The Lizard Cage

by Karen Connelly

  He knows he is sane, despite the physical agony that leaves his mind raw and shaky. He is sane, but he misses the spider dearly, the web spun and respun according to the creature’s secret need. He misses the perfection of that architecture in the midst of so much ugliness, and he misses the constant presence—even though the spider went outside, he always came back. Teza feels real concern. When the pen fell, did it hurt the spider? He knows how delicate and breakable they are, a spider’s jointed legs.

  The singer rubs the smell of old urine away from his nose and gingerly touches his swollen eye. He pulls his knees up to his chest and stares down the sharp slope of shinbones. He has five broken toes, two on the left foot, three on the right. Though he has no clear memory of it, he suspects that one of the warders, or Handsome—probably Handsome—must have jumped up and down on his feet. The toe bones are the broken pieces that have healed most easily. With tolerable pain, he is able to hobble. Talking is still very bad. And not talking is also very bad. Eating is the worst. His entire jaw is tight, raw-feeling, but the left mandible is the site of the fracture. No mirror, of course, but he leans over the water pot and sees the wavering reflection. His whole chin has shifted to the left, sunken into the shortened, half-shattered bone. His chin is the only place on his lower face that doesn’t hurt now—because it’s perfectly numb. The doctor says the nerve in that area has been severed.

  The buzz and echo in his left ear come back at least a few times a day. Sometimes he thinks he’s gone deaf in that ear. Other times he still hears as well as he did before. Or does he? What worries him most is that he doesn’t know for sure. The left eye is bruised and still swollen but has stopped running pus. He washes it several times every day.

  Taking stock this way is a necessary task, like returning to a city after the invading army has left, but it leaves him feeling like the most exhausted man on the planet. Chit Naing has told him that all the men who wrote letters to Daw Aung San Suu Kyi are in the dog cells. There hasn’t been a trial yet, but that doesn’t matter. Each man possessed “illegal” materials, which means they’ll all get an extra seven to ten years.

  I was wrong to trust Sein Yun. We were all wrong to trust him.

  But you cannot remain human if you never trust another person.

  That is the crux of it. I am exhausted because I remain human.

  Sammy strikes the time, but the singer isn’t counting anymore. Whatever time it is, he is old. He covers his crooked face with his hands. His long fingers pass over his cheekbones, his head. He smells the dirt on his hands and gets up to wash them at his water pot, using soap. He knows the sadness will leave him. It will change into something else. This is the truth of annica: all things are impermanent. He moves carefully to his mat, clears away a dirty undershirt, and wraps himself in his blanket. Forming a mental image of the Buddha, he turns toward the outer wall, the bars, and genuflects three times. He still bows gracefully, as he will until the day of his death, his head touching the cement through the triangular opening formed by his thumbs and index fingers.

  Kneeling, his hands held before his chest, his eyes closed, he silently recites the Pali prayer:

  Sabbe satta aham sukhita hontu.

  Sabbe satta nidukkha hontu.

  Sabbe satta avera hontu.

  Sabbe satta abyapajjha hontu.

  Sabbe satta anigha hontu.

  Sabbe satta sukhi attanam pariharantu.

  Whatever beings there are, may they be happy

  Whatever beings there are, may they be free from suffering.

  Whatever beings there are, may they be free from enmity.

  Whatever beings there are, may they be free from hurtfulness.

  Whatever beings there are, may they be free from ill health.

  Whatever beings there are, may they be able to protect their own happiness.

  He bows again three times and begins to breathe.

  Though his eyes are closed, something interrupts him. Free El Salvador stands beside the outer wall, his body hidden behind it, his head visible, hovering over the food tray. Teza completely forgot that it was time for breakfast. The boy shifts his weight from one foot to the other, somehow asking if he’s welcome.

  Teza cannot smile, but his eyes soften as he waves the boy closer. How long has Free El Salvador been watching him? With the fluidity of a mongoose, the boy comes forward, crouches. Teza notices that his expression is different. Why does he look more like a child today than he did yesterday?

  Chin dipped against his chest, eyes lowered, Free El Salvador carefully pushes the tray into the cell. It’s shyness. The boy has become shy! Teza is delighted to recognize this emotion in the hard nugget of a face. Quietly, still looking away, the boy utters that single, beautiful word they share.

  Sa.

  Eat.

  Teza whispers his thanks. “Tzey zu bay, Nyi Lay.”

  The words, garbled because he cannot open his mouth, are clear as fire, and hang like fire in the air between them, burning with many meanings: nyi lay. Little Brother. A prison child. The lizard he keeps in his shack. Aung Min, living in a border country that Teza can only imagine. Nyi Lay. Jailer Chit Naing calls both child and singer by this casually affectionate name.

  Teza is still kneeling, the blanket gathered about him, while the boy squats with his hand on the tray and pushes it into the cell. His head almost touches the bars.

  The boy whispers, “Sa! You’re too skinny.”

  Teza points to his jaw and makes a falling ax of his hand. “It’s not easy to eat.”

  Free El Salvador points to the tray. “Sa. Sa!” He sticks his arm in through the trap and pushes the tray closer to the singer, but Teza still doesn’t look at it. He’s too excited; the boy is finally speaking to him.

  Free El Salvador says, “Pass me your dirty tray.” Now the singer will see. There is the familiar sound of aluminum rasping cement. Then a faint intake of breath. The boy snatches up the used tray.

  The singer squints with his good eye, confused, then disbelieving. There it is, poorly concealed with a few spoonfuls of wet rice, something he has not seen for years. An egg.

  When he looks up, his hands rise too, fingers spread, asking for an explanation, but Free El Salvador is gone.

  He pulls the tray toward him. Yes. It’s a hard-boiled egg, the white turned brown with fish sauce and oil.

  Teza picks up the slippery egg with his long fingers and inhales deeply. Noodles. On the other side of the egg, he finds mohinga. Mohinga! He smells the Forty-Second Street Tea Shop, behind the old jute factory. You have to be there before eight-thirty in the morning if you want to be sure to get a bowl. It’s a famous place. The crowds on their way to work or school stop for breakfast, then drink sweet tea or bitter tea or instant coffee, deliciously thick with condensed milk.

  He breaks the egg with the edge of the metal spoon. It’s backward augury, for he cannot read the future in the yellow center, only the past. Early mornings with Thazin bent close over the corner of a low wooden table, his knees touching her knees, the bowls of mohinga empty and the sweet tea finished and the pots of bitter green tea beginning, that lovely, endless stuff, provided compliments of the shop, allowing them to stay longer, too long, drinking not only tea but each other’s company, away from their friends and families, enjoying each other as much as they do when they borrow a dorm room or find a secluded spot in a park. Mohinga and the whole tea-shop ritual often made them late for their first classes.

  He breaks the egg again, in quarters, then mashes it up without mixing it into the boiled rice, not wanting to dilute the taste. With the blanket pulled up around his shoulders, Teza eats his first egg since the days before his arrest in 1988. He eats slowly, his tongue pushing the crumbled yolk against the roof of his mouth until it becomes a wet paste. He winces, stops, keeps going.

  The salty, sulfury taste is both utterly unexpected and deeply known. Home, the noodle and tea shops, the young woman he loved. Eating mohinga with Aung Min before they go to pl
ay football. And from far, far back, his father, who takes him to visit the Shwedagon in the new light of dawn. He is four or five years old. Aung Min is too small to come. Teza is a boy gloriously alone with Hpay Hpay, who buys jasmine and orchids from one of the flower-sellers on the grand stairway that leads to the gold stupa. He puts his son down to take the flowers, chatting and laughing with the old lady who sells them. She touches Teza’s cheek with one hand as she hands him a string of jasmine. Father and son climb a few more steps, stop again to buy incense and candles. Another small conversation ensues with the vendor, about the coolness of the morning, the coming heat of the day. Near the top of the staircase built into the angle of the hill, Hpay Hpay lifts Teza and carries him up the last of the steps into the round, glittering courtyards of the great pagoda. All around them, invisible and visible among the many shrines, monks are murmuring and chanting the prayers of dawn. Both father and son offer flowers. Hpay Hpay lights the incense and candles, then makes his own prayers with Teza sitting cross-legged beside him. After a while they bow again to the Buddha—Hpay Hpay places Teza’s hands in front of his head—then they stand and walk the night-cooled stones around the large circumference of the stupa. The small boy is patient and quiet, happy with his father in this circular labyrinth of many Buddhas and brightly painted statues. He knows what awaits them, after they descend the long staircase under the arched and painted ceiling, after they return to the wakening clamor of the streets around the pagoda. There’s a mohinga stall nearby. Each of them has a bowl. The little boy gets an egg in his noodles. To help you grow big and strong, Hpay Hpay tells him.

  I am eating an egg. He revises it.

  I am eating my whole life.

  Rain begins to fall, all at once in steady rhythm, a wet broom sweeping out the sky. Fresh air billows into the cell. The rain has a mantra: egg, egg, egg, egg.

  With a fleck of yellow yolk stuck on his lower lip, Teza makes up a stupid joke.

  What comes first, the chicken or the egg?

  The political prisoner, of course.

  He swallows as slowly as it’s possible to swallow without choking. He revises it.

  What comes first, the chicken or the egg?

  The boy. Free El Salvador, who brought the political prisoner an egg from a bowl of mohinga.

  Before Sammy beats out five o’clock, Teza places another dried fish outside his cell, laid carefully on a piece of cloth from the parcel, surrounded by four small pouches of peanuts, tea leaves, and sesame seeds.

  When the boy arrives, his eyes fall immediately to the offering on the ground. Obviously surprised, he glances at Teza, who manages to say, “Thank you. For the egg this morning.”

  Shyness comes to Free El Salvador again. He approaches the cell. “Was it good?”

  “Very good,” Teza replies, a smile in his voice. “I haven’t eaten an egg for a long time. It made me think of my father.”

  At the word father, the boy lifts his head. His mouth is not quite closed, not quite open. The dark lips are full, as innocent as they are sensuous. Beautiful, really. The old anger whipcracks through Teza, asking one question: Why is this child living in a prison?

  The singer takes a deep breath. The boy’s still looking at him, newly direct, almost complicitous. And wanting. Wanting what? To be loved, of course, like any child. Teza points to the food outside the cell. “It’s for you.”

  “De gé la?” Really?

  He breathes out a laugh. “Really, Nyi Lay. Who else?”

  The boy scratches his cheek. It wrings Teza’s heart, to watch him struggle against his own longing. “Be quick. The warder might come.” The child drops to a squat and deftly wraps the fish in the little white cloth, secrets the pouches of la-phet away in his sling bag. He thanks the singer almost formally. “Ako.” He pauses. “Tzey zu amiagee tin-ba-deh.” Teza nods, touched by simple words. The boy is still too shy to say Teza’s name, but ako is a beginning. Older Brother.

  A few mornings later Nyi Lay brings the singer a fried fish. After deboning it, Teza makes a paste of the soft white flesh to mix in with his boiled rice. The boy watches him drink the soupy mixture, occasionally whispering, “Sa, sa,” like the parent of a fussy child. In turn Teza leaves him more food—another fish and some deep-fried beans—from the parcel. The next day the boy brings him a very ripe banana.

  Two days later he leaves Teza a small twig of diamond-shaped leaves and the singer gives him another dried fish and one of the little bricks of thanakha.

  The next day, squatting in front of the cell, Nyi Lay sticks his skinny arm through the bars and opens his hand. Lying in his dirty palm is a pale green stone. He whispers, “It might be jade,” and looks up at Teza. Like a diver, the boy takes a big, audible breath before plunging in. “Maybe it’s a jade amulet. Tan-see Tiger has a jade Buddha that he wears around his neck. On a gold chain. He pays the warders so they don’t take it away from him. And he says that the Buddha image protects him.” He flushes, embarrassed to be talking so much, but he can’t stop. “And he has some other amulets too, all for protection. One’s a bullet that was taken out of his chest. For protection against other bullets! And you can still see his scar!” Out of air, Nyi Lay falls silent.

  Teza raises a questioning eyebrow. “If the stone is for protection, don’t you want to keep it?”

  There is a long pause. The two of them gaze down at the glinting little rock.

  If it is an amulet, then he should keep it for himself. The Songbird’s right. Because of Handsome and the pen, he needs all the help he can get. Yet he doesn’t close his fingers and pull his arm back through the iron grille. The green, gray-fissured stone lies on his open palm. He wants to give it away.

  With long, thin fingers, Teza picks up the stone and turns it this way and that, into the light of the corridor. “If you need this talisman back, just ask. I’ll hold on to it for you.” The boy stands. Teza says, “Wait, don’t go yet. There is one more dried fish from my parcel. Do you want to take it today or tomorrow?”

  As the boy watches Teza wrapping it up, an explanation opens in his mind easily, lightly, like a door made of thatch. If the Songbird keeps the amulet, the boy can keep the pen. The trade keeps both of them safe.

  . 36 .

  From the white house, he walks along with Teza’s empty tray, the pleasant weight of more good dinners stowed in his sling bag, bumping against his thigh. He pauses to check the fish and reknot his longyi.

  Amulet for pen for protection. What can he do to make sure the exchange works?

  He will make an offering. That’s why the men pray, and leave flowers and food for the nat of the last tree in the cage. They believe the nat will help them.

  Between the hospital and the kitchen stands the Buddhist shrine. Though he needs to return the singer’s tray for wash-up, he finds himself stopping at that special in-between place. If he makes an offering to the nat, then maybe now is the time to make one to the Buddha, who sits calmly above the fresh and wilted flowers, the fresh and dried branches of green. Incense smoke curls up and disappears above his knees of peeling gold. A warder has placed a glass of water and a plate of oranges beside him. It must have been a warder, or an officer, because the convicts gobble up fresh fruit right away, peels included. Untempted, the Buddha sits placidly beside this plate of juicy oranges, tapered fingers grasping nothing. The long gold arms slope smoothly into his draped lap, like those of a dancer who has decided to sit down forever.

  The boy stands behind the half-dozen worshippers, prisoners sitting cross-legged with eyes closed, lips forming inaudible words. Two of them count prayer beads; the boy hears the tiny click-click-click as the beads pass under fingertips. He won’t get down on his knees and bow three times. Not yet, not with so many prisoners around. He knows it’s three times because he’s watched the men so often, and the Songbird too. He just stands there, staring at the golden face.

  Then he sees it.

  A thousand times he has watched the gold mouth, wondering if it ever
speaks. But he has never seen the holy man smiling as he is now. The Buddha has changed. Almost imperceptibly, the full lips curve upward, as though he knows the boy’s secret—amulet for pen for protection—and promises, with his closed, smiling mouth, that he will tell no one.

  The boy meets the Buddha’s gaze and makes the same face back. Putting the tray under his arm, he raises his hands in prayer position, makes three little nods with his head—as close to bowing as he dares—and closes his eyes.

  “Why don’t you kneel down like the rest of us?”

  This unexpected voice, close and hot against his ear, makes him jump. The aluminum tray falls noisily to the ground. A worshipper turns, scowling. Sein Yun smiles an apology and raises a diplomatic yellow hand. The boy has already retrieved the tray and taken several steps backward.

  Sein Yun gets down on his knees. Now he is like a midget. Instead of genuflecting before the Buddha, he casts a wry sideways glance at the boy, who knows he should leave. Maybe it’s the Buddha himself whispering, Go, don’t stay here. But the boy doesn’t move. He’s never been so close to Sein Yun’s face. He examines the yellow skin, the curly-haired mole on his chin, the betel mouth with wrinkles radiating from lips stained red and brown. When the palm-reader waves to the boy, Nyi Lay stares at his fingernails, exceptionally long and rounded like hooks.

  Sein Yun’s smile reveals his dark teeth. “Don’t just stare, Nyi Lay.”

  “Sorry, Uncle.” His apology is without meaning.

  “Oh, I don’t mean at me—stare at me as much as you want. I mean at the shrine. La-ba. Come and join me. We will worship together.”

  The invitation takes the boy by surprise. He has always wanted exactly this, one of the men to teach him, to help him, but no one has ever offered, until now. Why does it have to be the nasty palm-reader?