The Lizard Cage

by Karen Connelly

  Teza meets the question with silence. He is thinking, Why? Why? “Because I trust you. That’s the only reason. And I love you as much as I love my own little brother.”

  This declaration has an unexpected effect on Free El Salvador. It shakes him out of his hurt. “You have a brother?”

  “A younger brother. But not little like you.”

  “I’m not little.”

  “No. I guess you’re not.”

  “What’s your brother’s name?”

  “Aung Min.”

  “Does he live in Rangoon?”

  “Not anymore. He’s somewhere on the border.”

  “The border?”

  “Between Burma and Thailand.”

  “Sometimes the Thai prisoners give me food.”

  “That’s kind of them. Their country is right beside Burma. And the place called the border separates our two countries, and joins them.”

  “At the same time?”

  “Yes. Like the walls around the prison keep us from the outside but remind us that the world’s right there, just a few steps away.”

  “Is Aung Min in prison too?”

  “No. He’s a revolutionary.”

  “Like Bogyoke Aung San!” Awe deepens the boy’s voice.

  Teza immediately thinks of how pleased Aung Min would be with this comparison. “You know about Bogyoke Aung San?”

  “Tan-see Tiger talks about him. He has a framed photograph of the Bogyoke in his cell. Bogyoke Aung San was the great revolutionary general who chased away all the Japanese and English.” The boy isn’t sure exactly what Japanese and English are. When Tiger talks about them, they occasionally seem human. Other times, the boy is convinced they’re wild animals. But he knows for certain that Bogyoke Aung San made them leave Burma. “Does your brother chase away Japanese and English?”

  Teza gives Free El Salvador a sad look. “No, he fights against Burmese soldiers.” Teza has no idea, really, what his brother does, and how. He’s not even sure that Aung Min is still alive.

  “Our soldiers?”

  “Yes. The Burmese army. And their leaders.” How to explain civil war to a child? “Many of the soldiers are cruel, because the men who lead them are cruel. You know about the other political prisoners, right?”

  “They can read.”

  “Yes, they can. And they can write. And they talk to people about changing the government. The army doesn’t like that, so they put the politicals in the cage. But thousands of other politicals don’t live in the prison. When the generals started to kill them, they went to the border, to work against the army from outside Burma. There are many different groups of people working against the government.”

  “What’s the government again?”

  “The government’s made up of the men who run the army and their friends. The SLORC.”

  “Oh.” The boy nods.

  “If you disagree with them or ask them to stop hurting the people, sometimes they become very cruel.”

  “Like Handsome.”

  “Yes. A lot like Handsome.”

  “Why are they like that?”

  Teza looks at Nyi Lay’s hungry-to-know face. “Because they’re afraid. They’re afraid to give up their power, or all the good things they’ve stolen from people. And they’re afraid of how angry the people are.”

  “What people?”

  “All the people who’ve been hurt or whose families have been hurt by the government. All the people who aren’t allowed to be free and do what they want. But do you know what terrifies them the very most?”

  “What?”

  “Change.” Teza doesn’t let go of the boy’s eyes. “They don’t want to change. They want all the old ways to keep going. They’re not very good Buddhists.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because the Buddha taught us that things change all the time. It’s like the weather. The monsoon’s almost over, isn’t it, even though it still rains at night. And now it’s warm enough, but soon the cold season will begin, and then a while later it will get hot again and more rains will come. It’s the same for everything—people, animals, plants, all the things we make and build. Even if people or things look the same, they’re always shifting or growing or dying. Nothing stays the same for any of us. So we try to have upekkha, to live with upekkha. That means to accept the change that comes and to be calm in it.”

  Free El Salvador glances toward the corridor and quickly puts a finger to his lips. The old warder is coming to take Teza out for a shower. The boy recognizes his footsteps. And sensing the hidden message Teza is trying to pass to him, he is glad to end the conversation. “The warder’s coming. I’ll take your pail off to the latrine hole.”

  He walks toward the outer wall. If the stooped old fellow’s in a good mood, he might give the boy a candy.

  Teza quickly whispers, “Nyi Lay!”

  He turns his head.

  “Be very careful.”

  Just as the old man appears, rattling a handful of keys, the boy gives Teza a smile like a small jewel.

  . 52 .

  Once more he’s found a tribe of ants. They lived in the white house before his arrival, but those first weeks after the beating, all his energies turned inward. In the past few days, with a sense of purpose returned to him, he has started to observe the ants with his old keen eye, wondering about the minutiae of their lives. It’s easier to see them too, because their trails, once close to the ceiling, now switch back and twist farther down the wall. Teza has tempted them down with grains of rice on the floor. He saves any gristle or vegetable in his morning meal for the boy, but part of the rice gruel goes to the birds, to the ants, to the twitchily enthusiastic cockroaches.

  The rest of the morning gruel he eats himself, though eating is still his most dreaded activity. He can’t apply any pressure to grind his teeth. Even swallowing uses muscles that have not healed. It’s excruciating, but it concerns him less and less. Soon it won’t concern him at all. Most days he meditates, four, five, six hours. When he is done, his exhaustion is complete. He can only do sitting meditation now. In the teak coffin he often meditated by walking, observing each footfall, the heel, middle foot, ball of the foot, toes bending. Though his broken toes are much better now, they’re very stiff. He hobble-walks without grace. Ya-ba-deh. Never mind. His toes are so far from his heart, he’s already given them up.

  His body is often tired, the long muscles squeezed empty and thin. His distillation continues apace, as the pulp gets sucked out. The leftover shell is not dry husk but essence, pure oil or alcohol, sharp and eye-brightening despite his weariness. When he doesn’t meditate, he sleeps, and when he doesn’t sleep, he thinks about the pen, so remarkably returned to him, and the ledger with its stained but mostly empty pages, and his little brother, and words. Of all the words there are in his mind, in his life, of all the words in the world, which ones must be spoken to paper? What will he write? Sometimes he lies on his back, face turned to the ceiling, where lizards pivot and run in their hunt for insects.

  It’s just as it was in the teak coffin, yet everything has changed. He composes long letters in his head while watching the creatures do their jerky dance, small jaws snapping. They eat and eat: moths, mosquitoes, small and larger flies. It’s almost unbelievable that the singer ever ate them, the small reptiles. He shakes his head when he thinks of it.

  He looks from the ceiling to his slice of blue sky beyond the cell. Last night he saw the moon, half waxing or half waning, like a sad face turning toward him. Lying close to the bars, he intended to watch it drop across the short chasm between roof and wall, but he was so tired he fell asleep after two minutes. He woke to watch the gray dawn become mauve become rose-blue become blue sky, and he knew it was a whole blue sky, without clouds, wide open over the prison, over Rangoon. The colors made him think of his mother, her flowers and plants growing in their compound. He remembered the little wooden gate. Surely it’s covered in lime-green moss again, after the monsoon. Scrub brush in hand, Da
w Sanda has already complained about it to the neighbor, as she does every year, and she has promised to get an ugly iron one, which she never does and never will do. A gate made of iron bars looks too much like a prison door.

  With this thought, Teza’s eyes shift. Because he’s still lying down, the first thing beyond the grille of bars that hits his eyes is a pair of boots. The sight of them so close to his face frightens him. An uneven cry rises three octaves “Waa-aa-aah!” as it flies from his mouth. He’s already rolling away as a glimpse of the face registers in his mind. It’s not Handsome but Chit Naing, his friend.

  “I’m sorry, Ko Teza. I thought you heard me.”

  With the rush of adrenaline, Teza has become both nervous and dazed. Very slowly he rolls onto his side and sits up. “No, I … I was thinking about something.” He wonders if he has gone completely deaf in the damaged ear. He moves his head back and forth, as though rattling a faulty gadget.

  Chit Naing bends down. “The doctor wants to come by to see you again.”

  “Today?”

  “Oh, he’s not that dedicated. But soon. He mentioned it to me this morning when he signed in.”

  “Has he spoken to the Chief Warden?”

  “I don’t think so. But he will, Ko Teza. And if you are serious about a hunger strike, you must know that the Chief Warden won’t let you go through with it. They will beat you again. You have to know that. They’ll make you eat.”

  “What are they going to do, break my jaw again to stuff food down my throat?”

  “Possibly. If the Chief’s feeling generous, he might strap you down in here and hook you up to an IV.”

  Teza looks at him suspiciously. He doesn’t believe the prison authorities would handle any problem with such finesse. “No one will do that immediately.”

  “So you are serious about the hunger strike.”

  “You thought I was pulling your leg?” Genuine bemusement lightens Teza’s voice.

  The jailer closes his eyes for a long moment. When he opens them, he asks, “What are your demands?”

  Teza slowly crosses his legs, so that the ankle of his bottom foot presses against the dirty weave of his mat. He lifts the other foot and nestles it in the cradle of slack thigh and calf. Then he says, “I have no demands.”

  “But if it’s a hunger strike, the prisoner always has demands.”

  The senior jailer sounds like a petulant child, Teza thinks, scratching the rash of scabies along his shin. He shrugs. “If I must have a demand, then I demand to be released so that I can go eat curry and rice with my mother.”

  “Ko Teza, please don’t make stupid jokes.”

  “That’s my demand. Surely it’s no more stupid than my being here in the first place.”

  “I cannot tell that to the Chief.”

  “I could tell him. I’ll explain why now is the perfect time to release me.”

  Chit Naing smiles nervously. “Even if you ask politely, I don’t think they’ll let you go.”

  The two men look at each other. Teza’s voice is clear and resonant. “No, they won’t let me go. I know that, U Chit Naing. But I intend to release myself. I’m ready to leave the cage.”

  Chit Naing gets out his handkerchief, takes off his glasses, and squints at his friend’s blurred, softened face. “You have to serve out your sentence …” He is aware how ridiculous these words sound, but he can’t help saying them, holding on to this reality, this version of how things must be. Teza will serve out his sentence, thirteen more years, less if there’s an amnesty. There might be amnesty next year, or the year after; sometimes it does happen. It’s happened before, when those human rights groups in the West have campaigns for certain political prisoners. It makes the generals fret about the bad publicity, and they let the person go. It’s happened before. Look at Daw Aung San Suu Kyi. They’ve released her from house arrest.

  Teza stares at Chit Naing with a sympathetic, almost fatherly expression. “I know all about serving my sentence. That’s not what I mean.”

  “What do you mean, then?”

  Teza stares past his friend’s shoulder, up to the left, at the slice of blue sky. Then his eyes return to Chit Naing, who hasn’t been able to resist cleaning his glasses. The singer waits until the polishing is over and the jailer has put them back on. He’s about to speak when Chit Naing starts to fiddle with the wires behind his ears, making the lenses flash once, twice, again, like signal mirrors. His left eyebrow and cheek have tightened up, as though he has a bad toothache.

  When his eyes are visible again, and steady, Teza answers his question. “I mean that I am ready to leave this body behind.”

  Chit Naing stares at him for such a long, stunned moment that Teza starts to wonder if the jailer has understood. Will he have to be more explicit? But then the torrent of words begins. “Ko Teza, stop. It’s the beating. The beating took something out of you. Obviously it was awful physically”—he lifts his hand in the general direction of Teza’s face—“but psychologically, your mind, you haven’t been the same since. And you’ve been fasting already—you’ve lost so much weight, no wonder you haven’t gotten better. You need to drop the Sixth Precept. Start eating your evening meal. I will get the boy more rice. I will, I promise you. I know he eats your food. The guys in the kitchen take some too—it’s a double portion. If you just started to eat more, you would feel better. And the morphine. You need to take it, Ko Teza. The pain is too much, you see—it’s affecting your mind.”

  The jailer is gesticulating now, as if talking to himself. “It doesn’t make any sense. You have to think of …” The word comes out in a barely audible whisper, “The movement. All you’ve worked for. And Daw Aung San Suu Kyi. She’s free now. And your …” Teza knows what he’s going to say. “Your mother. Think of her. She’s already lost so much. If you just give yourself time to get better, you will change your mind. I am sure of it. You are depressed because of your injuries.” Like a flare in empty ocean, the jailer throws his final argument out into the cell: “To live through so much, and then to give up!”

  Teza lightly responds, “U Chit Naing, don’t say that. I’m not giving up. I am ending the war.”

  “What? What are you talking about?”

  “I can’t hate them anymore. I don’t hate them.”

  “Who?”

  “The men who put me here, who keep me here. The generals, the MI agents. The Chief Warden. All of them. Even Handsome. I must not hate him for what he did to me.” His voice is warm but eerily toneless.

  Chit Naing’s eyes have grown amazed, even incredulous, behind his glasses, but he sounds impatient. “Ko Teza, what do you mean?”

  “I mean that I have ended the war. My own war. It’s done.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “I do not want to die hating them, the terrible them. Who are they? They are my own people. You were once them.”

  “Fine, Ko Teza, I will agree with you if that’s what you want, but can’t you end your war without a hunger strike? You have to fight against them, Ko Teza. Don’t you remember what you told me once? I remember exactly. You said, ‘In the cage, the only weapon I have is my own life.’ How can you give that up now?”

  “What I said was true. But look at my body. Look at my face. I don’t need to defend myself now.”

  “Why not?”

  Chit Naing sounds offended. “You forget that people still listen to your songs. You are the singer. Don’t you remember why you’re here? Because of the struggle. How can you abandon it? Think of your brother on the border—he’s still working.”

  “If he’s still alive, yes, I imagine he’s still working.”

  “He’s mentioned regularly in the newspaper as an enemy of the people, so he must be alive. If he’d been killed, the government would have made a big celebratory announcement.”

  Teza laughs quietly.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “I’m just thinking of how pissed off they’ll be when I … go.�
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  “Ko Teza, you are not going anywhere!”

  Teza ignores him. “Their power takes such unexpected forms. Sometimes killing is the power. Sometimes keeping someone miserably alive is the power. Those two things look so different, but they are the same—they come from the same will to control, to violate. It’s true that my life has been my weapon. But death can be a weapon also.”

  Chit Naing has started to feel nauseous. He stares at the singer, who calmly, almost blandly, returns his gaze.

  “U Chit Naing, do you know about the hunger strikers of Coco Island?”

  The jailer has never told Teza that his father was a chief warden of Thayawaddy Prison and, years before that, an overseer for the work camps on Coco. “Yes,” he mumbles, deflated, his sense of indignation gone. “Yes, of course I know.”

  “The prisoners who staged those hunger strikes knew that choosing their own death was a better choice than enduring degradation day after day. They chose. They died in their friends’ arms. Did you know that? Their friends helped them to die with dignity.”

  “Yes, Ko Teza, but they died and their friends got off the island alive.”

  “We have to respect the choice they made. Their deaths forced the authorities to pay more attention to the camps. Their friends were released sooner because of the strikes.”

  “But who will be released sooner if you die, Ko Teza?”

  “Me. I will be released. You see? My decision is a selfish one, finally. I am very tired. I am ready. The only one I worry about is the boy. I want him to leave before I begin the strike.”

  “Listen, we’ll talk more about this strike business later. I have to go. But about the boy—I went to the monastery school last night.”

  “It was still there, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  “And the Hsayadaw is still alive.”