The Lizard Cage Read online

  At the beginning of July last year, the Chief Warden assigned him to oversee the teak coffin. He’d been at it for just three days when his new prisoner surprised him by asking for a string of jasmine flowers, the kind used for offering at the pagoda. The singer’s manner baffled him as much as the request itself. Teza did not cower. He didn’t even respect prison protocol by keeping his head down. He stood in his cell, a bit left of center. The teak door was open. Chit Naing was on the other side of the threshold, feeling awkward because he was used to his inmates dropping to a squat or moving away from him. But after Sammy the giant had left with the latrine pail, Teza actually took several steps toward him. He looked the jailer in the eye, asked forthrightly for jasmine, then continued in a thoughtful tone, “Or even just a small branch with leaves, it doesn’t matter what kind of tree. Flowers are the thing, or the smell of green leaves.”

  Chit Naing thought, The man is insane. Teza, the singer, was mad, and no one, typically, had bothered to inform him. Or perhaps no one knew. What else could explain this bizarre fearlessness? A request for flowers? He looked at his prisoner with such obvious, eyebrow-knitted confusion that the singer smiled at him, which only unbalanced Chit Naing further, because he saw that Teza was completely sane, and that with his openhearted, friendly smile, he was trying to put Chit Naing at ease. This was a complete reversal of anything the jailer had experienced in the cage. It wasn’t that the singer had overstepped the boundaries between prisoner and jailer. It was that he acted as if those boundaries did not exist.

  Teza kept smiling intently into his jailer’s worried eyes, showing off a row of very white, very straight teeth. He’d lost a couple in the bottom row, but the gaps took nothing away from his fine-boned face, with its strong brow and narrow, high-bridged nose. Malnourishment and beatings had made Teza thin and weak, but a genuine playfulness mixed with yearning shone in his eyes. Chit Naing felt unexpectedly touched: the look on the prisoner’s face reminded him of his children. Teza’s smile shifted and broadened as his eyebrows rose, questioning, prompting the jailer to respond. Without thinking, Chit Naing smiled back.

  Sammy rattled them from their silent communication by lumbering down the corridor, metal latrine pail dangling and clanking at the end of his long arm—and then he stared down at Chit Naing as if he were crazy. The jailer flushed dark red. Did Sammy think he had propositioned Teza in a sexual way? He took a handkerchief out of his breast pocket and started to polish his glasses. Sammy handed the pail back to the prisoner and grunted. Without saying a word, Chit Naing waved the server out of the teak coffin, hurriedly closed the door, and locked up.

  But the next day, when Sammy left with the latrine pail again, Chit Naing pulled a string of jasmine blossoms out of his breast pocket—the sweet scent flared like white sparks against the odor of shit—and handed it to Teza. The singer thanked him and lifted the handful of jasmine to his nose.

  “What will you do with the flowers?” Chit Naing asked.

  The jailer’s low, conspiratorial tone made Teza laugh. “What do you think? I will offer them to the Buddha.”

  Chit Naing glanced around the cell. “There is no altar here.”

  “Ha! There’s no toilet either, but that doesn’t stop me from doing my business, does it?” He pointed to the back wall of the cell, high up. “The altar is up there, but it’s invisible. I don’t need to be able to see the Buddha to meditate and pray. There’s not much else to do. I never would have become so interested in Buddhism without this enforced retreat.”

  Chit Naing raised his eyebrows. “That’s what you call twenty years in solitary confinement?”

  “On my better days. The cage is a big monastery and my sentence is a very long meditation. I’m sure that’s how my mother thinks of it too.”

  “How do you know what she thinks if she’s not permitted to correspond with you?”

  “Sir, she is not only my mother! She is my friend. I was fortunate to be born to her.” Teza paused reflectively. “Though I don’t know what she did to deserve us. She raised one son for prison, the other for war in the jungle. Now she only raises orchids, the most beautiful ones in Rangoon.” He gestured with his long-fingered hands, evoking rows of hanging orchids.

  His voice rose with a childlike enthusiasm. How much the man loved and missed his mother was obvious to the jailer, but the singer wasn’t sad. He seemed grateful just to have the chance to talk about her.

  “She doesn’t sell her orchids, though. She could by now, you know—professional growers used to come and visit her little garden. But she says she could never sell them. She says they must only be gifts. She doesn’t want to make a business out of something she loves. Isn’t that interesting? Of course, she already has a business, and she’s a very good businesswoman too. She runs a laundry.”

  Suddenly self-conscious, Teza pressed his lips together to stop the rush of words. Then he shyly whispered, “I’m talking too much, eh? Well, just let me finish. She is a very devout Buddhist also, and though she might not tell anyone else, I know that on her good days, she thinks the cage is her son’s only chance for Nibbana. Out there, I could never attain enlightenment. I probably would be a rock star, a laundry-boy rock star, drinking every night and running with fast women. In the cage, I’m like a monk.” A lilting, comical tone entered his voice. “Very celibate. Holy, even. Who knows? By this time next year I could become a Hpaya-Laung, a Bodhisattva. Then what would the Chief Warden do with me?” The singer turned his head sideways and looked at the jailer with one shining crowlike eye.

  Chit Naing frowned in response. Maybe Teza was going nuts.

  “U Chit Naing, please do not look so concerned. I don’t think the Chief Warden would do anything cruel to an enlightened man.”

  The jailer couldn’t tell if the singer was joking or putting up a brave front or just being foolish, but this curious chat intrigued him. He accompanied Sammy to the teak coffin twice daily, which included overseeing Teza’s bathing and clothes-washing breaks. He began to find excuses to lengthen those brief visits. Before eleven in the morning and five in the evening, the senior jailer felt a rush of pleasurable anticipation. In a few minutes he would see the singer.

  Their conversations were often charged with an excitement out of proportion to what they talked about, whether it was the stifling heat or the mystery of Sammy’s missing tongue—no one in the cage knew how he had suffered that loss—or the awful quality of Teza’s food. Their words seemed to glimmer in the air between them, dangerous metallic threads that quickly connected both of them to books and ideas, to language itself. The jailer told Teza about the daring subject matter of the famous writer Ju’s recent novel, in which a passionate young man falls in love with an older woman, but the story, as he was telling it, became a metaphor for their own deepening and forbidden association. Chit Naing talked about the magazines he had been reading, or asked Teza what he thought of this or that book. “U Chit Naing,” Teza once said, “to hear someone talk about books is as good as eating my mother’s curry.”

  Teza refused to act like a prisoner, which freed Chit Naing from acting like a jailer. For Chit Naing, the illicit friendship was dangerous, though he was sure he could trust Sammy not to betray them. After that first time, when the giant came upon them mid-grin, the server ceased to express interest in their conversations either way but stood outside in the corridor like a sentry, guarding them both.

  Two months later, Teza asked him not for jasmine or a banana or another cheroot, easy things for the jailer to give. The moment Sammy had disappeared down the corridor, Teza said in a quiet voice, “U Chit Naing, my mother has not had a message from me in two years. The last person to communicate with her for me was a warder who had known my father in another prison. Will you send her a message on my behalf? You know I have nothing to pay you with but my gratitude.”

  Chit Naing realized he’d been waiting for something like this, because he responded as though he’d been brave his entire life. “Your gratitude is
enough. What do you want me to tell her?”

  That’s how it began. The note was not in the singer’s handwriting but in Chit Naing’s: a brief missive of Teza’s news, such as it was, and a message of his love. The jailer delivered it himself. He didn’t want to involve anyone else, nor did he trust anyone else. Better to take the slip of paper to her on his own, under the pretext of going to the laundry to drop off some shirts.

  He took a bus into the heart of the city and bought some old shirts from a noisy street vendor outside Scott Market. He caught a cab from the market and had the driver drop him off at a tea shop. Then he walked ten minutes to Daw Sanda’s house and the laundry beside it. In his hand was the plastic bag of shirts. He had no intention of going to pick them up again. He placed the letter, clearly addressed to Daw Sanda, at the bottom of the bag.

  A dangling bell rang when he pushed open the door. There were two women in the long narrow laundry office, but only the Indian girl sitting on a high stool behind the counter greeted him. The older woman stood at the far end of the same counter, reading a magazine.

  Obviously the girl was not Teza’s mother, but in his nervousness, he asked her her name as she was filling out his order sheet. She glanced up at him shyly and murmured, “Ma Sherry.” He showed her the shirts one after the other without completely removing them from the bag. The letter remained undisturbed as she wrote down the number of items.

  Still engrossed in her reading, the older woman lifted her head slowly, pulled her eyes away from the magazine, and smiled at Chit Naing.

  He was so struck by the resemblance that he gasped, and quickly cleared his throat to cover the sound. His young prisoner was standing there in the body of a mature woman, her long thick hair pulled away from her face and gathered into a ponytail, as though she were still a girl. But she was wearing Chinese red lipstick and a traditionally tailored tamin and eingyi, pale gray-blue in color, very much the lady of business. Her smile was like Teza’s smile, but smaller, and careful: a professional lady greeting her new customer. The dimples, one deep in the center of each cheek, disarmed Chit Naing. For a few seconds he stared at her, caught in the net of two thoughts: She is much more attractive than I expected. And, Does Teza have dimples or not?

  Chit Naing was not wearing his uniform and felt strangely exposed without it. He looked away and coughed into his hand, as embarrassed and awkward as a country bumpkin. Pull yourself together, man, he thought, annoyed. It’s a laundry, for crying out loud!

  But what could he say to this elegant woman, whose intelligence marked her every feature and movement, from the candor of her gaze to the black eyebrow rising slightly above her eye to the way she closed the flimsy magazine with an air of formality? She folded her carefully manicured hands on top of it, silently asking him, What do you want? You are a stranger here and you are acting strange. Her fingernails were not painted, and she wore absolutely no jewelry. Not an earring, not a ring, not a strand or speck of gold or gem anywhere. So unlike his wife, he thought, who adored and coveted gold.

  He glanced from the white moons of her nails to her face, the strong brow and fine nose, the seed versions of Teza’s features, though her eyes were longer and paler, tortoiseshell brown. The plastic bag was still on the counter. Sherry had turned away from it to finish counting out the items of an earlier drop-off. He could leave, if he wanted. No, he must leave, his work was done.

  But Daw Sanda seemed to read his hesitation like a preface to the note at the bottom of the bag. As he turned to the door, she said, “Look. It’s begun to rain so hard. Would you like a cup of tea until it lets up?”

  Chit Naing could hear Teza’s voice in hers, mellifluous and strong, surprisingly direct, not a syllable hushed or withdrawn. With her offer of tea, she was telling him, Stay here. Chit Naing blinked at her like a schoolboy and stumbled out the words: “Tea. Yes. A cup of tea. I would like some tea.”

  That’s how it began.

  As he approaches the big gates, he gives a sharp nod to the young warder, Tint Lwin, who sits up straighter in the sentry box. Chit Naing walks more slowly, hesitating. Anyone watching—Handsome, for example, or the Chief Warden—will see that he isn’t going to walk through the gates. He’s not leaving the prison after all.

  . 11 .

  Teza smiles when the metal bolts of the window trap start clicking. Chit Naing cannot open the door on these nocturnal visits; he no longer has the key to Teza’s cell. But he slides open the long metal slat to reveal his eyes, shining behind wire-rimmed glasses. The singer is always very grateful to see the bridge of his nose.

  Chit Naing speaks in a deep, quiet voice but not a whisper. He has stopped whispering. “How are you?”

  “Hungry. Sein Yun told me my food parcel has gone missing.”

  “He told you that? How the hell does he know?”

  “He seems to know a lot—nothing gets by him. And the last parcel was almost empty. Do you know what’s going on?”

  “I’ll try to find out. Be patient.”

  The two men look into each other’s eyes. Chit Naing says nothing. How can a man who is well fed reply honestly to another man’s hunger? He glances down at his watch.

  Teza also looks away. The jailer is a friend who already does all he can. Changing the subject, he asks, “Is Sein Yun really a palm-reader?”

  Chit Naing smiles. “Maybe that’s what he writes on his résumé. He’s a gem smuggler. Who made a very bad mistake. He’s a special case, working off time.”

  “As quickly as he can.” Teza makes a sound like a dog gnawing at a pig’s hock.

  “Exactly.”

  “Has he read your palm?”

  The jailer laughs. “Of course not.”

  “He told me he’d read your palm.”

  “He’s a liar.”

  “Was he lying about Daw Suu Kyi’s release?”

  “You know about that? We will have to do something about your secret telephone line.”

  “The palm-reader knows everything. He’s friendly with Handsome too, opens the cell on his own, comes in and chats, brings me cheroots.”

  “A regular turnkey, is he? Watch what you say. You know Handsome is always looking for an excuse to exercise his fists.”

  “I wish you were still the jailer around here.”

  “A change was coming one way or another. And since Daw Suu Kyi’s release, whole blocks have been reassigned to different officers. Servers, cells, details have all been shifted. The Chief Warden is paranoid.”

  “She really is free, then?”

  “As free as any other political. She hasn’t tried to travel yet. I don’t think the generals will let her leave Rangoon. But there’s been attention from all over the world.”

  “It’s a good sign, their releasing her. Don’t you think?” Teza cannot prevent a bright vein of hope from breaking into his voice.

  On the other side of the door, Chit Naing removes his glasses and rubs his eyes. When he puts the glasses back on again, the singer’s expression of contained jubilance—the open face, the incautious smile—makes him very tired. “Ko Teza”—his voice is heavy—“it may be an encouraging sign, but it’s also an act of manipulation. The generals released her to get aid money from Japan again. Her freedom is good publicity.”

  Teza smiles broadly. “Good publicity should never be underestimated. If the people are able to see her again, in the flesh, they will be inspired. If she finds a way to speak publicly—”

  The iron-beater strikes half past eight. Chit Naing looks at his watch, then at what he can see of the singer’s face. “I’m sorry, but I have to go—the night sentries are starting their rounds. All the shifts have been changed, and I don’t know who will be around tonight. I don’t know how often I’ll be able to come.”

  The singer can see purple wedges under his friend’s eyes. “But you will come, won’t you?”

  “I’m being warned, Ko Teza. Not directly, but warned nevertheless. It’s best I don’t visit for a while. I have to be careful fo
r at least a month or two, maybe a bit more. You be careful too.”

  “A month? That’s a long time. What … what about the parcels?” Teza’s voice has gone slightly hoarse.

  The jailer takes a small step backward. “I will do my best.”

  “There was only one fish in my last parcel.” The singer presses his forehead against the iron rim of the trap, as if he’s trying to squeeze headfirst out of his cell. The large dark eyes stare directly into Chit Naing’s. The jailer has never met any prisoner who looks at him this way, completely vulnerable, asking and demanding at once. His voice has become breathy, rushed, like a man speaking through fever. “I live on that dried fish, U Chit Naing, and the deep-fried beans and lentils. What if Sein Yun sells all my fish?”

  Chit Naing looks away from the aperture in the coffin door, pretending to check the hall. It disgusts him to see Teza caught in the raw fear of hunger.

  He looks back up at the iron-framed rectangle of Teza, his eyes shining like hot tar. “Ko Teza, I don’t think Sein Yun had anything to do with the disappearance of your parcel. As for selling your fish, he has more lucrative jobs to do. He’s a carrier.”

  “Of what?”

  “Mostly drugs. Possibly selling them for someone else and taking a cut. He’s an entrepreneur. Maybe into weapons too. Poke bars made from pieces of iron filed to a point. Several men have been stabbed with them in the past few months. Sein Yun isn’t violent—he just helps out with the tan-see and akhan-lu-gyi of his hall. A king’s servant. I don’t think he’s stealing your food. But I will look into it.” He pauses, hoping for an encouraging response, but the singer just stands there, head against the trap. Chit Naing hears him breathing.

  “Are you eating the prison food these days?”

  “Since I was sick, I’ve been eating everything. It all tastes like shit.”