The Lizard Cage

by Karen Connelly

“He is, but he’s away in Sagaing for a couple of days. The pongyi-kyaung is very full, but I think they’ll find a place for him. I’ve spoken to the Chief Warden. He’s willing to let the boy go. Last night I talked with the Hsayadaw’s assistant, a monk who grew up there. He knows you, he said, you played together as children. And he knows the songs.”

  Teza puts a hand to his chest in a gesture of thanks. “This is the best gift, U Chit Naing.”

  “But we can’t be sure if the boy will want to go.”

  “Oh, don’t worry. I’ll talk to him again. He’s close to making the decision for himself. He’s just getting ready. It takes time. Doesn’t it?”

  The two men look at each other without speaking. Teza sits cross-legged in his cell and Chit Naing crouches in front of him, one hand gripping an iron bar for balance. He knows he must quell his rising emotion. It’s disconcerting to realize how much he draws his own strength from the presence of this wasted prisoner, Teza of the beloved songs, the man in solitary who endures with dignity, grace, and humor. Where to put the unfathomable idea of his absence? He staunchly refuses the word death. The hunger strike won’t work. They’ll force him to eat. Chit Naing is ashamed to hear the thought forming in his mind, I will force him.

  Teza no-longer-here shakes the very center of his mind. He grips the iron bar, the muscles in his hand and wrist and lower arm contracted and aching, until Teza whispers, “U Chit Naing, are you all right?”

  The jailer blinks at him. He releases the bar and pulls his hand across his mouth. Before rising, he whispers, “If I can, I’ll come again tomorrow.” The visit will be for himself, he knows, as much as for Teza.

  . 53 .

  Sein Yun stares at the Buddha’s face. He’s trying for a holier-than-thou expression and thinking about water buffalo. About that proverb actually, so dear to his heart: When the buffalo fight, the tender grass gets trampled. Oh, well, that’s tough for the grass, isn’t it? Everyone has their karma in this shitty life.

  Straightening the hair that kinks from his chin, he tries to throw a religious glance back across the compound. He’s waiting for Soe Thein to come by with a little package of quinine for a prisoner in Hall Three. The guy’s sick with an attack of malaria. Soe Thein is okay, he’s useful enough—he got Sein Yun some pills for his hepatitis—though he still refuses to bring in the hard stuff; he’s a warder with principles. Chuckling under his breath, Sein Yun shuffles away from the praying ground of the shrine and spits his betel juice, then returns to wait for the warder. Bloody principles! Their inevitable erosion is always pleasant to observe. Quinine and new syringes today, amphetamines and smack tomorrow. Or next week, or next year.

  There will be a next year, and a year after that. Maybe more. Handsome is a fucking idiot. Why didn’t the palm-reader see that from the beginning? He’s done so much work in the past two and a half months. That whole laborious setup with the politicals, all the pen-and-paper-ferrying and rah-rah-rah-ing for the revolution, the bloody mess with the Songbird. Not to mention weeks of looking for that stupid pen. And what has all his magnificent bullshitting accomplished?

  Handsome sent him a note last night. He was in a fit, an absolute fit, after another fuckup with that kid. Just what did the note say? Was it a thank-you note, commending Sein Yun for his psychic detective work? Was it perhaps a little poem, praising his great dedication to the retarded junior jailer?

  No, it was two scrawled lines of poison cursing Sein Yun’s name and mother. Not only has the palm-reader lost his sentence reduction, but for the next two years he’ll have to put up with that asshole who couldn’t even manage to shake down a twelve-year-old. He didn’t find the pen. Sein Yun pulls and pulls on his unruly hair.

  He knows the kid has the pen. He can feel it. He would bet every palm he’s ever read on it: Cut their hands off! The boy has that precious piece of contraband. Or he had the damn thing and somehow got rid of it in the nick of time. Unbelievable. Not once but twice—twice!—the palm-reader serves up exactly what Handsome orders and the idiot wastes it.

  The more he thinks about it, the more pissed off he gets. The prison kings got what they wanted. Better said, they’ll give away what they want to give away when all the contraband cases go to trial next month. Right now the politicals are still in the dog cells, edging away from the tide of their own shit and enjoying the last of the monsoon on their bare heads. But at the end of October’s hearing, the Chief Warden will hand out about eighty years’ worth of extended sentences to the letter-writers from Hall Three.

  So something went wrong with Teza. Is that the palm-reader’s fault?

  Handsome was the one who screwed up, all because of a brat with a rat stick and a smart-aleck stare. How could they have been outsmarted by an illiterate, garbage-eating child? It’s disgusting. All those free palm readings, what does he get for them? Dick all.

  Buggered.

  The word makes him think of their own resident water buffalo. Forget the nickname Eggplant, the cook has more in common with an ox. His fleshy lower lip droops, as though the tendon that holds it up has been cut away. His big bottom teeth are almost always visible, the horizontal grain of them stained brown, just like a water buffalo’s.

  The palm-reader’s scowl slowly turns into a smirk, which spreads into a smile. He thinks again about the little creature—kaung-lay, kala-lay, nyi lay, they call him by so many names—and remembers the school longyi the boy was wearing this morning, wrapped tight around his skinny hips, bright and deep green both, and he renames the child so easily, so aptly, it makes him laugh: little jungle snatch, little tender-assed patch of grass.

  . 54 .

  Teza sits and breathes. He unfolds his legs and opens his eyes to look at them, so thin and long on the cement floor that a vision of a praying mantis clambers into his mind. He thinks, Exoskeleton. His bones are so close to the surface of his skin that he might wake one morning only skeleton and rise up to do a clackety little dance.

  That has been the meditation theme of his morning, not macabre but practical. The meditation of unmaking the body, letting it decompose and pass away, as it will, as it must. It’s fascinating to him that he feels so light, so lit from within, when he has spent the last two hours envisioning himself without life, the whole of him and the parts, inside and outside, rotting away and putrid. The stench of a rotting body is a disgusting one, but foremost in the meditation is detachment: that horrid reek, like the pain, is not him. It will not be him.

  Ironically, he is most attached to what he cannot see, the most broken piece, his own face. After that, he mourns his hands. They are made for grasping, picking up, holding; it is not easy for the mind to let them go. To think of losing his hands is to remember the disappearance of his father, who had the same long, double-jointed fingers, like a dancer’s. The hands are his memory of music, fingers spidering over frets, stretching and bunching up for the unfamiliar chords that he used to impress his classmates, guitar-strummers all. Oh, the hands, which keep and give, which touch or stay folded with shyness. He looks around the cell, gazes at the bricks in the wall, the bars, the blocking wall beyond them. Human hands built this cage, just as they built the temples and painted a myriad of faces of the Buddha.

  Teza refolds his legs. He closes his eyes again and breathes, inhaling and exhaling the passage of an hour, two hours, until he has died and bloated and rotted clean away. His rib cage sits open like an empty basket. Inside, his invisible heart beats, jumps like a bird or a frog. Or a lizard. Like any small animal waiting to get out of its cage.

  Here is something new, and strange, and fine: he does not worry himself about the pen, or the ledger. The book is barely a quarter used; the spillage occurred on the last page bearing figures—there the writing is completely illegible, drowned in some mystery substance. He sniffs the paper. Ink, and mildew, or sour milk, and … tea? Can he smell tea? Tea! It would be nice to have tea, wouldn’t it, but in a tea shop, on the open street one evening, surrounded by friends.

 
The whole book is ruined, at least for the purposes of proper bookkeeping. Someone must have copied what figures he could before throwing the ledger away. Teza holds it in his hand, very happily. He turns it over and opens it and brings the wrinkled paper to his nose again. Tea, it whispers to him again, la-phet-yeh. Despite the damage, it’s still a sturdy book, paper-and-cardboard-bound with a dark purple cover. Pieces of black binding tape are folded over each corner.

  The pen, of course, is familiar to him. After fishing it out of his clothing stash, he holds the plastic vein of ink on his palm and stares at it, marveling at how it helped to cause so much agony.

  Tsshik-tsheek. The nib is thick with a glob of coagulated ink. He wipes it away with his thumb, then walks to the other side of the cell. “So you have come to me again, little troublemaker. This time I shall put you to better use.” He sits down against the brick wall that faces away from the white house entrance. If a warder appears unexpectedly, Teza will have a few seconds to hide his new book and his old pen. Sitting here is as much precaution as he will take. He is neither nervous nor afraid. On the contrary, a lightheartedness holds him, moves him slowly like sunlight moves a plant. The long meditations tire his body, but they almost always leave his mind spacious, as open as a plain. He can see all around himself, forward and back, his whole life and his one death in his hands. The simplicity of it brings tears to his eyes, not from sadness, or grief, but from clarity, and love.

  Let the warder find him. One of the old songs warms in his throat; as much as he can, he smiles. Let Handsome himself come in and see the pen in his hand, scribbling verses, or a list of food he will never eat again, or the day from his childhood that he remembers so often, when Daw Sanda caught him and Aung Min breaking the First Precept and sent them alone to the pagoda. Laughter sighs out of him, mixes with the remnants of song. He mouths a few words. Oh, to sing at the top of his lungs again, to get his hands on a guitar and feel the thin wood warm as he plays it. Let the prison kings read his memories, or whatever else he might write—nursery rhymes or poems for his lovely Thazin or a letter to the world he loves and will leave, is leaving now. He balances the open ledger on his knees and takes up his pen and begins, whispering the words to himself as he goes. Finally the singer writes his first prison song.

  Dear Nyi Lay, you are so far away

  I can see you only with my eyes closed

  while I hum the songs that separated us

  my ardent phrases for the revolution

  Now those boys love one another

  by map and moon and lizard

  clinging to brick wall

  If you examine the map with care

  you will see men with Hpay Hpay’s hands

  lighting their cheroots at the tea shop

  behind the jute factory

  The twin boys born without fingertips

  still crawl among the low tables

  They have a big business now

  digging bottle caps

  out of the dirt with a pointed stick

  Remember? We once bought them mohinga

  They laughed to the bottom

  of the bowl then danced for more

  My Brother my dreams

  have changed but sometimes

  I walk down the same street to an old house

  where a woman summons moonlight

  to help her orchids flourish

  under tattered nets

  If there is a wind

  white sheets snap

  on the lines nearby

  the starched arms

  of shirts twist and flail

  like ours did when the soldiers

  came out with Bren guns

  with bayonets

  Nyi Lay

  I wish I could touch your eyes

  and wipe away what they have seen

  visions that ravage the iris

  and drop shards of broken skull

  down the pupil’s black hole.

  The dish of the ear still fills

  with cries from a road

  where the blood

  stayed for many days.

  Remember their cautious gasps,

  the people who came slowly out

  of their hiding places to collect

  the slippers, the hand-painted signs.

  Still they are gathering the words

  from frozen-open mouths.

  We must remember the voices

  of dead women the voices

  of dead men the voices

  of children

  our own voices.

  My Dear Nyi Lay,

  I am happy

  because you will understand

  every message in this little parcel.

  Do you still have the slingshot?

  If there is a telephone in your jungle

  do you dare call the woman of orchids

  our mother May May?

  Sometimes I lean over my own map

  here in the cage pattern of grit

  on the floor wet trailings

  of roaches after they drink my soup

  the lines on my hands make this map

  and I see a night when the guerrillas

  come drunk and singing up the hillside

  young men thin as corpses but laughing

  Hunger you say

  keeps them alive

  I stand behind you

  in the shadows you stand

  before me near the fire

  not a gun

  but a warped guitar in your arms

  One of the men roasts

  a small bird on a stick

  You strum one of my songs

  but they are too tired

  too hungry to sing it

  I lean over my map

  and see your face lit by flames

  You refuse to eat the flesh

  I venture a prediction: in peace

  you will become a passionate vegetarian

  like our mother.

  Now we are men! Finally we know

  what she was doing down there at night

  among the flowers in their clay pots

  surrounded by her orchestra of crickets and frogs

  She was cleaning the salt from her eyes

  crying pure water into the orchid pouches

  Dear Brother, I’ve never told you this before

  because you would have laughed

  Still you will laugh but now I am glad

  Nyi Lay I heard her voice

  before my birth

  I remember May May

  singing to me inside her

  That’s why I grew into music

  like one of her orchids purple open mouth

  crying out the truth of its own color

  Dear Brother, here where all the doors are closed

  I have learned to walk through brick walls

  A copper-pot spider was my good friend

  and many lizards fed my heart

  Now every dream I see assumes

  the shape of a skeleton key.

  Once I heard Grandfather’s voice

  calling me back through the trees

  but I can’t go home that way

  I will return by an older path

  over the plain on the river

  My offerings as I travel

  through the city of temples

  will be bones and tears

  Burma, the generals say Myanmar

  to make us forget our country and

  their crimes but we will not forget

  they built a cage around our lives

  Only the ants know the strength

  the weakness of its walls

  and perhaps the child knows

  who knows too much the white ghosts

  of maggots on the edges of my pail

  the dark ghosts of men who haunt him

  He knows the living tree of language

  but cannot climb it yet

  my broken face he knows

  he knows my hunger feeds him

&n
bsp; as yours feeds the men on the border

  as May May became a vegetarian

  when Hpay Hpay died so her sons

  might devour the meat in every dish

  Everything shattered is sharp

  and often shines

  A sliver of glass in the hand

  can make the history

  that alters history

  here in the cage and there

  in your cramped room in that house

  without nation the new country

  is no distance away at all.

  Sometimes I almost see it

  growing like a web

  now invisible now

  suddenly shining

  Nyi Lay, here where the flesh

  becomes spirit

  the borders dissolve

  with the flayed skin

  Here there is no separation

  Brother, sometimes I fear for you

  Will you enter a new era

  only to make up another word

  for murder?

  I cannot see the weapons you carry

  only that warped guitar

  As for me I have forsaken

  every weapon but the voice

  singing its last song

  And the hand Dear Brother

  my own hand

  writing it down

  with metta

  Teza

  . 55 .

  The iron-beater strikes five o’clock. Dinner hour. Teza looks up and sees four sparrows bathing in the puddle near the outer wall, shimmying water over head and wing. In response to a chirp from him, two of them pause expectantly, then flutter out of the puddle. Hop-hop, a little closer. Hop-hop to the left, then more quickly again, to the right, undecided. Teza chirps again—the tongue sucking, clicking lightly away from his palate. It hurts, but not so much. One small skull tilts sideways at the sound. Hop-hop on spindly legs, straight toward the cell. Teza sits a couple of feet behind the bars.

  “Soon, little one, soon enough, a bit of rice.” The sparrow eyes him.

  Another bird comes hopping up and gives its companion a peck on the shoulder. The first bird rises into the air, wheels away, then returns and pecks back. The well of space between the outer wall and the cell quickly fills with small raucous argument, four sparrows taking sides. The other two bathers, still puffed up like miniature feather dusters, fly up and drop closer to the cell, shivering water off their backs as they scold each other.