The Lizard Cage (3 page)

Aung Min watched the child hover protectively over his plate. He ate with his hands, like the men, but not a single grain of rice or bit of curry escaped his fingers. The man smiled at the boy, who glanced at him without raising his head, jaws still in motion. Aung Min realized that this was an old child locked in an old hunger. Did anyone have candy? he asked. No? What about ice cream?

Plied with sugar, the boy began to talk, first about the cold delicious cake, which he had never eaten before. How did they keep it so cold? The men smiled to see so much delight come from a sweetness they had long taken for granted.

They asked the boy about his journey. He told them. They asked him about the monastery in Rangoon. He explained about the Hsayadaw and the other children and the trouser-wearers who had tried to find him and take him away.

Aung Min leaned forward, and the boy saw that the man wanted something, badly. For the first time in that house of strangers, he felt a stab of fear.

“Little Brother,” Aung Min said, “I want you to tell me about the prison.”

The boy looked down at his hands. He didn’t know what to say. To tell about the prison was to tell about his life, but he wasn’t sure what he had to keep secret. Stammering slightly, he said, “We call it the cage.”

Aung Min chose his words carefully. “I want you to tell me about your friends there.”

This was easier. First the boy talked about his lizard, and the beetle in its box, and the great Tan-see Tiger, who gave him soap and a new towel before he left. Then he said Saya Chit Naing’s name. “And books,” he said. “My friends were books.”

Aung Min’s head tilted, almost imperceptibly, to the right. One of the monks at the monastery in Mae Hong Son had told him the boy was just learning to read. How could books have been his friends?

The boy started talking about a nat, a spirit who lived like an invisible monkey in a tree on the prison grounds. Several of Aung Min’s men glanced at each other.

Clearly this child was many things. Inarticulate and superstitious. Malnourished. Uneducated. A variation of the boy’s story had preceded his arrival, but as they sat there listening to him talk about a tree-dwelling spirit, a contagion of sighs moved around the circle. The child wasn’t telling them anything they wanted to hear.

Sensing their impatience, the boy abruptly stopped talking and shrugged his shoulders. He stared hard at Aung Min as he chewed his rice. He knew exactly what the big man wanted to know about: the Songbird. Still gazing into Aung Min’s eyes, he finally swallowed and said, “Teza. He also was my friend.”

The men stopped picking their teeth or reading the newspaper beneath the dirty plates. Aung Min stopped smiling.

The boy pulled his sling bag into his lap. He reached into it and retrieved his meager possessions one at a time, laying them out on the floor in front of his crossed legs. Tattered postcards. A lime-green T-shirt and a turquoise sarong. A thanakha tin. His new towel. The boy touched the large matchbox with his fingertip. There were little bones inside, and a single tooth.

But Aung Min didn’t care about any of that. “Little Brother, what else do you have in there?”

The boy felt the pounding rise in his chest. He put his hands on the sling bag and squeezed the cardboard edges through the fabric. It belonged to him. He glanced warily around the ring of men.

“It’s mine,” said the boy.

“I just want to look at it.” But Aung Min had trouble keeping the hunger out of his voice, and the boy, an expert in hunger, hunched protectively over his sling bag.

“The Songbird gave it to me.”

“I just want to look. I’ll give it back to you.”

The boy blinked, his eyes burning. Why did they always have to take everything away? He clenched his teeth.
No
. “You have to promise.”

Aung Min tried to smile, but a grimace appeared on his face. Each word came out sharp and hard. “Little Brother, just let me see the notebook.”

The boy glared at him, then yanked down the cloth edges of the bag to reveal the stained ledger, which he picked up and held tightly in his hands.

No one said a word; no one moved. The two of them could have been in the room alone. The boy pressed the notebook down against his legs and opened the cover. “The book is mine, so
I
will show it to you,” he said. His palm splayed wide on the paper. He stared unblinking into the man’s eyes.

Aung Min raised his eyebrows. Bloody kid. He stood up, waved his hand impatiently. The men on either side of the child shifted away. He sat down next to the boy, who slowly turned the first page of the notebook, the second, the third. Aung Min saw only blurred numbers, handwritten rows of accounting. He swore under his breath. The figures meant nothing to him.

Then the boy turned another page, and the words began.

The handwriting was as familiar as the voice Aung Min often listened to on a dusty cassette player.

T
he singer is lying on the floor, a gray blanket pulled up around his chest. With slightly narrowed eyes, he stares at the ceiling. A single lizard is up there, clinging to the plaster.

What if it were the last lizard in the world? Then what would you do?

Teza opens his mouth.

It’s not the last lizard. Rather, it’s the first. Most of them won’t appear until evening, little dinner guests neatly dressed in khaki. When the halo of insects has formed around the lightbulb, the reptiles run to and fro in their jerky, mechanical way, jaws snapping. Sometimes their mouths are so stuffed with insects that they can barely shut them. Gluttons. Showoffs. Any hungry mammal would be jealous. With all that eating, you’d think they’d get fat, but unfortunately the lizards are very skinny, like most of the human inmates. Teza closes his mouth.

In response, his stomach growls, the sound as loud as his normal speaking voice. A predatory animal has taken up residence in his gut. Never mind the parasites, a small panther is mutating in there. A feral dog. Evening with its lizard bounty seems very far away.

To confirm that sad thought, the iron-beater begins to strike eleven
A.M
. Teza counts each blow of a hardwood pallet against an iron bar in the
compound, at the base of the watchtower.
Clang, clang, clang
. The timekeeper whacks the iron as hard as possible, so that the prisoners will hear him and know their time is passing. All ten thousand of them, especially the couple thousand politicals whom the singer counts as friends and comrades, are
very
far away. The nature of the teak coffin—of any solitary cell—is that it converts everything into distance. Time, space, food, women, his family, music, anything he might need or want or love: it is all far, far away.

From solitary, the whole cage is a foreign country to him. He lives on the very edge of it, straining to hear the other voices.

T
keep! Tkeep! Tkeep!

The lizard sings. Not like a bird, though Teza remembers from first-year biology that this common cling-to-house lizard is brother to a tiny prehistoric sparrow. Then the desert wind blew and the rain fell and the scales grew into feathers. As he stares at the lizard on the ceiling, he can imagine it: the front two legs and feet stretched out, webbing, blossoming into wings. The back feet articulated into clawed toes, which curled deftly around the thin branch of a tree. And birdsong ribboned through the steamy jungle.

But before that, who knows how many millions of years ago, there was just this somewhat alarmed chirping
tkeep tkeep tkeep
to inspire the Neanderthals. Like Junior Jailer Handsome. Here we are again, the singer thinks, smiling. Back in the Stone Age, among cavemen, in a cave. His stomach growls.

The iron-beater is still. It’s past eleven o’clock now. And Sein Yun has not shown up with breakfast. Teza watches the lizard run from the light, stop, run to the wall, stop. It runs down the wall and whisks itself out the air vent high above his head.

Teza scans the brick wall around the vent. His eyes have learned the different colors of reptile and wall, lizard skin and skin of man, brick and spider. That’s what he wants to see now. The spider.

It’s the color of a tiny, dirty copper pot. When the bulbous back catches the light, the copper becomes iridescent, an alchemist’s metal. It glints gold, then a sheen of blue-green rises toward copper again. At dusk the creature deepens to red, then fades with the invisible sun. When Teza
first came to the teak coffin, the spider was almost indistinguishable against the red bricks. But now the singer can find him in seconds.

A fine web is strung high in the corner where the two walls meet, below and to the left of the air vent. The spider often rebuilds his web in a different place. When Teza wakes each day, he checks to see if his companion has chosen to abandon the darkness of the cell and build his new home outside. The singer thinks he’s the sort of spider who should have green leaves around him. But the spider stays.

The Chief Warden thinks Teza cannot see out of this narrowest of windows. In a manner of speaking, he is correct. The vent is too high. Even when Teza jumps he sees nothing save another fraction of the very high outer wall and a corrugated tin overhang. But the spider sees. He crawls the outer wall, up and up. From the top, the spider witnesses the whole city, the gold stupas, the green trees, the streets, millions of men and women, the lakes Inya and Kandawgyi, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi’s famous house on University Avenue, and his mother’s two-story flat, surrounded by laundry and orchids. Daw Sanda loves her orchids dearly.

The spider perceives all this and more, much more: the sky with its white-backed, blue-bottomed clouds full of rain, the horizon curving like a belly. The spider sees.

And Teza watches the spider.

The fabulous copper-pot spider.

Is it male or female?

The singer has decided the spider is male: it’s too depressing to imagine a woman here. He would hate to have a woman see him now.

The singer feeds his male comrade-spider secret messages, just a few words at a time, all his body can hold. Soundlessly, the spider takes in the messages and spins them out when he crawls into the world. The glimmering threads are Teza’s words.

•   •   •

F
orbidden to write or receive letters, he has devised dozens of ways to send a message. Every political prisoner has an elaborate fantasy of messages. Sometimes the right moment never comes, or the message gets trapped in the cell with the man who wrote it, incriminating him as only words can. But sometimes the messages escape, slip through to the other halls, where friends live. Sometimes the words pass through the first brick wall surrounding the prison, and the second one. They move secretly through the great iron gates. Hands take the place of the prisoner’s legs; messages walk out into the world and speak.

The methods he has imagined are no different from his comrades’. Anxious fingers swivel scraps of paper into cigarettes and cheroots. Words are scratched onto walls and plastic bags, pinpricked onto dry leaves, stuffed into the handles of baskets, held under armpits, in mouths, wrapped in clothes, breathed nightly in prayers. The brief missives, puny as insects, as embryos, are regularly caught and crushed, torn out by the guards and warders and swept away. If the prisoners are caught sending messages, they are beaten violently; they must bleed, that is the general rule. It’s also fine to knock them unconscious. Then their sentences are extended by two years, by four, by seven, by seven times two.

The singer sits down.

The spider crawls out. Like the singer’s grandfather, the spider always goes outside for a morning view of the world, even if it is raining, as it is today. As it was yesterday. It will rain off and on now for months. Teza cannot see the rain, but he hears it drumming, muttering, sighing, turning over and over, out of the sky to the earth back to the sky, washing away the layer of filth created by men, which encourages them to create more.

Sometimes his dreams are very simple: rain falls into his cupped hands. In the base of that shallow well, there is a small lizard. Its tongue flicks at the clear, oversized drops, drinking the rain, which also washes Teza’s palms, runs through his fingers. The lizard licks at the rainwater, perfectly calm, fearless. The singer feels the small reptilian heart beat lightly against his human skin.

•   •   •

T
he lizard dream makes him think of food, and food makes him think of Sein Yun, and that makes him mad. Where is that sneaky little bastard?

The yellow-skinned palm-reader with the long dirty nails and the jumpy manner has been Teza’s server for a month and a half. He’s an uncommon criminal, Sein Yun, but useful. A couple of weeks ago, the palm-reader brought in—from where, Teza will never know—some first-rate papaya, cut in cubes and served on a white plastic plate, as if a pretty lady vendor on Anawrahta Street had brought it into the cage herself. No warder or jailer would ever lower himself to the task of serving a prisoner food of any kind, or of emptying out his shit pail. Such work is reserved for criminal prisoners like Sein Yun who are trying to reduce their sentences.

Teza’s previous server was Sammy, who has a new job now, as one of the iron-beaters. At least that’s what Sein Yun said last week. Teza likes to imagine Sammy out there, at the base of the watchtower, the great bulk of his long dark arms beating out the hours. Sammy is an Indo-Burmese of startling proportions, over six feet tall, the whole length and breadth of him thick with muscle. But when he was a server, all his strength meant nothing to the singer, because the giant has no tongue. His awful tonguelessness was intended—and received—as an added punishment for Teza.