The Lizard Cage (15 page)

On the very edge of the lapping gray water, Hpay Hpay prods the soft sand with his own walking stick. “Look at that,” and he points with his chin to the water’s edge. “There was a crocodile here last night. Maybe it was Rain Cloud himself.” Inspired by the river, Hpay Hpay told them Rain Cloud the Crocodile stories last night.

“There was no crocodile!” Aung Min looks up at him, his small mouth puckered with disbelief.

“There was! You can still see the place under the water where his fat tail made a groove deep in the sand. Look! And
swish-swoosh
, he stepped into the water. See?”

Teza grins slyly at his father. The mark, already half filled with sediment, must be from a boat’s keel. Rain Cloud the famous crocodile doesn’t swim in the Irrawaddy but in the Rangoon River. Teza has heard the stories
many times. But Aung Min is just ten years old, so of course he forgets important details. And he is easier to fool.

Now Aung Min is squinting at the imprints of men’s bare feet, their toes dug, one by one, deep in the sand. With round eyes, his hands rising up and down at his sides like propellers, he declares, “There are the marks of his big claws! It’s true! Rain Cloud was here last night!”

Their father leans down and whispers, “Now you see why your mother and I don’t want you to come down to the river alone. Because it would be frightening to meet up with a very large crocodile. Wouldn’t it?”

Even though Teza’s eleven and a half, he half believes what Hpay Hpay says. He adores his father this way, making a legend true beside the water. Teza takes hold of Aung Min’s bare elbow and whispers, “And Rain Cloud would want to swim us over to the other side, just the way he carried the prince over on his scaly back, remember?”

“But we wouldn’t go!” shouts Aung Min, making both Teza and Hpay Hpay jump.

Their father straightens his small, lean frame. “No, you wouldn’t go, because we still have a lot of pagodas to visit on this side of the river. Let’s go back up to the guesthouse. May May’s made lunch. She wants to have a picnic outside under the big tree.
La la la
. Come on.” With a smile, he turns away from the river and begins to walk up the hill, the boys scrambling behind him.

Teza breathes in, breathes himself out of memory. He’s supposed to be meditating, not wandering around in the past. Yet he would like to stay here forever with his father, his brother, his mother up the hill, all of them held safe in this realm of light and red dust and gray-yellow water, with hundreds of double-storied temple steps to ascend and mazes of brick to lose themselves in, though they never get truly lost, because the cavelike passageways always lead them out again into dry, hot sunlight.

In the Golden Age, the great King Anawrahta had an army of white elephants, a ton of ivory, many ingots of gold and silver. Anawrahta gave, with the princes and kings who followed him, hundreds of measures of bronze and iron, white copper and red copper, nine kinds of gems, to make the kingdom great for the Lord Buddha. They filled the granaries with countless baskets of paddy rice, and their gifts of salt were enough to cover the temple platforms like northern snow.

But King Kyansittha’s gold has worn away from the round stupas of the pagodas. Alaungsithu and all his riches are less than dust. King Narathihapate fled from Kublai Khan’s grandson Yesu Timor, the Mongol invader who ended the glory of Pagan. Only the temples still stand, the round bases of the pagodas, pounded daily by the sun, eaten away by rain and winter winds.

Teza follows his father upward. But when he reaches the top of the bank, Aung Min is no longer behind him and their father is far ahead, near one of the white temples. He looks down and sees the bare earth between his child’s feet, ochre dust coating his toes and ankles. When he raises his head again, he sees Hpay Hpay walking up the steps of the many-tiered temple. A small figure under the pale, enormous sky, he follows his father.

Inside the temple, the air is cool as a grotto’s. The arched windows open in three directions. To the east, there is no window but the Buddha. Teza kneels in the confluence of breezes, his toes almost cold on the flagstone floor. He holds his hands together in reverence and bows, touching his forehead to the stone three times. Then his eyes rise above the garlands of flowers, above the flickering candles and smoking incense. He looks past the rounded knees and the plaster flaking from the still robes.

In the crumbling hands of the clay-brick Buddha, in the worn clay face, the boy catches a glimpse of his father disappearing, his features resolving into dust.

Then only one man remains, breathing in, breathing out of his cage, swaying slightly with the pulsing tide of his own blood. He goes in deep, deeper, until his bones grow light as pumice stone. Even his stomach, bitter with acid and little bones, becomes a quiet hollow. The breathing lets him be patient before his hunger like the holy men are patient before the teachings that still elude them.

W
hen Teza thinks of his father, he can sometimes smell the distinctive inky scent of carbon paper.

Even buying it was dangerous. Ne Win’s regime orchestrated shortages to stem the circulation of subversive writing. His father tried to get around this by stocking up, but the military intelligence agents paid shopkeepers to report anyone who bought large amounts of carbon paper. So he gave his young student doctors money and sent them to different areas of Rangoon to buy supplies, making sure they changed their routines and varied the shops to avoid arousing suspicion. If questioned, they always said the paper was for their tutorials.

And so it was. For almost a decade Hpay Hpay managed to run secret tutorials without detection, supplying thousands of people in Rangoon and Mandalay with an underground news source. He executed this clandestine operation at the kitchen table, with the smell of curry and garlic wafting through the air.

Teza remembers how the carbon paper on tutorial evenings slowly won out over the tantalizing kitchen smells. His father read slowly and succinctly from various pieces of newsprint and hand-copied missives. Teza sat at the back of the kitchen on a small stool, listening to the quiet, persistent stream
of Hpay Hpay’s voice without understanding what it meant. Young men and women, faithful interns from Rangoon General, sat on either side of the kitchen table, bent over the inky sheets, writing hard.

Sweat beaded on skin, slid down necks and noses while words filled page after page. Sweat dampened shirt collars and the waists of longyis. Windows were closed to make sure no one in the side street heard the doctor reading; the kitchen became a sauna. The interns treated Teza’s father with great deference and affection. If he murmured past the last of the cicadas into the cricket-song of night, the young doctors followed his quiet voice with black-smudged hands. The carbon paper rustled and sighed, sending a strong scent of ink to the small boys who sat poised on the periphery of the writing circle, anxious to be inside it, where their father was. They were both jealous of the young men and women, who knew how to read and write. Teza had just learned to read, and Aung Min, a year behind him, was still memorizing the alphabet.

Though the interns changed every two or three years, their work remained the same: they pressed urgent words through several sheets of paper, then left the pages with May May, who organized the notes. She and the doctor passed them out to friends and colleagues, who in turn passed them on to others, until an elaborate network of people had read and absorbed the worn hand-copied writings.

The boys knew the work was a secret. Their parents told them many times that they were never to talk about the tutorials with anyone but the fledgling doctors. No one was allowed to hear what they were doing. Then, one particularly hot April night, Hpay Hpay suddenly stopped reading. Teza waited for him to take a drink of water. He did not. The interns shook out their cramped hands and began to wipe handkerchiefs over their faces. The doctor turned around. Everyone waited. He seemed to be examining the closed windows. Looking over his shoulder with a mischievous grin, he asked, “It’s too hot, isn’t it?” His voice was unexpectedly loud. “We’re going to suffocate in here. Just what Ne Win wants.”

He slowly unlatched and opened the windows. The young men and women looked at each other. Daw Sanda put three fingers over her mouth as her husband pushed the wooden shutters open. A current of cool air immediately poured into the room, bathing everyone’s faces and necks. Teza’s father turned around calmly. Before picking up his papers and continuing,
he leaned over, his palms spread wide on the stained wood of the table. “Let them hear,” he said. “We are all cowards at heart, but we must try not to be afraid. If we are always afraid, they will always win.” He read for the rest of the tutorial in the cool air of evening.

They copied widely, everything from banned news items and political satires to translations of Che Guevara and Lu Xun and directives from the Communist Party of Burma. The CPB sent out information about political and guerrilla action as well as strike organization. The doctor wasn’t a card-carrying communist, but he was ready to consider any alternative to Ne Win’s dictatorship.

Shortly after Teza’s fourteenth birthday, he lay restless in bed, trying not to wake his little brother, who breathed steadily beside him. That night his father had given him wonderful news: he would be allowed to have his own sheet of carbon paper and try his hand at writing with the interns. Perhaps his copy wouldn’t be usable, his father warned him, but he would be permitted to try.

Finally the ink would be his, smudged on his fingertips and shirt cuffs; he would join Hpay Hpay in his heroic, clandestine work. Sleep was out of the question. He lay wide awake in bed, pleased with his insomnia. Downstairs, right beneath him, his parents murmured in the sitting room. Teza wished he could join their serious conversation.

Lifting up the shadow of the mosquito net to feel a breath of chilly December air on his face, he thought about the grand and daring act he would soon perform. The secrecy surrounding the tutorials was something he savored, a treat his friends at school were not allowed to eat. With one hand touching Aung Min’s back and the other flung extravagantly and bravely outside the mosquito net, he began to drift off, imagining how impressed the young doctors would be when he sat down with them next week, the newest and youngest recruit.

The knock yanked him out of shallow sleep. Why would his mother knock at the bedroom door? He rose up on his elbow, dream-addled, half smiling in his confusion. The knock came again. This time he understood someone was knocking at the front door. Not the hurried rapping of a man with a sick child or with a wife in early labor, it was strangely polite. Who else would be calling so late?

Teza held his breath. Aung Min was still asleep beside him. When his
mother rushed into the bedroom, whispering, “Wake up, wake up! Come and say goodbye to your father,” Teza was already swinging his skinny legs to the floor.

“Aung Min!” He shook his little brother’s relaxed body until it tensed awake. “Aung Min! Get up now. Hpay Hpay’s going away.”

There were three men standing in the room. As soon as Teza saw that one of them was wearing trousers, he knew his father was in danger. Dr. Kyaw Win Thu did not like to be demonstrative in front of strangers, but he dropped to a crouch and enfolded both his children in his arms, so tightly that Teza lost his breath. When he released them, he continued to hold each boy tightly by the hand. He spoke quietly and quickly.

“You must be very, very good boys while I am away. May May needs your help. I will be home as soon as I can. Don’t forget me.” He smiled at them, but neither was fooled. Their eyes began to shine with tears.

The doctor squeezed his wife’s hands while looking into her dry eyes. She was not going to let military intelligence agents see her cry. Later the doctor was to wonder what more he could have done or said in the act of farewell. He had spent so many years loving her, it did not seem possible to convey this emotion in a brief, exposed gesture. He thought of his favorite endearment for her, “my moonlight”—a reference to the ancient Pali meaning of her name—but he could not say it in front of military agents. So he simply held his wife’s hands for a moment longer.

Somewhere behind and below them, Aung Min asked, “Where is Hpay Hpay going? Why is he going?”

T
he authorities sent the doctor to a work camp in the north. The expense and the two days of travel involved in reaching the prison camp from Rangoon prevented Daw Sanda from visiting him very often. Taking the children with her on the buses and trains and, for the last leg of the journey, the ox cart—for a thirty-minute visit with their father—was exhausting. Twice they reached the camp and were refused permission to enter. Sometimes she had to bribe the guards to let her and the boys in. As months stretched into years, she sold most of their furniture. The wedding silks went too, then her jewelery, then her mother’s and most of her grandmother’s
jewelry. Each possession paid for the next trip upcountry, and for her husband’s food. He was the first to wait for parcels from her.

Three years after he was sentenced, the doctor woke one morning during the rainy season with a fever. He had been feeling tired, almost sick, sore in his muscles for a day or two, but he had attributed it to his new work detail in the nearby stone quarry. When the fever started, his first thought was malaria. The rains brought mosquitoes; some of the men in the camp could barely stay upright. He already had the more common vivax strain in his body, so he hoped to sweat out the attack on a little supply of paracetamol and quinine. He waited for the chills that follow malarial fever. They did not come. In the middle of the second night of high fever, violent cramping in his gut twisted the length of his body from one side to another, a whip of pain snapping inside him.

Dr. Kyaw Win Thu realized it wasn’t malaria at all.

The vomiting and diarrhea came before morning, with such violence that two friends held him over one latrine pail as he heaved into another. Such is the work of amoebic dysentery. During their invasion and colonization of the intestine, the parasites produce a poison into the mucous membrane of the gut. The weaker the body, through malnutrition or fatigue, the more severe the illness. The raw lining of those long, many-folded coils and loops refuses its normal task of absorption and begins to secrete fluid instead. The doctor tried to drink water but immediately threw it up. He knew he was dehydrating from the inside out. He also knew that if he didn’t get antibiotics, the parasites would burrow into the intestinal wall, causing peritonitis, or they would enter his bloodstream and infect other organs, most likely his liver.