undershirts and briefs, was a stack of some weird things. The ladies of the neighborhood kept reaching into the piles. They covered their mouths with the edges of their headscarves and giggled amongst themselves as they showed each other the two-cupped pieces of clothing and placed them back on the wagon.
Gobi was still confused.
“What’s that thing for?” he asked.
I was also clueless. All we could see were two cups dotted with hearts connected by a clasp being lifted up and then set back down by the ladies. The salesman opened and closed the clasp and swung the thing like a pinwheel as he explained something to the women. Whatever he was saying, it made them laugh.
We knew what panties and garters were for. And the undershirt that we drew a Superman “S” on without our mom finding out--we knew what that was for. But no matter how we racked our brains, we couldn’t figure out what that pile of twin peaks that the guy kept straightening was used for. Only after a while did we hear him call it a “brassiere.” We looked at one another. We still hadn’t the faintest idea what a brassiere was for.
Gobi swung his feet gleefully, knocking his heels against the wall.
“I got it, man!” he said after a long pause. “It’s a-a thing!”
He snapped his fingers.
“A what?” I asked.
“Y’know...”
He narrowed his eyes and rubbed his fingers together as he found what he was trying to say.
“When goats have babies, you know how they wrap a cloth around the udders so that the kid doesn’t drink too much milk?”
“Yeah?”
“That’s what it’s used for.”
Gobi was onto something. The brassiere looked like the cloth used to wrap a goat’s udders. No matter how hard it tried, the rascally little kid couldn’t get its fill. The milk kept from its stomach was used to make yoghurt and cheese, which our friend Domestos’ dad sold to far-off cities to feed his family. So, it seemed that a brassiere was of vital importance when it came to goats.
Only, there was one important detail that Gobi missed.
Goats had just one sack of udders.
Gobi was stretching his arms, delighted at having answered a question correctly for the first time in his life. But the taste of victory turned to ashes in his mouth. His goat theory turned out to be wrong. He started rattling off stupid ideas again, thinking he would strike on the right one somewhere. He even claimed that the bra the guy kept turning over in his hand was a slingshot. Women supposedly put a rock in the cup, stretched back the strap, and flung the stone at the heads of the husbands who made their world into a prison. Then he laughed. In the end he saw just how silly this idea was.
The women asked the prices of this and that. The salesman adjusted the front of his pants with his thumb and forefinger as he answered their questions. He looked like a real no-good. He made sure to check out the ladies as he peeled a ten-lira note from his stack and handed over the change. We saw it with our own eyes. He gave the pretty ladies better discounts. But this didn’t help solve our brassiere conundrum.
The women held up undershirts for their kids and underpants for their husbands. For their daughters, headscarves that they would soon embroider around the edges with all sorts of patterns. Some bought yarn to knit sweaters for long, winter nights. But nobody even touched the brassieres. Their faces turned beet red as they set them back in the pile. The salesman offered the women one final, low price and then made his way, hollering to announce his presence, down another street.
While the women of the neighborhood showed off the things they’d acquired through hard bargaining, our minds were still on the brassiere. Gobi was the first to hop down off the wall. He rubbed his dust-caked hands together. He patted the chalk off the back of his pants. Unable to contain my curiosity, I hopped down, too.
It wasn’t hard to find the salesman and his cart. He was on the street where the Georgian immigrants lived. The guy had a great job. He was always surrounded by women. The immigrant ladies weren’t like ours. They were more interested in the brassieres than the undershirts or the yarn. We hid around a corner and watched. Once everyone had bought something or another, the peddler began pushing his cart down another street.
He noticed us a few streets further on. He wedged a rock under the wheel of his cart and wiped the sweat from his brow. He stopped and looked us in the eye. We cast our gaze to the ground to show that we weren’t trying to steal anything. We wanted to make it clear that something was bothering us and that was why we followed him. Now the time had come to ask. Underwear went on the bottom, yarn was knitted painstakingly into sweaters, socks went on the feet, belts went on the waist but...
“What’s a brassiere for?” we asked.
“Why, you never seen a brassiere before?” asked the peddler.
We said that we hadn’t.
“Don’t your ma or your sisters use them?”
When we raised our eyebrows in the negative, he understood that we truly had no idea what a brassiere was for.
“It’s for the cold,” said the peddler.
He picked up a bra and put it on his head.
“Ladies put it over their ears when it’s chilly,” he said, tightening the clasp around his chin.
We got what he was up to. Gobi clenched his teeth. His hand crept towards the ground. There was nothing more plentiful than rocks in our town. He picked up the most jagged one he could find and scanned the peddler’s forehead. The guy looked comical with the cups of the brassiere over his ears as he impersonated a woman.
“Oh but what chilly weather we’re having today!” he tittered.
Now we were completely sure the salesman was taking us for a ride, and the first cuss flew out of Gobi’s mouth. He cursed whatever relations the salesman had—from his mother to his whole host of ancestors. The place turned into a battleground in an instant. Stones flew from one end of the street to the other.
As we ran off, we darted from right to left, dodging the rocks that the guy hurled at us.
“You’ll never learn what a brassiere is, son!” he shouted.
He strapped the bra around his chest and made like he had a pair of boobs.
Gobi threw a sharp stone, aiming for the guy’s feet, but it bounced from the ground and glanced off the peddler’s head.
“God willing,” he cried, wincing in pain, “you’ll never get the chance to undo the clasp on one of these things!”
And that was the curse of the peddler.
Kemal Varol was born in Diyarbakır in 1977. He began his literary career as a poet, publishing the poetry collections Yas Yüzükleri, Kin Divanı, Temmuzun On Sekizi, and Bakiye. Later he published the short story collections Demiryolu Öyküleri and Memleket Garları, followed by his novels Jar (2011), Haw (2014), and Ucunda Ölüm Var (2016). His newest work is a short story collection entitled Sahiden Hikâye. The novel Haw (English: Wûf) received the Cevdet Kudret Literature Prize, the Bursa Contemporary Journalists’ Association 2015 Peace Prize, and the 2017 PEN/HEIM Translation Fund Grant. The same work was named the best novel of 2014 by Sabit Fikir magazine and among the top five novels of 2000–2015 by Milliyet Sanat Dergisi. His short story collection Sahiden Hikaye received the Sait Faik Short Story Prize.
Dayla Rogers first learned Turkish in high school as a participant in Rotary Youth Exchange. After earning a degree in education, she moved to Istanbul to pursue her dream of becoming a teacher trainer. Over time, she developed a passion for Turkish literature and translation. In 2017, she received a PEN/HEIM Translation Fund Grant for Kemal Varol’s Wûf, which has been published in University of Texas Press. Her translations have appeared in Lunch Ticket, Words Without Borders and Your Impossible Voice.