The Lizard Cage

by Karen Connelly

  Sein Yun thrusts the tray into Teza’s outstretched hands, then backs out of the cell and closes the door. Still confused, Teza puts down his dinner and tries to hear what the palm-reader and jailer are whispering on the other side of the thick door. Their low voices are drowned out by the shuffle-slap of slippers and the familiar clomp of Handsome’s boots. Teza wonders briefly if there’s something wrong with his hearing.

  He stares down at his tray—the same broken, dirty rice, the same watery curry.

  The next morning the singer begins to wait, consciously, patiently. Then he waits in growing annoyance. The pain from the beating diminishes as the growling, gripping cramp in his stomach intensifies. The stomachache gives him a headache.

  Swearing, he stands up, too quickly, and loses his balance; he grabs the wall to steady himself. The headache reasserts itself with a sudden ferocity, so he sits down and rests his back against the wall. Slowly the awful drumbeat in his skull recedes.

  When the iron-beater finally begins to strike out eleven, Teza is so relieved he could cry. Five minutes later he hears the palm-reader’s slapping footsteps. To his dismay, he also hears the sound of Handsome’s boots. Strange. Did he just miss them yesterday?

  The jailer swears above the rattle of his keys, whisks the bolt back with a harshness that Sein Yun never displays. Teza bows his head in submission. Handsome opens the door and spits into the cell. The phlegm smacks the floor close to him, but Teza doesn’t glance at it. He doesn’t move a muscle. The jailer grunts, steps back into the corridor, and shouts at Sein Yun, “What the fuck are you waiting for? Just give it to him!”

  The palm-reader shuffles into the cell and stands before Teza, grinning like an idiot. In his arms is a large htaung win za; the food tray is balanced on top. Teza blinks. Food. He opens his mouth but restrains his desire to let out a whoop of joy. The parcel is big, bigger than usual. He looks past Sein Yun’s shoulder, through the cell door. Handsome glares; Teza drops his eyes.

  The palm-reader is subdued in the presence of the jailer, but only in volume, not in character. He takes another step into the cell and the space fills with his throaty chuckle and his smell. “It weighs a ton, too. She must have thought you were setting up shop inside, Little Brother. There’ll be enough food here for you and all your friends.”

  Teza glances at Handsome again, who has turned his head away and appears to be staring grimly toward the shower room. Sein Yun jabbers on, his voice jumpy, pitched too high. “I hope you share some of this wealth. I can already smell the salted fish. I’ll make it worth your while, of course. You wouldn’t expect any less from me, would you?” He tilts his head this way and that, too quickly, nervousness making him a caricature of himself.

  Teza hurriedly takes the tray off the top of the box, sets it down, then lifts the food parcel out of Sein Yun’s arms. He whispers, “How did so much get through? And in a cardboard box?” Usually parcels come wrapped up in plastic bags.

  Sein Yun raises a finger to his lips but says loudly, “I’ll take the biggest fish in exchange for thirty tablets of paracetamol. You suffer with toothache, right? How can you enjoy eating if you’re in pain? Give me your pail, no chatting.”

  When Sein Yun leaves to empty the pail, the jailer steps to the threshold of the cell and growls, “Your food is poisoned,” then slams the door. Shaking his head in bafflement, Teza looks down at the parcel in his arms. Sein Yun was right; he can smell the fish! His mouth begins to water even as he tries to hear what Handsome is saying on the other side of the door, but the men move off down the corridor and their voices disappear.

  Five minutes later Sein Yun, still out of breath and jumpy, pulls open the heavy door and hands Teza his pail. He winks and jerks his head backward, indicating that Jailer Handsome is waiting to lock up, his impatience audible in the clatter of the key ring against his leg. He whispers, “Remember not to eat too quickly, Little Brother!”

  When the door heaves shut again, the air is still filled with the palm-reader’s nervousness. Teza waits for the footsteps to fade out, then squats down in front of the parcel. Having been searched, it is already open, but he carefully and slowly folds back the flaps of cardboard. It is a gift from his mother.

  There are plastic bags filled with peanuts, deep-fried beans, sesame seeds, the pickled tea leaves he particularly adores. He takes the packages out, carefully sets them on his mat, surprised to see she has bought a new brand of la-phet, tea leaves they’ve never eaten at home. It doesn’t matter. He is so pleased, so surprised to receive this food. He takes deep breaths, trying not to rush.

  The cheroots have come through all of a piece, thirty of them in a sealed pack: he’ll be able to perform the cheroot ceremony for three weeks without relying on the palm-reader. And he’ll smoke a little more freely.

  When he takes out the bundle of fish, tears of relief fill his eyes. This is what he has been waiting for, the dark brown and gray half-coils of these water creatures, their bodies preserved with salt. They are life to him. Strangely, they’re wrapped in oil-stained paper instead of the cloth she usually sends. His mind lights briefly on Handsome’s threat, but he knows the food is not poisoned. And if it were, he would eat it anyway. Only his sense of formality stops him from tearing into one of the fish, bones sticking out of his mouth like opaque pins. There are an unprecedented twelve of them.

  A gathering sense of foreboding competes with his pleasure in this bounty. Twelve fish. Usually there are eight. Once there were ten. Why did they allow such a large parcel through?

  Four blocks of thanakha slide into view. Rubbed in a little water in his hand, the fragrant bars of ground bark become a paste he applies to his sores. His mother claims that thanakha is the reason that Burmese women have such lovely skin. While he was growing up, she smeared it on him for reasons as varied as heat rash to boils to insect bites. He peels the plastic wrap off one of the bars and smells it: the faint scent returns him to a childhood morning, when he left the house in a sulk because she forced him to go to school with thanakha swirled on his cheeks. Like a child, or a girl! He stopped at a tap in a friend’s compound and indignantly washed the offensive cream off his face, only to get scolded by his friend’s mother, who knew exactly what he was doing.

  There are four large packages of deep-fried beans mixed with spices. There is a new towel, and two new pairs of underwear. Most worrisome of all, there are two bars of soap. He has never received two bars of soap. Someone always steals the soap.

  Teza’s nervousness mounts as he takes out each longed-for item, holds it. Daw Sanda, May May, his mother: he cannot feel her touch here. Though everything is in place, something is missing. Some of the food may have been sent by her, but someone else put together the parcel, which explains the uncustomary cardboard box, the unexpected quantities.

  The abundance feels like a bribe. But that is ridiculous. What can he possibly be bribed for?

  Out loud, he whispers, “Keep going.”

  He flips up the cardboard flaps at the bottom of the box. A half-cry rises from his mouth.

  Paper.

  White, coarse-grained, and folded at the bottom of the box. He tilts the empty parcel. A white ballpoint pen rolls out from underneath a cardboard flap. The paper is blank, and the pen looks new.

  The singer swears under his breath.

  Now he understands Sein Yun’s jumpiness.

  Minutes pass. He stares at the various items of food and toiletries placed carefully on his sleeping mat. Then he looks at the paper, three sheets. A white pen. They are like bombs meant for children, enticing him, drawing him forward, designed to explode in his hands. He does not touch them. He sits in the cell tilting the box back and forth. His headache comes back. The pen rolls under the cardboard flap, disappears. Rolls back out. He cannot escape it.

  He tucks the paper and the pen back under the flap at the bottom of the box, out of sight, and turns to the food. What he craved so badly has suddenly become a distraction.

  Still, as soo
n as he pulls a chunk of flesh off one fish and puts it into his mouth, his body remembers that food is the center of the world. The rice on the tray is particularly sandy today, but no matter, he has fish to eat and he eats it, feels the salty flesh bypass his stomach completely and go straight into the long wasted muscles of his thighs and arms. Thank you, thank you. He carefully picks at the needling bones. It’s almost a medical procedure, the precise, methodical stripping away of the meat.

  The cardboard box sits beside him like a disturbing companion, but he ignores it, surrendering instead to the deep hunger of his body. He eats and eats, slowly, carefully, making himself stop and breathe, stop and breathe, knowing he must not go too fast or have too much at this first sitting. Forgetful, he chews and swallows, licks his lips, eats too much. To keep himself from eating more, he stands and paces for a few minutes.

  All afternoon he has left the pen and paper in the box, pretending they are not there. When the iron-beater strikes five o’clock, Teza begins to stare at the door, willing Sein Yun to appear. Sometimes when a parcel is delivered, the next prison meal is mysteriously forfeited. Teza waits, but Sein Yun does not come to explain to him what is going on, where the pen and paper came from. By six he understands that the palm-reader will not be making an appearance.

  In his agitation, he eats another whole fish. And a package of la-phet. Then peanuts. He chews each peanut carefully.

  Soon he must put all the food back in the box and start moving it around, trying to keep it from the ants, who have already abandoned their excavations in the wall to come and have dinner with him.

  Polite creatures. He crushes a peanut and puts it on the floor to distract them from the larger store of food. This will work for a while.

  He removes the pen and paper from the box and tucks them into his little bundle of clothing. He will not touch them again until he knows how they got into the parcel. And where the parcel itself came from.

  His curiosity rises with the evening mosquitoes. Does the pen actually write? He retrieves the ballpoint and sets the nib to the muscled flesh of his palm, just under his thumb, like a surgeon aligning a scalpel. The entire surface of his palm sweats. His hands, he notes unhappily, are shaking. Imagine holding a gun! He surely would blow his foot off. He thinks of Aung Min on the border, an armed revolutionary.

  “Aung Min,” he whispers, “I can barely hold a pen.”

  He begins. Nothing. The point skids along his damp skin. He wipes his hand on his longyi and tries to write again. He swears. Of course the pen writes. Blue ink. He knew it would write. As soon as the ink makes its mark—he loops the line—he rubs it away with the thumb of his other hand. How amazing that these mundane objects, the tools of clerks and civil servants, should alter his narrow world so completely. He has not held a pen since he signed a confession after being tortured.

  Through the air vent comes the guttural sound of a guard clearing his throat. Caught unawares, Teza drops the pen. The plastic clatter causes him an anxiety as acute as physical pain. His first impulse is to run. Run to where? Eight feet away, to the opposite wall? He knows the guard could not have heard the pen drop, but sweat floods his skin. He stands as still as he can, the white pen on the concrete floor somewhere below him, his head turned up to the air vent, where the spider rests in the center of his web. There is nothing wrong with his hearing.

  He listens with his whole body.

  No one is there, neither outside in the rain nor on the other side of the coffin door, but he remains motionless, straining to hear. Handsome could be sneaking up on him, ready to heave the door open and catch him.

  With paper, pen. Contraband items.

  No one is there.

  The guard has long since passed on his rounds.

  Suddenly the lights go out. Nine o’clock. Blackness falls like a blanket with a silver hole: through the air vent he can see the illumination of the floodlights high above the coffin. But the cell is in complete darkness. Teza lowers himself to his knees and begins to search for the pen. Under the watchtower, the iron-beater begins to strike out the time.

  “Fucking Sein Yun.”

  His own words surprise him. He has not realized until now, with his hands carefully sweeping the floor, stretching out farther, farther, coming in again, that he is angry. In fact he is furious, which helps to keep his growing sense of panic at bay. He is sure Sein Yun is responsible for this. Certainly he has made it possible. While his hands pass over the layer of grit on the cold cement—the bloody thing did not fall so far! or did he kick it when the lights went down?—it becomes very clear to him that the three sheets of paper and this lost-in-the-dark pen will only make his life more difficult. He does not want them. The last beating, the drowning, is still too fresh.

  If he is discovered with pen and paper, Handsome will thrash him, to death perhaps. If he survives the beating, they’ll just extend his sentence. There doesn’t even need to be anything written on the paper; they would sentence him by intention alone. Two, four, seven more years? Seven. Probably seven. Or ten.

  There. There it is. His fingers close around the pen. Tsshik-tsheek. He clicks the point in and out, then crawls over to his sleeping mat. In the dark, his fingers burrow into his little bundle of clothing, where the three sheets of paper are wrapped in a clean undershirt. He slides the pen in beside the paper. Where else to hide them? There is no broken cement on the cell floor, no broken or breakable brick in the wall to create a hiding place. The ants’ chambers are not thick enough for the pen. His latrine pail? Obviously not. The water pot?

  Hiding places are useless anyway. In a raid, the warders miss nothing. They check the bricks to make sure they are sound. They tap the floor and dig up raw earth. If they look for something they will find it, even if it isn’t there.

  . 17 .

  When Sein Yun comes with his breakfast, Teza does not stir from the back of the cell. The palm-reader almost skips toward him, eyes shining, and leans down to the singer’s ear. “You have the paper?”

  He whispers, “Yes.”

  Sein Yun smells of sweat and betel and cooking oil. Many of the criminals in the big halls are allowed to cook for themselves. “And the pen?”

  “Yes.” Teza’s voice is thick with suspicion. He wonders if Sein Yun also hears the fear. Both of them glance repeatedly at the open teak door. Handsome is at the end of the hallway.

  “Your friends will be pleased. They are writing messages to Daw Suu Kyi, in celebration of her release.”

  Teza does not reply.

  The palm-reader drops to a squat. “The politicals in Hall Three want you to write something about prison conditions. They want you to write it to Daw Suu Kyi with the plan that a whole collection of letters will be sent out to the UN.”

  Teza quells his surprise that Sein Yun can say “UN” without a hoot of laughter and some rude comment about Westerners. No, Sein Yun’s yellow face is grave. Teza asks, “Which politicals?”

  “Myo Myo Than and his group in Hall Three.”

  Teza glances at the door. “When did you find out about this?”

  “Right after Daw Suu Kyi was released. They wanted my help. Of course I said no, are you crazy? I’m a hardworking criminal, not a political gofer. But they kept at it, and I must admit they came up with some danger pay. I’ve earned it a hundred times over, listening to all that shit about solidarity and the movement and prison conditions—as if I don’t know about prison conditions! I agreed to bring you pen and paper as long as it came in a food parcel. Forgive me, but I didn’t want to carry anything on my body. Heroin and vegetables are one thing, Songbird, but paper and pen is another kettle of fish, you know what I mean? I have no idea what happened to your last parcel, but a friend of yours kept this one hanging around for a week in the holding room, until it was safe enough to repack it.”

  “What friend?” Teza stares hard at the palm-reader.

  “You know, your powerful friend.”

  He can only be talking about Jailer Chit Naing,
but why doesn’t he just say so? Teza rubs his eyes, hiding his confusion. Something is wrong. Why didn’t Chit Naing tell him directly that something was going on? Because he didn’t want to incriminate himself?

  As though reading his mind, Sein Yun whispers, “Let me tell you, it has been a nerve-racking time. A lot of people are risking their necks. More people than you might imagine.”

  “Which people?”

  “The fewer names you know, the better, in case someone fucks up. Just remember that you have friends. Another criminal prisoner has agreed to take the messages out. A criminal! So don’t think we’re good for nothing. He leaves in four days, and the releasing officer has been doing business with him for years, so he won’t be checked when he leaves.” Sein Yun clasps his hands together and stands up, then squats down again just as quickly. His gold teeth gleam among the stained ones as he bends closer. “So can I tell them you’ll join them?”

  Teza doesn’t know what to say. Sein Yun’s yellow eyes shine with urgency. He breathes the words: “Why do you hesitate?”

  “Because I am surprised.”

  “Are you afraid?”

  Teza cannot reply.

  Sein Yun impatiently shifts his pack of betel from one cheek to the other. “There’s not much time. Myo Myo Than is waiting. We have to get the messages together.”

  The we enters Teza like a needle. We is the movement, the people. We is what he longs to feel viscerally, but cannot. He is alone. Though he is a political prisoner, he does not feel like a politician.

  Myo Myo Than was Aung Min’s good friend, a fellow strike leader and organizer. He was arrested just before Teza. For one week they shared a holding cell at Interrogation Center Twelve. Teza spent night after night listening to the strike leader screaming in the room across the hall. Myo Myo Than, in turn, spent his mornings listening to Teza. The destruction forged a tender bond between them. Myo Myo Than was the only political prisoner Teza shared a cell with as he became one himself.