The Lizard Cage (49 page)
Authors: Karen Connelly
T
eza sits and breathes. He unfolds his legs and opens his eyes to look at them, so thin and long on the cement floor that a vision of a praying mantis clambers into his mind. He thinks, Exoskeleton. His bones are so close to the surface of his skin that he might wake one morning only skeleton and rise up to do a clackety little dance.
That has been the meditation theme of his morning, not macabre but practical. The meditation of unmaking the body, letting it decompose and pass away, as it will, as it must. It’s fascinating to him that he feels so light, so lit from within, when he has spent the last two hours envisioning himself without life, the whole of him and the parts, inside and outside, rotting away and putrid. The stench of a rotting body is a disgusting one, but foremost in the meditation is detachment: that horrid reek, like the pain, is not him. It will not be him.
Ironically, he is most attached to what he cannot see, the most broken piece, his own face. After that, he mourns his hands. They are made for grasping, picking up, holding; it is not easy for the mind to let them go. To think of losing his hands is to remember the disappearance of his father, who had the same long, double-jointed fingers, like a dancer’s. The hands are his memory of music, fingers spidering over frets, stretching and
bunching up for the unfamiliar chords that he used to impress his classmates, guitar-strummers all. Oh, the hands, which keep and give, which touch or stay folded with shyness. He looks around the cell, gazes at the bricks in the wall, the bars, the blocking wall beyond them. Human hands built this cage, just as they built the temples and painted a myriad of faces of the Buddha.
Teza refolds his legs. He closes his eyes again and breathes, inhaling and exhaling the passage of an hour, two hours, until he has died and bloated and rotted clean away. His rib cage sits open like an empty basket. Inside, his invisible heart beats, jumps like a bird or a frog. Or a lizard. Like any small animal waiting to get out of its cage.
H
ere is something new, and strange, and fine: he does not worry himself about the pen, or the ledger. The book is barely a quarter used; the spillage occurred on the last page bearing figures—there the writing is completely illegible, drowned in some mystery substance. He sniffs the paper. Ink, and mildew, or sour milk, and … tea? Can he smell tea? Tea! It would be nice to have tea, wouldn’t it, but in a tea shop, on the open street one evening, surrounded by friends.
The whole book is ruined, at least for the purposes of proper bookkeeping. Someone must have copied what figures he could before throwing the ledger away. Teza holds it in his hand, very happily. He turns it over and opens it and brings the wrinkled paper to his nose again.
Tea
, it whispers to him again, la-phet-yeh. Despite the damage, it’s still a sturdy book, paper-and-cardboard-bound with a dark purple cover. Pieces of black binding tape are folded over each corner.
The pen, of course, is familiar to him. After fishing it out of his clothing stash, he holds the plastic vein of ink on his palm and stares at it, marveling at how it helped to cause so much agony.
Tsshik-tsheek
. The nib is thick with a glob of coagulated ink. He wipes it away with his thumb, then walks to the other side of the cell. “So you have come to me again, little troublemaker. This time I shall put you to better use.” He sits down against the brick wall that faces away from the white house entrance. If a warder appears unexpectedly, Teza will have a few seconds to hide his new book and his old pen. Sitting here is as much
precaution as he will take. He is neither nervous nor afraid. On the contrary, a lightheartedness holds him, moves him slowly like sunlight moves a plant. The long meditations tire his body, but they almost always leave his mind spacious, as open as a plain. He can see all around himself, forward and back, his whole life and his one death in his hands. The simplicity of it brings tears to his eyes, not from sadness, or grief, but from clarity, and love.
Let the warder find him. One of the old songs warms in his throat; as much as he can, he smiles. Let Handsome himself come in and see the pen in his hand, scribbling verses, or a list of food he will never eat again, or the day from his childhood that he remembers so often, when Daw Sanda caught him and Aung Min breaking the First Precept and sent them alone to the pagoda. Laughter sighs out of him, mixes with the remnants of song. He mouths a few words. Oh, to sing at the top of his lungs again, to get his hands on a guitar and feel the thin wood warm as he plays it. Let the prison kings read his memories, or whatever else he might write—nursery rhymes or poems for his lovely Thazin or a letter to the world he loves and will leave, is leaving now. He balances the open ledger on his knees and takes up his pen and begins, whispering the words to himself as he goes. Finally the singer writes his first prison song.
Dear Nyi Lay, you are so far away
I can see you only with my eyes closed
while I hum the songs that separated us
my ardent phrases for the revolution
Now those boys love one another
by map and moon and lizard
clinging to brick wall
If you examine the map with care
you will see men with Hpay Hpay’s hands
lighting their cheroots at the tea shop
behind the jute factory
The twin boys born without fingertips
still crawl among the low tables
They have a big business now
digging bottle caps
out of the dirt with a pointed stick
Remember? We once bought them mohinga
They laughed to the bottom
of the bowl then danced for more
My Brother my dreams
have changed but sometimes
I walk down the same street to an old house
where a woman summons moonlight
to help her orchids flourish
under tattered nets
If there is a wind
white sheets snap
on the lines nearby
the starched arms
of shirts twist and flail
like ours did when the soldiers
came out with Bren guns
with bayonets
Nyi Lay
I wish I could touch your eyes
and wipe away what they have seen
visions that ravage the iris
and drop shards of broken skull
down the pupil’s black hole.
The dish of the ear still fills
with cries from a road
where the blood
stayed for many days.
Remember their cautious gasps,
the people who came slowly out
of their hiding places to collect
the slippers, the hand-painted signs.
Still they are gathering the words
from frozen-open mouths.
We must remember the voices
of dead women the voices
of dead men the voices
of children
our own voices.
My Dear Nyi Lay,
I am happy
because you will understand
every message in this little parcel.
Do you still have the slingshot?
If there is a telephone in your jungle
do you dare call the woman of orchids
our mother May May?
Sometimes I lean over my own map
here in the cage pattern of grit
on the floor wet trailings
of roaches after they drink my soup
the lines on my hands make this map
and I see a night when the guerrillas
come drunk and singing up the hillside
young men thin as corpses but laughing
Hunger you say
keeps them alive
I stand behind you
in the shadows you stand
before me near the fire
not a gun
but a warped guitar in your arms
One of the men roasts
a small bird on a stick
You strum one of my songs
but they are too tired
too hungry to sing it
I lean over my map
and see your face lit by flames
You refuse to eat the flesh
I venture a prediction: in peace
you will become a passionate vegetarian
like our mother.
Now we are men! Finally we know
what she was doing down there at night
among the flowers in their clay pots
surrounded by her orchestra of crickets and frogs
She was cleaning the salt from her eyes
crying pure water into the orchid pouches
Dear Brother, I’ve never told you this before
because you would have laughed
Still you will laugh but now I am glad
Nyi Lay I heard her voice
before my birth
I remember May May
singing to me inside her
That’s why I grew into music
like one of her orchids purple open mouth
crying out the truth of its own color
Dear Brother, here where all the doors are closed
I have learned to walk through brick walls
A copper-pot spider was my good friend
and many lizards fed my heart
Now every dream I see assumes
the shape of a skeleton key.
Once I heard Grandfather’s voice
calling me back through the trees
but I can’t go home that way
I will return by an older path
over the plain on the river
My offerings as I travel
through the city of temples
will be bones and tears
Burma, the generals say Myanmar
to make us forget our country and
their crimes but we will not forget
they built a cage around our lives
Only the ants know the strength
the weakness of its walls
and perhaps the child knows
who knows too much the white ghosts
of maggots on the edges of my pail
the dark ghosts of men who haunt him
He knows the living tree of language
but cannot climb it yet
my broken face he knows
he knows my hunger feeds him
as yours feeds the men on the border
as May May became a vegetarian
when Hpay Hpay died so her sons
might devour the meat in every dish
Everything shattered is sharp
and often shines
A sliver of glass in the hand
can make the history
that alters history
here in the cage and there
in your cramped room in that house
without nation the new country
is no distance away at all.
Sometimes I almost see it
growing like a web
now invisible now
suddenly shining
Nyi Lay, here where the flesh
becomes spirit
the borders dissolve
with the flayed skin
Here there is no separation
Brother, sometimes I fear for you
Will you enter a new era
only to make up another word
for murder?
I cannot see the weapons you carry
only that warped guitar
As for me I have forsaken
every weapon but the voice
singing its last song
And the hand Dear Brother
my own hand
writing it down
with metta
Teza
T
he iron-beater strikes five o’clock. Dinner hour. Teza looks up and sees four sparrows bathing in the puddle near the outer wall, shimmying water over head and wing. In response to a chirp from him, two of them pause expectantly, then flutter out of the puddle. Hop-hop, a little closer. Hop-hop to the left, then more quickly again, to the right, undecided. Teza chirps again—the tongue sucking, clicking lightly away from his palate. It hurts, but not so much. One small skull tilts sideways at the sound. Hop-hop on spindly legs, straight toward the cell. Teza sits a couple of feet behind the bars.
“Soon, little one, soon enough, a bit of rice.” The sparrow eyes him.
Another bird comes hopping up and gives its companion a peck on the shoulder. The first bird rises into the air, wheels away, then returns and pecks back. The well of space between the outer wall and the cell quickly fills with small raucous argument, four sparrows taking sides. The other two bathers, still puffed up like miniature feather dusters, fly up and drop closer to the cell, shivering water off their backs as they scold each other.
Teza laughs behind his bars. Still watching, he slowly lies down. The birds abruptly take wing, lifted into the air by an invisible communal net and pulled over the wall.
Teza looks toward the entrance. He didn’t hear Free El Salvador’s footsteps at all, but here is the boy, carrying a loaded tray with both hands. The singer motions his head toward the bathing puddle. “You frightened them away.”
“They’ll come back. They know I’m bringing their dinner.” The boy hesitates before the bars. “Do you want your rice?” He’s asked this question several times in the past few days, just before squatting down to eat the singer’s meal.
“No. You go ahead.”
But the boy still hesitates. “Ko Teza?”
“Hmm?”
“Why won’t you eat?”
“I am no longer hungry.”
“But you are so thin.” The boy places the tray on the ground without looking at it.
“I’ve told you before, Sabado. I’m doing what the monks do, fasting after my morning meal.”
The boy picks his nose and thinks,
You are full of shit
.
Teza says, “You will leave some rice for the birds?”
But the boy has no desire to change the subject. “You are not a monk.”
“No, I’m not. But I am keeping the Eight Precepts, like a monk.”
Making a dissatisfied clatter with the aluminum tray, Free El Salvador spoons up rice soup and stands very quickly. Near the edge of the puddle, he upturns the spoon: food for the damn birds. Then he returns to the tray and scrapes out another spoonful of gruel, draining away as much liquid as he can before returning to the birdbath and dumping out the sopping rice. That’s it; he will eat the rest himself.
Teza’s voice is almost timid. “You are kind to them.”
