The Lizard Cage (58 page)

The boy’s head jerks toward that inky word. He raises his eyes to the Chief and begins, very loudly, in a tone of adolescent righteousness, “Sir, that is
my
blanket and I want to take it with me to the monastery. I’ll wash it there, sir. I will. Please let me take my blanket with me.”

Chit Naing’s mouth is so dry only a croak emerges. His explanation begins with a ragged cough. “Sir, the tan-see told me that the kid had a little accident during the night but there was no time to clean it up.” He attempts to clarify. “He had the runs, sir.”

“Yes, I have a nose, Officer Chit Naing, but why the hell is he taking that filthy blanket to the monastery school?”

“He’s very attached to it, sir. It’s from his shack. He insisted on taking it with him. I gave him permission. He has so few possessions.” When Chit Naing pulls his hand into the air, he feels the sweat streaming down his side. He gestures stiffly to the boy’s belongings. “As you can see, sir. He has nothing.”

“Novice monks are supposed to have nothing. A shitty blanket! I’m sure the abbot will be very impressed.” He waves his hand in front of his face. “Bloody hell, what a reek! I’ve been wondering what that smell was from the moment you two walked in here. I wish Officer Nyunt Wai Oo could have done this search himself. What a dirty job it’s turned out to be.” He reaches over to pick up his cigarettes and lighter, then takes another big step away from the table.

Chit Naing doesn’t let his face change. He doesn’t move. Nor does the boy, except for his nostrils, which dilate as he takes a conscious whiff of his accident. It really doesn’t smell that bad. The Chief Warden should try emptying out latrine pails.

The chief lights another Marlboro and takes a deep drag. He looks from Chit Naing to the boy and back to Chit Naing. Then he taps the ash off his cigarette and gestures to the things on the table. “You can pack up your stuff, kala-lay.” He glances back at the senior jailer, whose eyes are hidden by a streak of light across his glasses. “This has been great fun, Officer Chit Naing. I look forward to next time.”

The jailer manages a strained smile. “Yes, lots of fun, sir. Thank you.” He watches the boy stuff his belongings back into the sling bag. Then he
carefully asks, “May we go, sir? There’s a taxi outside the prison gates. I’m sure the Hsayadaw has been waiting a long time.”

The Chief Warden replies, “And I’m sure such a wise man knows that state security is more important than anything else.”

For an instant the two look into each other’s eyes, with nothing between them, no screen of reflective light, no words. Chit Naing has the distinct impression of being offered a reprieve, which he warily accepts. “Yes, sir, you’re absolutely right.”

The Chief addresses Zaw Gyi. “Well, off with you, then. I’m sure the abbot will be happy to meet his new student, despite what you’ve got in that basket. May you become a good novice.”

“Yes, sir.” The boy settles the strap of his sling bag across his shoulder and picks up his woven plastic suitcase. Chit Naing’s warm hand grasps his shoulder, nudging him toward the closed door.

The boy is the first to step out of the releases room. As one flip-flop settles into the gravel, the Chief’s voice stops him. “Officer Chit Naing.” The senior jailer turns back. The boy waits, facing the compound. It’s late twilight and the floodlights are already on.

The man’s voice booms out of the bare concrete hollow. “When you’re finished seeing the boy out, could you come back in here for a moment? I want to talk to you about something. Something quite important.”

“Yes, sir. Of course. I’ll be back directly.”

Saya Chit Naing’s voice has become very small, which frightens the boy. But the tall, thin man touches him again on the shoulder. “Let’s go, Nyi Lay.” Once they’ve taken a few steps, he speaks again, more quietly, “Hurry.”

The only sounds between them are their feet crunching gravel and the boy’s slippers slapping his soles. In another minute Soe Thein follows them, the Chief Warden’s keys rattling in his hand. The three of them stare at the iron-banded door built into the high gates—it seems to grow taller and heavier as they approach it. Soe Thein waves to the guard in the sentry box and bends down slightly, to see the locks and bolts better. After a few seconds, he pushes the heavy door open.

A light wind gusts in, carrying the scent of green stuff, weeds and ripe fields beyond the prison. Now comes a heady draft of car exhaust. The chubby driver is already behind the wheel, revving his engine, but the old
monk in burgundy robes remains standing beside the taxi, watching the prison gates.

The boy looks up gravely at Chit Naing, who whispers, “Nyi Lay, don’t worry. We’ll be fine in here and you’ll be better out there. Look, the Hsayadaw is waving at you.”

The boy gives the jailer a grin like a spark of fire and glances at the road. He lifts his hand and shyly waves to the old abbot. Chit Naing nods toward the open door.

And Zaw Gyi walks out of the cage.

A Chapter from the History of Kindness by Karen Connelly

I
was educated abroad.

Not in universities or private schools, but on the streets and in the markets of northern Thailand, in a shepherd’s hut on an island in the Aegean, in the refugee camps and cramped rooms of political exiles on the Thai-Burma border. The first time I lived away from home I was seventeen. I spent a year immersed in Thai culture and food and language. It was an intense, wonderful, difficult experience. It helped me to understand that living in different countries and speaking new languages was a vital part of my apprenticeship as a writer. I lived in Thailand, Spain, France, and Greece for much of the next twelve years. I would return to Canada periodically, once for almost two years, but my goal was always to have a life elsewhere.

Living abroad and writing a novel are very similar experiences. Both involve entering other realities, constructing new identities. If you want to have a profound experience of a new place, the mind has to be open, vulnerable, and spacious enough to undergo a violent invasion of the other. If you want to write a good novel, the mind has to be able to sustain that openness and vulnerability for as long as it takes to get the job done.

Any foreigner (and any writer) who is trying to get
in
—into a language,
into the inside jokes, into the skin of another world—sets him or herself up, willingly, for a rich but also painful onslaught of newness and otherness. Unlike many people who become foreigners, I did not leave my country because of economic duress or political upheaval. I left Canada as a teenager because I was starved for what I vaguely termed, even then, “real life.” I left, too, because I was sick of real life, the real life of alcoholism and drug abuse that is the abridged history of my family.

I knew from the beginning that exile was one way of protecting myself from almost sure disaster. While growing up I had observed that disaster is a kind of genetic trait, but I was going to do my best to escape the fate that several of my siblings were experiencing. I was to become a new person, a new citizen. I wanted to remake myself, to do the impossible and leave my history far behind me.

I was adopted everywhere, and fed often. Besides the good, sane families I found wherever I was, I invariably searched out people who were marginalized: gypsies, drug addicts, artists, cantankerous peasants, exiles of various kinds. These were the sorts of people whose codes I dimly or sharply understood. I discovered, during this strange, shape-shifting evolution of empathy, that a great many people are wounded, in need of care, lost, variously broken, and yearning for love and connection. In other words, I discovered the terrible truth that every escape artist comes to, eventually: there is no escape. All of us have a gene for disaster.

To put it another way, I’ll quote Julia Kristeva, from her book
Strangers to Ourselves:
“Living with the other, with the foreigner, confronts us with the possibility or not of
being an other
. It is not simply—humanistically—a matter of our being able to accept the other, but of
being in his place
, and this means to imagine and make oneself other for oneself. Rimbaud’s
Je est un autre
(“I is an other”) … foreshadowed the exile, the possibility or necessity to be foreign and to live in a foreign country, thus heralding the art of living in a modern era, the cosmopolitanism of those who have been flayed.”

Those who have been flayed
. I first read that phrase while I was working on
The Lizard Cage
, and it made me think immediately of Teza and Nyi Lay. Both of them are flayed people: great violence has brought them to the shocking and brutal but completely normal circumstances of their lives
in prison. Teza is a fictional character, but he is also many real men and women, just as the boy, Nyi Lay—Free El Salvador—Zaw Gyi, is many of the different children I came to know in Burma and on the border.

I could not have started writing
The Lizard Cage
if not for my long education of trying to know the other, and, in all those foreign places, of
being
the other. Absorbing and living so much in a state of actual foreignness prepared me for the most galvanizing experiences of my life so far: events in Burma and on the Thai-Burmese border. Writing the novel was a continuation and a deepening, an internalization, of those experiences.

Contacts in Bangkok had given me the numbers of many people in Burma’s major centers: political activists, artists, writers, editors, musicians, doctors. On my first visit to the country, I met with them several times over a period of three weeks, and met other individuals through them. I had never heard people speak so passionately about freedom and art and political oppression. Burma was different than the other countries I knew: it was ruled by a dictatorship.

If I had experienced wounding and become a witness to and a recorder of the wounding of others, if I had lived among those who were damaged by bad parents and bad people and bad luck, this was something beyond, something far worse. Burma was an entire country flayed by its symbolic parents, its rulers. This was dysfunction and disaster on a national level, and that is exactly how the people described it to me.

Actively suffering the destruction of their human rights, my newfound Burmese friends were keenly aware that I had come from a place of great openness and wealth. They also knew that I was a writer. We discussed various painful and dangerous aspects of living in Burma under military rule. I learned much, and I asked many questions. But the one and key question Burmese people asked me was, “Will you write about this?”

Artists prohibited to exhibit their paintings, the famous writers whose works never pass the Press Scrutiny Board. Hundreds of people gunned down on the street, the school girls who were bayonetted in 1988. “Why don’t you write a book about that?” The children carrying loads of wet concrete at the construction sites of new hotels. Whole villages of women raped by soldiers. Men taken away, enslaved as weapon porters on the front-lines. “Will you write this story down?” The outspoken father, brother,
sister, mother who disappears at night, and eventually is sentenced to seven, ten, twenty years in a prison infested with tuberculosis, dysentery, and rats.

Confronted with these stories, and with so much intelligence and indignation, the very least I could do, in my great freedom as a writer, was to reply
Yes, I will write it down
.

Of course I didn’t really understand what I was getting myself into.

Writing
The Lizard Cage
was profoundly painful, just as researching the book was physically and spiritually exhausting. After I was denied a visa to reenter Burma, I sought out dissidents and revolutionaries who live on the Thai-Burma border. I could already feel the shape of the novel I was to write, but I needed to get the details right, and live longer with my subjects.

I spent almost all of my time with Burmese people who had left Burma for political reasons. Yet it was a lonely time, too. The writer is alone, in the sense of not belonging to an organization. The writer is (or should be) a free agent, uniquely unprotected from the hard, bright truth of the world. I was in my twenty-sixth and twenty-seventh year: youth and idealism carried me through. But it wasn’t easy. There was no coworker I could talk with after interviewing former political prisoners; there was no supervisor who could tell me what I might expect psychologically after listening to dozens of people describe how they had been tortured, how they had lost their families or been cut off from them for a decade.

The stories people most wanted to tell, it seemed, were the stories of how they became political, and then how they ended up and survived in prison. Metaphorically, the story of modern Burma is one of violence, incarceration, isolation. Living on the border, among Burmese people who had lived that story, who had the marks of it on their skin, I learned the questions I still ask myself: What am I willing to see? What am I willing to feel? How well can I know this world that I live in, this world that I love? I ask myself these questions often, and the answers, often, are very humbling. Sometimes I don’t want to see. I don’t want to feel. I would prefer a comfortable numbness. But numbness is boring.

Whereas seeing, especially seeing with a compassionate eye, always surprises. It is labor paid for with unexpected gifts. Burmese people taught me how to see beauty anew, and then how to see beyond beauty. They
taught me how to see beyond what I wanted to see. How to listen to more than what I wanted to hear. How to listen for a while, a while longer, a long time, until the speaker could tell the story underneath the story, which was often tragic.

To face the woundedness and vulnerability of others is to face my own vulnerability. Or to face my fear of it—the dread of being hurt or broken. That can be uncomfortable. It can be terrifying to know your own fragility. Most often we place that fragility outside of ourselves—over the border or in the prison, where the other people live. The poor ones. The sick and maimed ones. The refugees. All those who are more vulnerable than we are. Writing
The Lizard Cage
taught me that the border most people are really frightened of is death. It is the border we will all cross eventually. Aided by the wisdom of his Buddhist faith, Teza faces it with a simple courage and matter-of-factness that still inspires me.