The Lizard Cage (47 page)

“He didn’t get the pen because you brought it to me. Along with that ledger.”

“
Ledger
is the book of lines and numbers?”

“That’s right. The clerks keep track of accounts, money spent, by writing down all the numbers, the dates. Where did you get that?”

“I found it in the garbage outside one of the offices.”

“The garbage?”

“Ko Teza, you can find many good things in the garbage,” the boy explains earnestly. “Sometimes food, sometimes wires and plastic bags. Once I found a pencil and traded with an Indian for three chapatis. Sometimes I just get mango pits and bags of la-phet with a few peanuts or tea leaves still stuck inside. No one’s supposed to throw away papers or books or anything
important in the garbage baskets, but sometimes they’re too lazy to take their garbage to the big office.”

“But how did you leave the ledger here last night? Didn’t the warder on guard duty see you?”

“Only Saya Chit Naing was here.”

“U Chit Naing
knows
about this?”

“Oh, no! He didn’t see anything. I said I wanted to pray with you. He stayed on the other side of the wall when I came in. You were sleeping. So I stuck the book under your blanket.”

Free El Salvador and the singer stare at each other. Then, at precisely the same moment, they begin to laugh. Teza breathes out his ragged, syncopated
Heh heh heh
and the boy covers his mouth with his hands. After a few seconds he suddenly becomes serious and whispers, “I thought Handsome was going to kill me. But Chit Naing would not let him.”

Teza is silent. What can he say? “Oh, Nyi Lay, please be careful.”

“I’m always careful. But if somebody really wants to kill you, it doesn’t matter what you do. He’ll get you in the end.” The words are so brutal and true that Teza cannot respond.

Nyi Lay briskly rises and reknots his longyi with sharp movements, then sinks again into a squat. “But you know what? On my way over here, I heard the news from a warder that Handsome didn’t come to work this morning. Everybody’s talking about it. So for today I’m safe.”

Yet the boy is very nervous, Teza notices, constantly fidgeting and straining to hear what’s happening in the compound.

“Maybe Handsome’s quit his job.”

“Oh, no,” the boy replies. “He loves his job. Tint Lwin told me something’s wrong with his leg, so he can’t walk. But when he comes back, he’ll come after me again.”

Teza watches the boy carefully. “Sabado, this is your invitation.”

“My invitation?”

“To go away from here. If you leave the cage altogether, Handsome won’t be able to hurt you.”

The boy rubs the back of his hand across his nose. “I have other work to do now.”

Without thinking or planning his words, Teza begins. “Sabado, you
can rush off now, but take this idea with you. Think about it. Why did you bring me the pen, the ledger? Because you understand how important words are.” The boy turns his face away, stubbornly, but can’t pull himself out of the man’s orbit. “Nyi Lay, when I was really small and didn’t know how to read and write, I used to cry because I wanted so badly to learn. Then I went to school, and I learned. You want to learn too, don’t you? Don’t you? Then you have to leave the prison. You’re already so brave, living on your own here. I admire you. But to get out of this place, you’ll have to be braver.”

“I don’t want to talk anymore. I have to go now.” The boy clenches his fists.

The singer cannot stop himself. “U Chit Naing will help you, Nyi Lay. Other people will help you. But you have to let them. You have to trust us. You have to trust
me.
”

Teza has stretched out his hand in a pleading gesture, and the boy wants to knock it against the iron bars. Instead he scrambles backward, not losing his balance but springing to his feet, so angry he can’t breathe.
Trust!
Yon-kyi hmu, at the heart of love and betrayal both, a word he understands but has never lived. How would he live it here, who would have taught him to believe in its power? Yes, he might trust Chit Naing and Tan-see Tiger and Sammy the giant Indian. He might trust Teza, but one question keeps him separate, caged within the cage:
Why? Why should I trust any of them
?

He chokes, not on water like last night but on tears. Drowning again, he stifles his cries, but the force of them makes him shudder. His arms lift away from his sides. It almost hurts to touch his own body. Abandoned, he stands in front of the white house and sobs.

“Nyi Lay!” The voice comes across a chasm three feet wide and a universe distant, but it’s the same place, the same cage, because the boy can hear Teza. “Nyi Lay, come here.” Teza stretches his hands and voice through the bars. “Come here,” he whispers again. In the midst of the wave that carries him forward to take Teza’s hands, the boy might be safe, even beloved. But the wave rolls back. He draws his hands from Teza’s and twists away. Swallowing his tears, he spits out the furious words, “Why should I trust you?”

Teza meets the question with silence. He is thinking,
Why? Why
? “Because
I
trust you. That’s the only reason. And I love you as much as I love my own little brother.”

This declaration has an unexpected effect on Free El Salvador. It shakes him out of his hurt. “You have a
brother?
”

“A younger brother. But not little like you.”

“I’m not little.”

“No. I guess you’re not.”

“What’s your brother’s name?”

“Aung Min.”

“Does he live in Rangoon?”

“Not anymore. He’s somewhere on the border.”

“The border?”

“Between Burma and Thailand.”

“Sometimes the Thai prisoners give me food.”

“That’s kind of them. Their country is right beside Burma. And the place called the border separates our two countries, and joins them.”

“At the same time?”

“Yes. Like the walls around the prison keep us from the outside but remind us that the world’s right there, just a few steps away.”

“Is Aung Min in prison too?”

“No. He’s a revolutionary.”

“Like Bogyoke Aung San!” Awe deepens the boy’s voice.

Teza immediately thinks of how pleased Aung Min would be with this comparison. “You know about Bogyoke Aung San?”

“Tan-see Tiger talks about him. He has a framed photograph of the Bogyoke in his cell. Bogyoke Aung San was the great revolutionary general who chased away all the Japanese and English.” The boy isn’t sure exactly what Japanese and English are. When Tiger talks about them, they occasionally seem human. Other times, the boy is convinced they’re wild animals. But he knows for certain that Bogyoke Aung San made them leave Burma. “Does your brother chase away Japanese and English?”

Teza gives Free El Salvador a sad look. “No, he fights against Burmese soldiers.” Teza has no idea, really, what his brother does, and how. He’s not even sure that Aung Min is still alive.

“Our soldiers?”

“Yes. The Burmese army. And their leaders.” How to explain civil war to a child? “Many of the soldiers are cruel, because the men who lead them are cruel. You know about the other political prisoners, right?”

“They can read.”

“Yes, they can. And they can write. And they talk to people about changing the government. The army doesn’t like that, so they put the politicals in the cage. But thousands of other politicals don’t live in the prison. When the generals started to kill them, they went to the border, to work against the army from outside Burma. There are many different groups of people working against the government.”

“What’s the government again?”

“The government’s made up of the men who run the army and their friends. The SLORC.”

“Oh.” The boy nods.

“If you disagree with them or ask them to stop hurting the people, sometimes they become very cruel.”

“Like Handsome.”

“Yes. A lot like Handsome.”

“Why are they like that?”

Teza looks at Nyi Lay’s hungry-to-know face. “Because they’re afraid. They’re afraid to give up their power, or all the good things they’ve stolen from people. And they’re afraid of how angry the people are.”

“What people?”

“All the people who’ve been hurt or whose families have been hurt by the government. All the people who aren’t allowed to be free and do what they want. But do you know what terrifies them the very most?”

“What?”

“Change.” Teza doesn’t let go of the boy’s eyes. “They don’t want to change. They want all the old ways to keep going. They’re not very good Buddhists.”

“Why not?”

“Because the Buddha taught us that things change all the time. It’s like the weather. The monsoon’s almost over, isn’t it, even though it still rains at night. And now it’s warm enough, but soon the cold season will begin, and then a while later it will get hot again and more rains will come. It’s the same for everything—people, animals, plants, all the things we make
and build. Even if people or things look the same, they’re always shifting or growing or dying. Nothing stays the same for any of us. So we try to have upekkha, to live with upekkha. That means to accept the change that comes and to be calm in it.”

Free El Salvador glances toward the corridor and quickly puts a finger to his lips. The old warder is coming to take Teza out for a shower. The boy recognizes his footsteps. And sensing the hidden message Teza is trying to pass to him, he is glad to end the conversation. “The warder’s coming. I’ll take your pail off to the latrine hole.”

He walks toward the outer wall. If the stooped old fellow’s in a good mood, he might give the boy a candy.

Teza quickly whispers, “Nyi Lay!”

He turns his head.

“Be very careful.”

Just as the old man appears, rattling a handful of keys, the boy gives Teza a smile like a small jewel.

O
nce more he’s found a tribe of ants. They lived in the white house before his arrival, but those first weeks after the beating, all his energies turned inward. In the past few days, with a sense of purpose returned to him, he has started to observe the ants with his old keen eye, wondering about the minutiae of their lives. It’s easier to see them too, because their trails, once close to the ceiling, now switch back and twist farther down the wall. Teza has tempted them down with grains of rice on the floor. He saves any gristle or vegetable in his morning meal for the boy, but part of the rice gruel goes to the birds, to the ants, to the twitchily enthusiastic cockroaches.

The rest of the morning gruel he eats himself, though eating is still his most dreaded activity. He can’t apply any pressure to grind his teeth. Even swallowing uses muscles that have not healed. It’s excruciating, but it concerns him less and less. Soon it won’t concern him at all. Most days he meditates, four, five, six hours. When he is done, his exhaustion is complete. He can only do sitting meditation now. In the teak coffin he often meditated by walking, observing each footfall, the heel, middle foot, ball of the foot, toes bending. Though his broken toes are much better now, they’re very stiff. He
hobble-walks without grace. Ya-ba-deh. Never mind. His toes are so far from his heart, he’s already given them up.

His body is often tired, the long muscles squeezed empty and thin. His distillation continues apace, as the pulp gets sucked out. The leftover shell is not dry husk but essence, pure oil or alcohol, sharp and eye-brightening despite his weariness. When he doesn’t meditate, he sleeps, and when he doesn’t sleep, he thinks about the pen, so remarkably returned to him, and the ledger with its stained but mostly empty pages, and his little brother, and words. Of all the words there are in his mind, in his life, of all the words in the world, which ones must be spoken to paper? What will he write? Sometimes he lies on his back, face turned to the ceiling, where lizards pivot and run in their hunt for insects.

It’s just as it was in the teak coffin, yet everything has changed. He composes long letters in his head while watching the creatures do their jerky dance, small jaws snapping. They eat and eat: moths, mosquitoes, small and larger flies. It’s almost unbelievable that the singer ever ate
them
, the small reptiles. He shakes his head when he thinks of it.

He looks from the ceiling to his slice of blue sky beyond the cell. Last night he saw the moon, half waxing or half waning, like a sad face turning toward him. Lying close to the bars, he intended to watch it drop across the short chasm between roof and wall, but he was so tired he fell asleep after two minutes. He woke to watch the gray dawn become mauve become rose-blue become blue sky, and he knew it was a whole blue sky, without clouds, wide open over the prison, over Rangoon. The colors made him think of his mother, her flowers and plants growing in their compound. He remembered the little wooden gate. Surely it’s covered in lime-green moss again, after the monsoon. Scrub brush in hand, Daw Sanda has already complained about it to the neighbor, as she does every year, and she has promised to get an ugly iron one, which she never does and never will do. A gate made of iron bars looks too much like a prison door.

With this thought, Teza’s eyes shift. Because he’s still lying down, the first thing beyond the grille of bars that hits his eyes is a pair of boots. The sight of them so close to his face frightens him. An uneven cry rises three octaves “Waa-aa-aah!” as it flies from his mouth. He’s already rolling away as a glimpse of the face registers in his mind. It’s not Handsome but Chit Naing, his friend.

“I’m sorry, Ko Teza. I thought you heard me.”

With the rush of adrenaline, Teza has become both nervous and dazed. Very slowly he rolls onto his side and sits up. “No, I … I was thinking about something.” He wonders if he has gone completely deaf in the damaged ear. He moves his head back and forth, as though rattling a faulty gadget.

Chit Naing bends down. “The doctor wants to come by to see you again.”

“Today?”

“Oh, he’s not that dedicated. But soon. He mentioned it to me this morning when he signed in.”

“Has he spoken to the Chief Warden?”

“I don’t think so. But he will, Ko Teza. And if you are serious about a hunger strike, you must know that the Chief Warden won’t let you go through with it. They will beat you again. You have to know that. They’ll make you eat.”