“Yes, sir.”
The Chief Warden opens his Marlboros, picks up his gold ingot, and lights a cigarette. Exhaling a bluish cloud, he begins. “But you are leaving, kala-lay. Good Jailer Chit Naing and his wife have gone to all this trouble to find a place for you at the pongyi-kyaung, so you mustn’t be ungrateful now. Right, my boy?”
“Yes, sir.”
While the Chief is talking to the boy, his eyes bore into Chit Naing’s cheekbone. The jailer is careful not to look at him. He stares at the boy’s head, the words his wife reverberating like distant artillery fire. Sweat shows through his shirt now, long bars of it under his arms. He doesn’t want to turn around lest the Chief see the round, damp target in the center of his back. He puts his hands in front of his body and clasps them together, but it’s too much, too close. His fingers let go of each other and he thrusts his right hand deep into his pocket. There it is, the pen. His hand closes around the plastic casing, pushing it down again, the nib against his thumb.
“You see,” the warden continues, his voice smooth and deep, “that’s why I’ve come down to bid you farewell, kala-lay. I just want to take a look through your things before you go. Could you put your bags up here on the table? There we go. That’s a good boy.” The Chief slides to the left as the boy shuffles forward, pulling the handle of his sling bag over his head. He places the bag carefully on the gray metal table. Then he hoists the woven market basket into the air. “This one too?”
“That one too.”
Smelling the blanket, the boy wrinkles his nose as he swings his colorful suitcase up on the table. The Chief won’t mind a little shit-stink, especially if he finds the ledger. That would make the big man happy, and Nyi Lay would get to stay in the cage.
“My boy, no need to keep staring at the floor. Lift up your chin.” As the Chief talks, he watches the boy’s face. He opens the blue sling bag by touch, without looking down at his hands. “I just want to make sure that our friend Junior Jailer Nyunt Wai Oo is as crazy as everybody seems to think. When he heard you were leaving, he called me. I know he’s not too friendly, but he’s a hard worker, even when he’s away from the prison. This little search was his idea.”
The Chief sees that the mention of Handsome doesn’t intimidate the child; his knees certainly aren’t knocking together in fear. On the contrary, having received permission to lift his head, Nyi Lay stares into the Chief’s eyes. The bald man sniffs the air, looks left and right, and sniffs again. He seems about to say something, but instead just tosses his cigarette on the floor. Nyi Lay doesn’t jump away from the arc of the red coal. He doesn’t even look down, nor does he cower when the Chief Warden takes a quick step toward him and squashes the burning cigarette with the toe of his boot.
The man slides his cigarettes and lighter out of the way and upends the sling bag, shaking its contents out onto the table. In the space of fourteen seconds, he undoes the boy’s careful packing.
The only thing that immediately interests him is the nail, which clatters on the metal table. Prisoners use them as weapons against each other. He picks it up by the pointed end and asks in an almost sexual voice, “You’re not an enemy of the regime, are you, kala-lay?” He isn’t looking at the boy now but at Chit Naing, the grin on his face like the nail in his hand.
The boy answers, “No, sir, I’m not an enemy of the regime, sir. I want to be a prison warden when I grow up.” All the warders love it when he tells them this.
The Chief Warden laughs loudly, predictably flattered. “You do, do you? My, my, that’s quite a grand hope for such a little boy. It’s not an easy job, you know. This nail”—he wags the point of it at the boy—“you can’t keep this nail. It’s prison property.”
“Yes, sir,” replies the boy. The Chief keeps pawing through his things. He touches the new bar of soap, opens up the thanakha tin. His going-away presents. The Chief unrolls the new, still-damp towel and shakes it out with a snap. Nothing hidden there. Two bent, tattered postcards are splayed on the table—the Shwedagon Pagoda and a Buddha from Pagan—but they don’t interest the Chief. One by one he examines several bags of food: pickled tea leaf and deep-fried beans, a big clump of rice, green spirals of cabbage and lettuce. He pushes them away with the nail, puncturing each bag in turn.
“What’s this?” He picks up the matchbox and shakes it.
The boy hesitates. “Hpay Hpay …” His eyes are on the matchbox. “Hpay Hpay …” he begins again. The word for father. The other words are stuck.
“What’s in here, kala-lay? Hmm?” The Chief Warden glances at the tongue-tied boy, then brings the box closer to his face and slides open the little drawer. At first he doesn’t understand what he sees. There is a pointy cylinder of pale wood, brown and bonelike at one end. He tilts the box toward himself and something else slides into view just as the boy finally spits the words out, proudly, “My father’s tooth.”
But the Chief isn’t listening. He sees the lizard now, half skeleton, half flesh, the flesh part moving slowly, sensuously, many small white mouths, chewing. “It’s full of fucking maggots!” he shouts, thrusting the box away in disgust. It falls open on the table, dislodging perhaps a dozen maggots from their meal. The tooth has also jumped out and dropped with a musical tink on the Chief’s gold lighter, from which it bounces to the floor.
Repulsed, waving his hands, the Chief steps back. “Bloody filthy! Filthy. Get them off the table!”
Zaw Gyi drops to his haunches. His hand darts out and grabs the tooth off the cement. He quickly stands again, and not knowing what else to do with the maggots, he tweezers them up in his fingers with the deftness of a gem dealer. One pinch at a time, he deposits the wiggling creatures back in the box and closes the drawer. “Sir, I am sorry. Sir, I am very sorry,” he whispers, hunching his shoulders up around his ears.
But the Chief is too upset to hit him. Those maggots were a mere foot away from his mouth. “Ugh! Ugh!” he says, grimacing and wiping his hands on his trousers. He walks behind the table and circles past Tint Lwin, then paces to the other side of the room, where Soe Thein stands, his face still unreadable.
The Chief addresses him for support. “Wasn’t that revolting? What a weird little bugger he is.”
Soe Thein agrees in a low voice, “Yes, sir. But the cage is a weird place for a boy. That’s the problem.”
The Chief nods briefly, impressed by his employee’s logic. “You’re right, Warder Soe Thein. You’re quite right.” He strides back to the table and scrutinizes the surface to make sure that the maggots are all gone. “All right, let’s get on with this, shall we? Warder Tint Lwin, check the boy.”
Tint Lwin rounds the table and searches the boy gingerly, running his hands down the boy’s back and front, relieved to find nothing tucked in his longyi, nothing under his arms or tied to his legs. “He’s clean, sir. Just taking out his own skin and bones.”
“And a box of fucking maggots. Great. Now, what do we have here?” The Chief pulls the market bag toward him and opens the twin handles. His hands are already tugging on the rolled blanket when the dank smell rises into his face, but this time he doesn’t push the bag away; he just yanks his hands off it and steps back. “And what the fuck is in there? No, don’t tell me, I can guess. He’s smuggling out a latrine pail!”
Fallen from grace because of the maggots, the boy has lowered his head again. He bites his lip. The Chief looks at Chit Naing in bewilderment. “What the fuck is in that basket?”
Preparing to remove his hand from his pocket, Chit Naing presses the pen down hard, ready to leave it there, safely stowed. Instead he hears a sound as loud as a human voice: Tsshik-tsheek.
The boy’s head jerks toward that inky word. He raises his eyes to the Chief and begins, very loudly, in a tone of adolescent righteousness, “Sir, that is my blanket and I want to take it with me to the monastery. I’ll wash it there, sir. I will. Please let me take my blanket with me.”
Chit Naing’s mouth is so dry only a croak emerges. His explanati
on begins with a ragged cough. “Sir, the tan-see told me that the kid had a little accident during the night but there was no time to clean it up.” He attempts to clarify. “He had the runs, sir.”
“Yes, I have a nose, Officer Chit Naing, but why the hell is he taking that filthy blanket to the monastery school?”
“He’s very attached to it, sir. It’s from his shack. He insisted on taking it with him. I gave him permission. He has so few possessions.” When Chit Naing pulls his hand into the air, he feels the sweat streaming down his side. He gestures stiffly to the boy’s belongings. “As you can see, sir. He has nothing.”
“Novice monks are supposed to have nothing. A shitty blanket! I’m sure the abbot will be very impressed.” He waves his hand in front of his face. “Bloody hell, what a reek! I’ve been wondering what that smell was from the moment you two walked in here. I wish Officer Nyunt Wai Oo could have done this search himself. What a dirty job it’s turned out to be.” He reaches over to pick up his cigarettes and lighter, then takes another big step away from the table.
Chit Naing doesn’t let his face change. He doesn’t move. Nor does the boy, except for his nostrils, which dilate as he takes a conscious whiff of his accident. It really doesn’t smell that bad. The Chief Warden should try emptying out latrine pails.
The chief lights another Marlboro and takes a deep drag. He looks from Chit Naing to the boy and back to Chit Naing. Then he taps the ash off his cigarette and gestures to the things on the table. “You can pack up your stuff, kala-lay.” He glances back at the senior jailer, whose eyes are hidden by a streak of light across his glasses. “This has been great fun, Officer Chit Naing. I look forward to next time.”
The jailer manages a strained smile. “Yes, lots of fun, sir. Thank you.” He watches the boy stuff his belongings back into the sling bag. Then he carefully asks, “May we go, sir? There’s a taxi outside the prison gates. I’m sure the Hsayadaw has been waiting a long time.”
The Chief Warden replies, “And I’m sure such a wise man knows that state security is more important than anything else.”
For an instant the two look into each other’s eyes, with nothing between them, no screen of reflective light, no words. Chit Naing has the distinct impression of being offered a reprieve, which he warily accepts. “Yes, sir, you’re absolutely right.”
The Chief addresses Zaw Gyi. “Well, off with you, then. I’m sure the abbot will be happy to meet his new student, despite what you’ve got in that basket. May you become a good novice.”
“Yes, sir.” The boy settles the strap of his sling bag across his shoulder and picks up his woven plastic suitcase. Chit Naing’s warm hand grasps his shoulder, nudging him toward the closed door.
The boy is the first to step out of the releases room. As one flip-flop settles into the gravel, the Chief’s voice stops him. “Officer Chit Naing.” The senior jailer turns back. The boy waits, facing the compound. It’s late twilight and the floodlights are already on.
The man’s voice booms out of the bare concrete hollow. “When you’re finished seeing the boy out, could you come back in here for a moment? I want to talk to you about something. Something quite important.”
“Yes, sir. Of course. I’ll be back directly.”
Saya Chit Naing’s voice has become very small, which frightens the boy. But the tall, thin man touches him again on the shoulder. “Let’s go, Nyi Lay.” Once they’ve taken a few steps, he speaks again, more quietly, “Hurry.”
The only sounds between them are their feet crunching gravel and the boy’s slippers slapping his soles. In another minute Soe Thein follows them, the Chief Warden’s keys rattling in his hand. The three of them stare at the iron-banded door built into the high gates—it seems to grow taller and heavier as they approach it. Soe Thein waves to the guard in the sentry box and bends down slightly, to see the locks and bolts better. After a few seconds, he pushes the heavy door open.
A light wind gusts in, carrying the scent of green stuff, weeds and ripe fields beyond the prison. Now comes a heady draft of car exhaust. The chubby driver is already behind the wheel, revving his engine, but the old monk in burgundy robes remains standing beside the taxi, watching the prison gates.
The boy looks up gravely at Chit Naing, who whispers, “Nyi Lay, don’t worry. We’ll be fine in here and you’ll be better out there. Look, the Hsayadaw is waving at you.”
The boy gives the jailer a grin like a spark of fire and glances at the road. He lifts his hand and shyly waves to the old abbot. Chit Naing nods toward the open door.
And Zaw Gyi walks out of the cage.
AFTERWORD
A Chapter from the History of Kindness by Karen Connelly
I was educated abroad.
Not in universities or private schools, but on the streets and in the markets of northern Thailand, in a shepherd’s hut on an island in the Aegean, in the refugee camps and cramped rooms of political exiles on the Thai-Burma border. The first time I lived away from home I was seventeen. I spent a year immersed in Thai culture and food and language. It was an intense, wonderful, difficult experience. It helped me to understand that living in different countries and speaking new languages was a vital part of my apprenticeship as a writer. I lived in Thailand, Spain, France, and Greece for much of the next twelve years. I would return to Canada periodically, once for almost two years, but my goal was always to have a life elsewhere.
Living abroad and writing a novel are very similar experiences. Both involve entering other realities, constructing new identities. If you want to have a profound experience of a new place, the mind has to be open, vulnerable, and spacious enough to undergo a violent invasion of the other. If you want to write a good novel, the mind has to be able to sustain that openness and vulnerability for as long as it takes to get the job done.
Any foreigner (and any writer) who is trying to get in—into a language, into the inside jokes, into the skin of another world—sets him or herself up, willingly, for a rich but also painful onslaught of newness and otherness. Unlike many people who become foreigners, I did not leave my country because of economic duress or political upheaval. I left Canada as a teenager because I was starved for what I vaguely termed, even then, “real life.” I left, too, because I was sick of real life, the real life of alcoholism and drug abuse that is the abridged history of my family.
I knew from the beginning that exile was one way of protecting myself from almost sure disaster. While growing up I had observed that disaster is a kind of genetic trait, but I was going to do my best to escape the fate that several of my siblings were experiencing. I was to become a new person, a new citizen. I wanted to remake myself, to do the impossible and leave my history far behind me.
I was adopted everywhere, and fed often. Besides the good, sane families I found wherever I was, I invariably searched out people who were marginalized: gypsies, drug addicts, artists, cantankerous peasants, exiles of various kinds. These were the sorts of people whose codes I dimly or sharply understood. I discovered, during this strange, shape-shifting evolution of empathy, that a great many people are wounded, in need of care, lost, variously broken, and yearning for love and connection. In other words, I discovered the terrible truth that every escape artist comes to, eventually: there is no escape. All of us have a gene for disaster.
To put it another way, I’ll quote Julia Kristeva, from her book Strangers to Ourselves: “Living with the other, with the foreigner, confronts us with the possibility or not of being an other. It is not simply—humanistically—a matter of our being able to accept the other, but of being in his place, and this means to imagine and make oneself other for oneself. Rimbaud’s Je est un autre (“I is an other”) … foreshadowed the exile, the possibility or necessity to be foreign and to live in a foreign country, thus heralding the art of living in a modern era, the cosmopolitanism of those who have been flayed.”
Those who have been flayed. I first read that phrase while I was working on The Lizard Cage, and it
made me think immediately of Teza and Nyi Lay. Both of them are flayed people: great violence has brought them to the shocking and brutal but completely normal circumstances of their lives in prison. Teza is a fictional character, but he is also many real men and women, just as the boy, Nyi Lay—Free El Salvador—Zaw Gyi, is many of the different children I came to know in Burma and on the border.
I could not have started writing The Lizard Cage if not for my long education of trying to know the other, and, in all those foreign places, of being the other. Absorbing and living so much in a state of actual foreignness prepared me for the most galvanizing experiences of my life so far: events in Burma and on the Thai-Burmese border. Writing the novel was a continuation and a deepening, an internalization, of those experiences.
Contacts in Bangkok had given me the numbers of many people in Burma’s major centers: political activists, artists, writers, editors, musicians, doctors. On my first visit to the country, I met with them several times over a period of three weeks, and met other individuals through them. I had never heard people speak so passionately about freedom and art and political oppression. Burma was different than the other countries I knew: it was ruled by a dictatorship.
If I had experienced wounding and become a witness to and a recorder of the wounding of others, if I had lived among those who were damaged by bad parents and bad people and bad luck, this was something beyond, something far worse. Burma was an entire country flayed by its symbolic parents, its rulers. This was dysfunction and disaster on a national level, and that is exactly how the people described it to me.
Actively suffering the destruction of their human rights, my newfound Burmese friends were keenly aware that I had come from a place of great openness and wealth. They also knew that I was a writer. We discussed various painful and dangerous aspects of living in Burma under military rule. I learned much, and I asked many questions. But the one and key question Burmese people asked me was, “Will you write about this?”
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