The Lizard Cage (35 page)

That stupid little brat. Sein Yun realizes he is too polite—he should have smacked that kid a good one. As if the palm-reader doesn’t have enough shit on his plate. Handsome’s pissed at him, and Tiger’s making noises about finding someone else to do his heroin runs, all because he lost his pens and a few sheets of scented paper. Unbelievable. Sein Yun walks away from the shrine. Without knowing it, he’s developed a curious tic, one he shares with Handsome. He scans the brick-chip ground as he walks.

Where did it go? The singer could have eaten the damn paper, but who could eat a pen? Impossible. You can’t eat a pen. It would make you choke.

Really, it verges on obscene, that brat making his accusation, as if the palm-reader has broken some sort of code. Little twat. There’s nothing more annoying than a voice full of its own innocence.

He doesn’t feel guilty. No. Absolutely not. He didn’t
touch
the singer, didn’t lay a
finger
on him. The thought never entered his mind. He doesn’t like violence; he is a civilized man. And Teza’s not a bad guy, for a political. Sein Yun tried to be good to him. Remember the cheroots? And that time he took him papaya? Pure altruism! Merit-making!

Besides, this is a
prison
. If you were charitable every day, you’d be eaten alive. People do what they have to do.

He had no idea that Handsome would fly off the handle like that, none at all. Let’s face it, the guy’s dangerous; everybody knows that. He wants to be an
MI
. The warders say he had orders not to do any work on Songbird and he’s in shit now for breaking the guy’s face. But that’s what happens in the cage.

Little brat rat-killer. It’s none of his business. Sein Yun had nothing to do with that savage beating, it wasn’t his fault. It’s not like he was standing outside the teak coffin, cheering them on.

Sein Yun stops walking.

He is a restless, sick-yellow man, stricken most of the time with a frightful inability to keep still. But he has gone very still.

The pen.

He’s found it. Right there, staring him in the face. It’s wearing mismatched flip-flops, in a monsoon storm, waiting for rats near the shower-room drain.

F
ree El Salvador brings a new gift with the five o’clock tray. He pushes three cheroots into Teza’s cell, along with a lighter. Then he sits back on his haunches to watch what the Songbird will do with the offering. All prisoners are pigs for cheroots. The singer who cannot sing sits down, holds a cigar to his crooked mouth, mimes lighting it. His eyes squint shut with pain as he speaks. “I still can’t smoke. Hard to suck, you know?” He exhales a stuttering laugh and nudges the lighter back out through the trap. It’s like playing a very odd game of checkers. The boy looks at the little red rectangle, then back at Teza, who says, “Watch.”

He breaks the filter off the first cheroot and removes the green wrapping of dried leaf. There they are: small words on a thin band of newsprint. He finds the place where the newsprint is glued, picks at it until it opens. He unwraps the words, letting the inner filter of straw leaf fall away. Holding two small pieces of paper in his palm, he leans forward, close to the bars, closer; his hand reaches through. Cautious but curious, Nyi Lay stretches his arm out. Teza drops his paper offering into the grimy open hand.

The broken mouth doesn’t make any difference; the singer’s eyes smile and smile. He whispers, “Zaga-lone-dwei.”

Words. The boy looks down at the two curled pieces of newsprint, all covered in the circles and dots that make words.

Then, as though it were a secret, Teza whispers, “Bathazaga.”

Language.

A light comes into the boy’s eyes. Bathazaga. This is a word he knows, but he thinks only of its first half,
batha
. That’s a different word altogether, separate but part of the other one too. One word lives inside another, he thinks, surprised.
Batha
is a word for every day, like breathing or drinking water. It means to bring the Songbird gifts, or to visit the nat’s tree and make an offering of flowers, a little clump of rice placed on a leaf. Batha.

Batha is religion. Bathazaga is language. What does it mean when one word holds the other? He doesn’t know how to think about it, yet something is there, like the lizard in the grass who can change color. Batha is the Muslim men praying in daylight and darkness, their voices an echo of his dead father’s voice. Batha. Zaga-lone-dwei. Bathazaga.

He can’t understand how one word gets inside another, and why, and what it means. He turns the newsprint over in his fingers, roughly. One of the pieces tears, and he squeezes both scraps in his small fist. Why is the singer making him think about farther-away things, words he can’t understand? Many thoughts rush into his head. He thinks of the tattered paperbacks in his shack, his hoarded treasures. He thinks of the white pen. The singer’s pen. He thinks of writing.

Here is a silence filled with many voices. Though neither child nor man speaks, they are talking—their thoughts drift into the air and ribbon together like smoke, twisting, dissolving. Teza thinks, When he’s frustrated, how much he resembles Aung Min! The boy opens his hand again, glares at the crumpled scraps of newsprint, then lifts his eyes. Suddenly they flick away from Teza, toward the sound of footsteps crunching gravel.

Their reactions are identical, resembling those of lovers caught in a guilty embrace. The boy springs to his feet. Teza rises and steps backward unsteadily, tucking the cheroots into the waist of his longyi. He and the boy lower their heads.

Both of them expect to see the old warder who sometimes comes to open up Teza’s cell so Nyi Lay can take away the latrine pail. Their guilty surprise turns into something else again when Chit Naing rounds the corner of the white house. His official mask breaks open when he smiles, first
at the boy and then at Teza. “What are you two up to? A football game? Playing cards?” The boy’s guarded expression cracks enough to reveal a smirk. The jailer peers into the cell.

“Has Nyi Lay given you a file to escape with?” Chit Naing laughs, then notices the boy’s indignant expression. He smiles and touches the bony shoulder. “I’m only joking, Nyi Lay. I know you’re doing a very good job, as usual. Here, why don’t I open up and you can do our inmate the favor of emptying his pail? I’m sure he would be very grateful. Correct, Ko Teza?”

The singer replies, “Yes, that’s a good idea.” This is the first time since the beating that he’s seen Chit Naing in such an easy mood. The ring of heavy keys clanks against the iron bars as the jailer unlocks the grille and lets the boy through. Nyi Lay hoists the pail and rushes out.

Chit Naing knows he’s walked into something. It’s like stepping backward through a spiderweb in a dark room. He feels it pulling, stretching behind the boy, who has already disappeared behind the outer wall. When he turns and looks more carefully at Teza—his hands folded in front of his body, his slightly hunched back—the jailer is sure of it. Some private act has taken place between them.

The thought of a sexual transaction crosses his mind, but he dismisses it. Teza is not a homosexual. Even if he was, the boy never makes himself available.

“Was I right? Has he really given you a file to escape with?”

“No, no.
I
gave
him
a file to escape with.” Teza winces. Too much talking. He breathes out the next stinging words, “Why is he here?”

“I suggested to the Chief Warden that he would be an excellent server. I know he’s not much of a talker, which the Chief appreciates. He’s also very obedient.” And, as the Chief was only too happy to point out, completely uneducated, therefore without politics.

Teza shakes his head. Chit Naing has misunderstood his question. “Why is he
here
, in the cage?”

“Well, he … ah, lives here. His father was a warder who died several years ago. There was nowhere else for him to go.” That was another reason why the Chief let the boy have the job. He lives in the cage, knows nothing but the cage, so he could never be bribed to take messages out or bring contraband in.

“Why not an orphanage? Prison is too hard. He’s only a boy. Why isn’t he living in a monastery school?”

“He doesn’t want to leave the prison. I talk to him about it sometimes. He’s never even been to Rangoon, if you can imagine that. He’s afraid of the city.”

Teza steps closer to the open door. “But he’s only a boy.”

It dawns on the jailer that this is it, this sympathy is the illicit interaction. Teza’s feeling sorry for the kid! Chit Naing smiles slightly and asks, “How are you? You sound better. Far too thin, but better. I see the swelling is down.”

“Yes, I can open it now.” Teza blinks his black eye.

“The doctor will come by before he leaves today to give you a shot of morphine. And you’re still getting your double ration of rice, aren’t you?”

Teza nods, though he doesn’t add that it has been many days now since he’s eaten the evening meal. He knows Chit Naing will be angry with him if he finds out about the fasting.

“I have good news for you.” This must be why the jailer is so relaxed, even making jokes. The haze of guilt and reticence that has surrounded him for weeks seems to have lifted. “The Chief Warden is tired of this search for the pen. He gave Handsome a bit of an extension, to keep looking, but he and his men can’t find anything.” Chit Naing looks carefully at Teza, whose face doesn’t change. “It’s been almost a month since the raids started. They still have no evidence to incriminate you. The papers for the list of the defendants and the charges against them have been drawn up. Your name is not there. You know what that means, don’t you? You won’t go to trial. They can’t extend your sentence.” The jailer tries to gauge Teza’s reaction to the good news. Chit Naing doesn’t tell how he removed the court files last night and replaced them this morning with trembling hands. While they were in his possession, he copied them at a safe shop and dropped the copy off at a small hut in an open-sewer satellite town outside the city. Today or tomorrow, the papers will be picked up by an old man, an agent who carries information to the revolutionary and dissident groups on the border.

Chit Naing likes to imagine that Teza’s brother will read the files before they are compiled and published. All tribunal records within the
prison system are highly restricted documents. The jailer wonders if any copies of prison court proceedings have ever left the country. He’s already planning to smuggle out the trial documents themselves, when the hearings are over. The thought of doing that fills him with an excitement indistinguishable from happiness. That is how the singer perceives it too.
Chit Naing is happy
. Though the jailer is deeply relieved that Teza is not among those charged, primarily he’s sailing on the adrenaline of his own subterfuge.

Waiting for something from Teza—some celebratory gesture, however subtle, or an indication of relief—Chit Naing pushes his glasses up his nose and leans through the slightly open door. Teza only nods, as though distracted, and looks past him. Chit Naing wonders if Teza’s injuries have rendered him apathetic. The jailer carefully examines the dark green and purple skin around the eye, the broken jaw hanging loose, various bruises and swelling still visible on his face and neck. Between the injuries and the shaven head, Teza has changed so much that it’s hard to remember what he looked like before, and
before
was only a month ago.

It was the beating that pushed Chit Naing deeper into measured recklessness. That’s why he was able to steal the list of defendants and pretrial papers. Though he comes to the prison every day, he’s not working for the generals anymore. He wants a response from the singer, not of gratefulness but of recognition.

“If there is a general amnesty for politicals in the next couple of years—”

Teza finishes the sentence, “They will not let me go.”

“But they’ve let others go, men who served only eight or ten years.”

“Thirteen years more. Because of the songs.” Still out there, flying around like birds.

“At least they won’t add an extra seven or ten.”

Teza only says, “Think of Myo Myo Than, the others.”

“You can be sure they are happy for you.”

That word again—how odd it sounds. Teza closes his eyes as the flame shoots up inside his jaw, into his skull. He wrenches his head to the right, to get away from that searing, but he cannot. The morphine will be a blessing tonight. Eyes closed, he says, “The boy. I would be happy to help the boy.”

Chit Naing is nonplussed. “What boy? The rat-killer?”

Both prisoner and jailer turn at the sound of the metal bucket clanking against a knobby knee. Free El Salvador looks up and grins widely, carelessly, out of character, because these two men are kind to him, in their different ways.

The small dark face sparks and for an instant gleams, returning the child to an innocent country he’s never lived in. Teza hasn’t seen the boy smile like that before, and it has already disappeared, subdued into a goofy, self-conscious smirk. Free El Salvador slips to the edge of the cell, handing the singer who cannot sing his bucket, which was not full. Lips pressed together, he waits for the jailer to tell him he can go, which the jailer does.

The boy glances at Teza, then he’s gone.

But that moment of clean light in his face was enough. Teza knows now. He knows what he intends to do.

T
hat night, while Teza is thinking about the boy, the boy is thinking about words.

The corner of the shack where he lays his head, as far as possible from the door, is the driest place. His collection of nine paperbacks is stacked in two piles between the wall and his face, each pile on a brick. He keeps the books off the ground because water often seeps in. Curling like a cat, he turns his back to the books, head on his arm, knees near his belly. The candle flame flares high in a sudden draft, then drops again.

Nyi Lay the little lizard clings to the low roof above the candle. For a long while the boy lies there watching him eat small moths and mosquitoes, happy that the lizard can get his dinner so easily. There are always enough insects for him.