The Lizard Cage

by Karen Connelly

In a whisper, he admits it. “Because I don’t know how to read.” Each word is a scrap of sandpaper on his tongue.

  Teza reaches his hand through the bars and touches the boy’s shoulder. “Don’t worry. That’s what school is for. I know a place where you can learn to read. And the people there will look after you.”

  The boy tilts his head to the side and asks suspiciously, “What kind of a place?”

  “It’s a monastery school. Run by an old man who was a friend of my father’s.”

  “You have a father?”

  “Everyone has a father. My father is dead, but … well, I still have him. And the Hsayadaw is like a father to all the children in his school.”

  The boy gives the singer a doubtful look.

  “Nyi Lay,” Teza leans toward him and whispers, “he would teach you how to read. I know he would. Do you know what reading is like?”

  Though the boy has many thoughts on this topic, he shrugs his shoulders. He doesn’t like to talk about leaving the cage. He’s too hungry.

  “It’s like flying. Reading a book can take you anywhere in the world.”

  “Ko Teza?” This is the first time the boy has used his name.

  “Yes?”

  “I have to leave now or I’m going to get in trouble. But can I eat your rice soup before I go?”

  “Of course. Go ahead.”

  He watches the boy eat, his pace increasing as the gruel disappears. The spoon scrapes against the tray, a desperate crescendo. It is the sound, Teza thinks, of pure determination. The boy picks up the dirty tray and the two of them stand together.

  “Tzey-zu-tin-ba-deh,” the boy thanks him politely.

  “That’s all right.” It’s a gift, Little Brother, to feed a small, struggling country.

  . 43 .

  Black threads sew themselves along the cracks in the walls, on the ground at the edges of buildings. Twilight. To visit the nat tree before it gets too late, the boy has to hurry. He walks quickly, skirting the wall of the kitchen before slipping in to drop off the Songbird’s tray. He says hello to the dishwashers and tries to catch a glimpse of the cook. Not for more fish—he receives his payment in the morning only. He just wants to make sure the cook doesn’t see him go out to the stream. He’s not scared of the crocodiles between the high prison walls, or the ghosts, but it’s dark enough for Eggplant to be a worry.

  With the cook nowhere in sight, the boy leaves the building through the back kitchen, anxious to visit the tree. He’ll be able to think there, about the Songbird and school and reading. He’ll say his prayers to the nat.

  He takes off his slippers and tucks them in his sling bag, then steps into the stream. With a low clack and loud buzz of electricity, the rampart floodlights turn on, making the boy jump. He scoffs at himself—how silly, to be scared of the light. He starts walking again. Gravel gives way under his feet and his toes sink into the soft mud.

  The big lizard is sleeping now. The rats rustle here and there through the shadowy grass, near the big wall. Weeks have passed since he’s gone hunting with his stick, but the food from the singer’s parcel is finished now. He doesn’t like to think about it, but he’ll have to start killing rats again.

  The water shushes and murmurs around his legs, pulling him on. The ghosts will come out soon enough, maybe even his father. His father was mean sometimes, not friendly like Chit Naing or the Songbird. But the boy is sure he would be kinder as a ghost than he was as a man. Sometimes he suspects Hpay Hpay can see him. That’s another reason that he likes to come to the stream and visit the nat tree. His father might be floating around here, drinking tea with the other dead men of the cage.

  The branches of the tree are bigger in the floodlights. The tree’s shadow spreads across the prison wall like a black-limbed painting of itself. The boy steps out of the stream and shakes his wet feet.

  The morning glories are tightly furled, so he can’t leave a flower tucked in the ribbons around the tree trunk. And he didn’t bring any rice to make an offering. But he kneels down.

  No one can be upset with him if he puts his hands to his forehead like a Muslim, like a Buddhist too—even the Karen Christians do the same sort of thing. If everybody else can do it, why can’t he? He whispers to the tree, who has no ears but hears him through its green leaves. To the nat, who must be similar to the Buddha at the shrine, but smaller, small enough to live in the branches of the tree like an invisible monkey. The boy closes his eyes and asks for the word, the beginning word that will open up the books he wants to read. He makes a prayer for bathazaga, the spirit in language like the nat in the tree. He prays to learn the round alphabet of his mother tongue, of his mother.

  And a ghost leaps, furious, onto his shoulder.

  His scream is small, one piercing note. He yanks himself away from the claws at his neck. When the creature lets go, the boy flies through the air and falls heavily onto his side at the water’s edge. His fingers close on a missile of small rocks and silt as he looks up to take aim at his attacker.

  But his hand drops back into the stream. It’s not a ghost. In the cross-angles of the floodlights, half of Jailer Handsome’s face is sharply lit, the other half is shadowed. The eye in the dark catches light like a broken window.

  “You like swimming, do you?” He gives the boy a light kick in the upper thigh, not too hard, just enough to hurt him a little and push him into the water. “It’s still rainy season, you know—be careful not to catch a cold.” Handsome kicks again, harder this time, at the boy’s waist, so his body curls into itself. The jailer’s knee immediately begins to burn, but he kicks again, harder, just above the child’s belly but below his chest. The kick elicits the telltale snag of breath, the solar plexus in spasm. Funny, but logical: the coughing is quieter than the same sound in an adult man. The little shit is in the stream now, heaving.

  The boy feels the cool water soak his shirt, stretch its fingers into his longyi, drenching the turquoise fabric. “Here, let me help you up.” Handsome extends a hand, but the boy scrambles to his feet, wheezing and shaking, trying to speak but unable; there’s not enough air to make the words.

  Handsome takes a step toward him. The boy stumbles backward in the water. He glances over his shoulder, at the tree and its shadow on the prison wall. Then he looks to the big halls. The warders on guard duty must be watching. The nat of the tree must be watching. Why don’t they help him? “Leave me alone,” he manages in a weak voice.

  “Oh, my, the rat-killer is frightened, is he?” Handsome laughs. Then hisses, “I don’t have to leave you alone. Got that? I can do whatever I want.”

  The boy turns his head away from the jailer and spits a gob of phlegm over the narrow stream. Handsome leans forward and strikes, grunting with effort; the thunk of knuckles against the child’s cheekbone is surprisingly loud. The boy lands on his back again, this time in the heart of the stream, where the water is deep enough to cover him. He feels the pebbles pushing into his skin as his elbows sink into the soft silt. He lifts his head and chest out of the stream and cries out, trying to stand, but a pawlike hand thrusts him backward again. Opening his mouth to protest, he gulps water, then begins to cough.

  Handsome feels a violent craving to just get it over with, to step into the stream and grab the child by the neck, hold his head underwater. The Chief Warden’s warning—You have to learn to control yourself, Officer Nyunt Wai Oo—doesn’t matter here; the stream is separate from the compound, and the guards won’t stop him. It’s the boy’s fault. The little rat-killer has been taunting him all this time. When Handsome steps like a giant into the water, the physical relief is as palpable as orgasm. He plants his boots firmly in the mud on either side of the boy’s hips and bends forward, his arms reaching out, unstoppable. The ligament in his knee strains away from the bone, sears like a brand; the pain is excruciating but right, stoking his fury. He grabs FREE EL SALVADOR, cramming his fists with the threadbare cotton. He hoists the child up sharply, to get a better grip on him, then shoves him
in the only direction possible, down, down, the inescapable trajectory of his life, the only choice.

  Even the boy sees the inevitability in Handsome’s contorted face, a man drowning in his fury as he drowns a child in water, water in the ears, the eyes, the nose, the mouth. The man’s strength crashes against the boy’s thin, flailing legs, boxing arms all elbows. The breathless choking roars in his ears, fills his eyes with the pressure of his own blood. The roaring heaves and heaves out of him until there is no breath left for sound.

  In the midst of frantic movement, stillness comes quickly, unexpected. The boy stops fighting. His terror is no longer explosion but numbness, an ending, the end of the world. His body was never his own body. There were too many hungers and losses, too many times when it was easier to do this, to slide out of the fearful territory bounded by his skin.

  It is magic. He is drowning in the stream, Handsome’s clenched hands press him down, but he is also hovering outside, invisible, like the nat. He sees everything that happens to him, but none of it matters. The thin body has gone limp, hardly different from a dead rat, its skin sliding like a velvet sac over viscera and small bones. Underwater, his eyes open to see a blurred shape outlined in light. He thinks, Handsome is already a ghost! Then he’s gone.

  As quickly as the stillness came, it twists over on itself like a landed fish. Handsome hauls the boy up alive. When his narrow back arches out of the stream, his head snaps into the air, mouth spilling water. He rolls over on his side and begins to heave the food in his stomach onto the gravel. Somewhere close by and very far away he hears Handsome swearing in what sounds like normal human pain. Mid-vomit, he looks up to see the man clutching his knee, stumbling through the nearby grass. The boy wipes his mouth and rolls over, trying to push himself to his feet. If there’s something wrong with Handsome’s leg, he will be able to outrun him. But the jailer has lifted himself upright too. He glares at the boy, who stands there dripping, bare feet ready to sprint. He’s still hacking, but he could run now, if he had to.

  The jailer speaks very slowly, through clenched teeth. “Kala-lay, if you stop being so disrespectful, I won’t have to hurt you, will I? It has to be Yes, sir and No, sir, you know that. Now come here.”

  Water seeps out of the boy’s sling bag. His longyi and shirt stick to him. As his coughing begins to subside, he becomes aware of the point on his cheek where Handsome punched him, a sharp ache cutting his face.

  “Kala-lay, I just want to ask you some questions.”

  The boy looks from the kitchen to the lit hospital windows to the first of the big halls, the place where the compound curves, following the octagonal enclosure of the walls. No one will help him. Even Tan-see Tiger’s amulets can’t help him now. He sees the floodlit figure of a warder on guard duty, the coal of a cheroot burning like a useless beacon.

  The jailer is getting angry again. “Get the fuck over here. If I have to cross the stream to talk to you, you’ll regret it, I promise you that. I won’t save your sorry ass a second time, you little fucker. Just get over here.”

  The boy would like to curl up, disappear. His voice quavers like his body. “Sir, please don’t drown me.”

  “Just come here. Fuck! Are you deaf as well as stupid?”

  Wind moves the leaves of the tree all at once, a susurrus. The boy plods back into the water. He’s shivering as he steps out onto the gravel and stands, head down, in front of the jailer, his shoulders tensed. He waits for a slap on the head, or a punch. Nyi Lay wants to put his fingers up to his cheek, to touch the swelling. But he doesn’t move.

  “I only want to ask you some questions. I think you can help me, kala-lay.”

  The boy cannot stop shivering. He glances up at Handsome and very quickly drops his eyes to the steady dark shimmer of the stream.

  “Remember the big storm last month, when Hall Two flooded?” The man puts his hand on the child’s shoulder and kneads the narrow muscles with his fingers. It hurts, but the boy doesn’t pull away. He knows he has to forget his fear or Handsome will smell it.

  “Do you remember? It was also the day a bunch of politicals were sent to the dog cells.”

  “Yes.”

  “Where were you that day?”

  Somebody must have seen him near the teak coffin. “In the morning I helped in the gardens, and in the afternoon I was hunting rats.”

  “Where?”

  “Here, by the stream. Then at the back of Hall Two. The rats all came out because of the flood.” Weeks ago, the boy made a careful plan about how to tell this lie.

  “What about the solitary section at the other end of the big halls?”

  “I passed by there on my way to Hall Two, and then again on my way home.” Slowly, he loosens his longyi and squeezes out some of the water. He is a fine actor: his forehead furrows with remembering. “My slipper broke. I stopped by one of the solitary houses to fix it. Under the eaves. Because of the rain.” Now it doesn’t matter that someone saw him by the teak coffin, he has an excuse. He was just on his way home. He reknots his longyi.

  Handsome lets go of the boy’s shoulder and takes hold of his chin. He bends slightly and hisses in the small, water-streaked face, “You know Sammy, the big Indian? You know how he lost his tongue? Do you?”

  The boy’s answer is distorted by Handsome’s grip on his jaw. “Nah.”

  “He lied to me, and I cut the tongue right out of his head.”

  Handsome is a liar too. The boy knows the giant didn’t have a tongue when he arrived here. He lost his tongue somewhere else, not to the jailer’s knife.

  The boy slowly pulls his head back. Handsome releases his jaw. “Sir, I’m not lying. I just stopped there for a second because my slipper broke. Look, I show you—it’s tied together with string.” He starts to open the bag on his shoulder, where his flip-flops are safely stowed, but the jailer swears in disgust and pushes the boy backward.

  “I don’t want to see your dirty shoes. I’m looking for something that got lost that day, during the storm. I want to find it.”

  The boy has stumbled but not fallen. He stands again, head down, his eyes on the jailer’s boots. “Sir, I would be happy to help you in your search, if you like. I am very good at finding things.”

  “Hey, kala-lay. Dirty little Indian, look at me.”

  The child lifts up his large dark eyes.

  Handsome whispers, “I won’t cut out your tongue.” He leans down and takes hold of the child’s jaw again, gently, then moves the small skull back and forth, as though testing the flexibility of the vertebrae. “If you are lying to me, I will kill you.”

  The boy does not blink.

  “Did you find anything in the mud that day, when you stopped by the singer’s cell? Hmm? Did you?”

  “I didn’t find anything, sir.”

  Handsome shoves him away again. “Go on, then. Get out of here. I’m sick of your smell.”

  The boy turns and wades noisily through the stream. When he feels far away enough to be defiant, he takes his slippers out of his sling bag and shoves his feet into them, one at a time. There is no string, no broken strap. He strides on, away from the water. He doesn’t need to look back. He knows Handsome is still there, watching him.

  When the boy disappears between the hospital and the kitchen, the jailer leans down and touches his knee. He would like nothing more than to sit down on the ground. Instead he turns and spits at the little tree. Someone’s going to have to cut it down. There aren’t supposed to be any trees on the prison grounds. They axed the big ones years ago to stop prisoners and warders alike from thinking that nats would help them escape punishment or get promotions. Superstitious crap.

  Handsome puts his back to the tree. If he could, he’d be right on the boy’s heels, but he has to rest for a few minutes. When he was showing that little bugger who’s boss, something ripped open around the kneecap—it could have been a damn bullet hitting him, that’s how much it hurt. He nearly fell on top of the kid. He’s still trembling, but he can
’t tell whether it’s from the pain or the excitement.

  He looks up. The boy is long gone. But don’t think you’re getting away, you little rat-killing Indian shit.

  A couple of warders confirmed it. They saw the boy close to the teak coffin that evening. The only place in the whole prison where they haven’t searched for the white pen is the rat-killer’s shack. Handsome can’t believe he didn’t think of it himself; the kid’s always put him on edge.

  After he caught the boy stealing food, he complained to the Chief Warden, but the Chief didn’t care. “What are you on about now? Don’t you have enough to deal with, Officer Nyunt Wai Oo? He’s an orphan and a good worker. He was eating leftovers off dirty plates? That’s hardly stealing. Leave the kid alone.” Leave the kid alone. Well, he won’t leave the little thief alone now. If he steals food right out from under their noses, there’s no telling what else he would steal, what else he has secreted away in that doghouse of his. Handsome takes a half-smoked cheroot out of his breast pocket and lights it. For a minute or two he needs this, just this, sweet heavy smoke to calm him. He will take a break and rest his fucked-up knee and then go do what needs to be done.

  . 44 .

  The singer goes back, before he met Thazin, years before he fought with Aung Min about the right way to win a revolution. He returns to an afternoon without cages, when he was still a boy and his father stood with a bag of oranges at the wooden threshold of the pongyi-kyaung, the monastery school. He bows to the abbot, the smiling Hsayadaw, raising his hands together to show his respect. Then he follows his father into the compound and watches him as he sets up a doctor’s office on the table of an open-air schoolroom. Stethoscope in hand, Dr. Kyaw Win Thu checks the boy with fever, the one with an eye infection, another with a lung ailment, the thin child who cannot gain weight. After his rounds, the doctor and the abbot sit under a scrawny tree and share a cheroot, laughing over things Teza cannot understand.