The Lizard Cage Page 11

  “I’ll pass that observation on to the Chief Warden.”

  “And tell my mother I’m getting fat on the stones in the soup.”

  Chit Naing breathes, “Shhhh!” The silver reflection of his glasses flickers down and away, like a light going out. Chit Naing once asked Teza never to use the word mother when the two of them are together. Teza sees him take a full step backward. They both stand still, listening, but the only sound is rain, falling lightly.

  Chit Naing’s eyes narrow as he steps forward. The rectangular section of his face is replaced by his fingers, sticking three cheroots through the trap. “When are you going to stop smoking?”

  “Ha! When I’m allowed to read a book!”

  “Some people believe smoking’s bad for you.”

  “Some people believe reading’s bad for you. And shitting in a proper toilet, and being able to see your family, and eating decent—”

  “I have to go.” Chit Naing raises his hand to close the trap.

  Teza speaks quickly to the sliding rectangle of iron. “Thanks for the cheroots. But bring a chicken next time, would you? Or maybe a goat?”

  As he turns away from the teak coffin, Chit Naing hears Teza laughing.

  At the end of the short corridor, he opens the metal door, steps over the threshold, and shuts the heavy bolt. Rain falls on his head. Turning his face up slightly, he considers how tired he is of locked doors. He begins to walk back to the warders’ quarters, still listening for Teza’s laughter.

  The migratory tendency of the prisoner’s voice has been the problem from the very beginning. Though it is illegal to publish Teza’s name, he remains the most celebrated singer in Burma. In secret. The Press Scrutiny Board censors even oblique references to music or art, or anything at all, if it believes the allusion is connected to Teza. Chit Naing suspects that this prohibition just makes the singer more famous. It’s the same with Daw Suu Kyi: there’s a nationwide ban on her name too, but rather than make people forget about her, the SLORC has turned her into a legend.

  Banning her name cannot make people forget history, just as suppressing Teza’s songs has not erased them. The tapes are still made and distributed secretly. Chit Naing recently received his first copy of one as a gift from the singer’s mother, who wrapped it up like a sweet in a strip of banana leaf. After his wife and children have gone to bed or while wrestling uselessly with his insomnia, he sometimes listens to the songs on a little tape player. Turning the volume as low as he can, he puts his ear close to the machine and holds his entire body still to listen.

  Teza does not sound young. In 1988 his voice was already an older man’s, a low baritone with rough edges. Somehow Chit Naing expected a lighter sound, and lyrics that would be vaguely embarrassing, years after the failed people’s revolution. But the songs have become elegiac. Written in a violent present, they bear witness to both the past and the future. Every one of them, in some awful way, seems to foretell Teza’s own imprisonment. The first time Chit Naing listened to the tape, he wept. He wanted to pick up the tape recorder and whisper, Leave! If you go to the border, they won’t get you. But the voice ignored him, rising and falling on the rhythmical, unpredictable tides of a guitar, and Chit Naing listened to the next song, and the next, with his hand clamped over his mouth.

  The generals devour the holy bones and jewels

  the tongues and hearts of our people

  But we have turned our shoulders

  to push against their crimes, their lies.

  We listen to the red commandments of the dead:

  When one shoulder buckles, use the other.

  Stop up the dumb mouths of the guns.

  Walk step by step through the room

  of slit-eye and boot and bayonet

  beyond, into our future’s country.

  He wonders if Teza’s mother ever listens to the songs. He would like to ask her but doesn’t dare; he doesn’t want to pry. He sees her once a month, at a different little restaurant or tea shop in a different part of Rangoon. He has never gone back to the laundry. He has never called her on the phone. Every meeting place is new. They make their plan to meet again each time they see each other. At first they spoke only about Teza, then drank some tea or ate a simple meal in silence. Now he also tells her about other politicals held incommunicado; she passes this information to the prisoners’ families. Each time they meet, they have more to discuss, and so they talk, quietly revealing themselves with and without language, their eyes moving like their hands over the plates of food between them. As Chit Naing’s clandestine work has become more complex, so have his meals with Daw Sanda.

  Once he spooned the last delicious bit of tea-leaf salad onto her plate, the way relatives and close friends will do. They both stopped talking and looked at each other. He gave her a timid, awkward smile, the apology ready on his tongue. He waited, wanting to see what she would do. With a ball of rice on the tips of her fingers, she pinched the salad up and put it into her mouth.

  They have become a man and a woman who eat together. The waiters obviously assume they are married, and neither Chit Naing nor Daw Sanda corrects or comments on this error. As he walks away from these visits, his heart almost bursts from happiness and regret. He would give anything to have made different choices.

  He is making those choices now, but he is forty-six years old. Sometimes he is haunted by the thought that it’s all come too late. Other times he thinks, No, what is happening now could never have happened before; I was too young and too fearful. The paradox fascinates him—as the old loyalties desiccate and the danger intensifies, he feels lighter and younger than he has in years.

  But out on the street, he often looks over his shoulder. At first he refused to admit to himself why he was doing this. He pretended he was searching for someone he thought he’d glimpsed in the crowd, or trying to remember if he’d forgotten something in a shop. Gradually he has acknowledged that he’s looking for a man, any man with an intent yet impudent face, a man wearing a white shirt, perhaps, and almost always sunglasses, a man who probably rides a motorcycle and is too friendly with certain taxi drivers.

  He has watched these men following other people. It is easy to read the arrogance on their faces. By turns swaggering and darting through the crowd, they do not really hide what they are. There are so many MI agents now; the streets are infected with them. They have become the rats of daylight.

  The moment will come when he turns his head and sees one of them behind him. Already the clicks and crackles in his telephone line make him cut his conversations short. Since Daw Suu Kyi’s release, he feels eyes upon him, questions on the tip of his colleagues’ tongues. Many suspect that he was the one who leaked the information of her release. When the Chief Warden took him off the teak coffin, he gave Chit Naing a long, searching look, then announced, “Forget whatever interested you so much in there. It’s not worth it.” Older officers and a few of the warders hesitate when they talk to him, as though he gives off a disturbing scent. They must wonder what’s happening to him.

  Sympathizer.

  Hoping it will not exist if it is not spoken, his friends do not utter this word.

  Yet how interesting they are, the many expressions of silence. He is learning the entire vocabulary of it, every pause filled with meaning.

  “Ko Tint Lwin, all quiet?” Chit Naing inquires at the gate in the first prison wall.

  The warder makes an admirable attempt to shake off his light sleep, like a student woken unexpectedly by a teacher’s question. He’s a new kid, a nice-looking boy from Pegu. He clears his throat. “Yes, sir.”

  As the jailer passes through the iron door, he gives the young man a knowing look and makes sure their eyes meet. “Don’t sleep too deeply, friend.”

  “No, sir. Thank you. I mean, sorry, sir, I was just …”

  “I know, I know. Not to worry. Anything to report?”

  Young Tint Lwin opens his mouth as though to speak, thinks better of it, and just says, “No, nothi
ng, sir.”

  “Is everything all right, Ko Tint Lwin?”

  The new warder lowers his voice. “I just wanted to let you know that Handsome—I mean, the junior jailer—passed through about half an hour ago.”

  Chit Naing leans forward. “Yes?”

  “And he asked about you, sir. If you’d gone home.”

  “What did you say?”

  “I said you’d already left, sir. Because, well, because I thought you had. I thought you’d left while another sentry was covering for me—I went to the latrine. You usually leave around eight, don’t you, sir?”

  “That’s correct, Ko Tint Lwin.” Chit Naing smiles. “Almost always. Handsome knows that.”

  “Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.”

  “Thank you, Ko Tint Lwin.”

  He is not surprised. It’s not the first time Handsome has shown such interest in his movements. There’s not much to be done, though he’s grateful to the young warder. He’s already reached the point where any ally, even the most unschooled, is an advantage.

  The rain is coming down heavily now. By the time Chit Naing reaches the village across the highway where the bus stops, he is drenched. And glad; he craved this cool walk away from the great cage of his life. His glasses are streaked with water. All around him in the blurred green dark, the frogs in the fields and the trees chant and answer and chant again. The chorus of frogs in a roadside pond falls silent when he approaches, rises up again after he passes by. He hears their amphibious words so clearly.

  The hunters are coming, the hunters are coming to catch us, the hunters will boil us alive.

  . 12 .

  Fish. The singer craves the salted fish his mother always sends him.

  Feeling himself fall into the full despair of hunger, he talks to the cell.

  And listens attentively to the reply. The cell knows everything.

  Is he going mad this time?

  Water pot, with its fur of algae on the bottom: speak.

  Spider. Ants. The glistening cockroaches.

  Bricks.

  Concrete floor.

  Straw mat.

  Three small, threadbare towels hang off the strap of the shoulder bag. Inside the shoulder bag is an extra prison uniform, the white cotton turned gray, and three old T-shirts he is permitted to wear. Cheroots, an empty matchbox, a lighter.

  Am I going mad?

  The shit pail sits across the cell from him, as far as it can be from where he meditates, eats, and exercises. The prisoner watches the shit pail. The shit pail watches him.

  Food and shit. The cage controls both. A meager amount of bad food yields a meager amount of painful shit, yet there is always the stench of it, a guest who must be tolerated because he’s a relative and will not leave. Though the pail is empty now, the smell remains. And the acrid stink of urine has been burning his nostrils for years.

  He rips the bottom of his longyi and tears a strip off. His sleeves are already gone. He uses the material for toilet paper. Holding his little white scrap—he waves it for a frantic moment in mock surrender—he walks over to the latrine pail.

  To shit or not to shit—

  That is the question.

  Teza read Shakespeare at university. He would love to have a few of the comedies here, with explanatory footnotes, of course.

  His stomach and lower intestine twist. He sighs as he squats.

  He strains for a while. Nothing comes. Too many little lizard bones.

  The singer waits. Pushes until the hemorrhoids start to hurt. In this situation as in so many others, it’s best not to force things. He stands up.

  He hasn’t shat for—what is it?—two days. His record is fifteen. But constipation is preferable to any kind of diarrhea. A battalion of intestinal parasites has conquered him already. His body is an occupied territory, a country full of worms. A serious case of amoebic dysentery is his greatest fear; he’s been afraid of dysentery since he was a teenager. At seventeen, he pulled down one of his father’s dusty medical textbooks and looked up the dreaded ailment. Beside the complicated English text, a few notes were carefully written in Burmese. Shocked to recognize the handwriting, Teza read his father’s clinical words over and over, as if they were fragments of a letter to him tucked away in the heavy book.

  He tries to be grateful for constipation. He thinks of his mother’s stoic refrain, usually in reference to political change but equally useful right now: La-may ja-may. It will come, it will take time. You will eventually be able to crap, my dear boy.

  He sits down and places his hands, palms up, one on top of the other, and closes his eyes. It’s important to be grateful. And to meditate. He begins to wander through memory, searching for a place to calm himself.

  He often goes to Pagan. It’s a majestic, holy place, but it sends him home too. Before his father died, he took Teza and Aung Min and their mother, May May, on three vacations. Each time they visited old Pagan.

  He breathes in. He breathes himself out of the coffin.

  Any one of the pagodas and temples of Pagan can help him find a path to stillness. Two thousand of them stand on a wide plain above the Irrawaddy River, embedded like old jewels in the dry earth. Nine hundred years ago, the kingdom of Pagan was called Tattadesa, The Parched Land.

  Walking from vaulted temple to river to pagoda again, his father becomes someone else, or more himself, a happy man who wears a straw hat and hires the most beautiful horse and buggy for sightseeing among the temples. Despite the heat, he isn’t tired here the way he is in Rangoon. His short, nervous temper untangles itself and loosens into playfulness.

  Teza and Aung Min follow him with walking sticks, which they use only for swatting at dragonflies and bushes and each other. Every few seconds they glance at their father, whose shoulders shift back and forth as he walks downhill, hiking his longyi up over his knees. At home they cannot get enough of him—he’s so busy at the hospital, and doing the secret tutorials, and going to the clinics outside the city to listen to people’s broken hearts with his stethoscope and to set their broken bones—but in Pagan they have him all to themselves, and May May too. Their eyes flit around him like birds. They would follow him anywhere, their father, and now he is leading them down to the shores of the great Irrawaddy, a river wide as a lake. Sailors unloading charcoal from wooden longboats pause in their labors to wave and smile; Teza waves back, proud to be with his father. Hpay Hpay, the boys call him—Papa.

  On the very edge of the lapping gray water, Hpay Hpay prods the soft sand with his own walking stick. “Look at that,” and he points with his chin to the water’s edge. “There was a crocodile here last night. Maybe it was Rain Cloud himself.” Inspired by the river, Hpay Hpay told them Rain Cloud the Crocodile stories last night.

  “There was no crocodile!” Aung Min looks up at him, his small mouth puckered with disbelief.

  “There was! You can still see the place under the water where his fat tail made a groove deep in the sand. Look! And swish-swoosh, he stepped into the water. See?”

  Teza grins slyly at his father. The mark, already half filled with sediment, must be from a boat’s keel. Rain Cloud the famous crocodile doesn’t swim in the Irrawaddy but in the Rangoon River. Teza has heard the stories many times. But Aung Min is just ten years old, so of course he forgets important details. And he is easier to fool.

  Now Aung Min is squinting at the imprints of men’s bare feet, their toes dug, one by one, deep in the sand. With round eyes, his hands rising up and down at his sides like propellers, he declares, “There are the marks of his big claws! It’s true! Rain Cloud was here last night!”

  Their father leans down and whispers, “Now you see why your mother and I don’t want you to come down to the river alone. Because it would be frightening to meet up with a very large crocodile. Wouldn’t it?”

  Even though Teza’s eleven and a half, he half believes what Hpay Hpay says. He adores his father this way, making a legend true beside the water. Teza takes hold of Aung Min’s bare elbow a
nd whispers, “And Rain Cloud would want to swim us over to the other side, just the way he carried the prince over on his scaly back, remember?”

  “But we wouldn’t go!” shouts Aung Min, making both Teza and Hpay Hpay jump.

  Their father straightens his small, lean frame. “No, you wouldn’t go, because we still have a lot of pagodas to visit on this side of the river. Let’s go back up to the guesthouse. May May’s made lunch. She wants to have a picnic outside under the big tree. La la la. Come on.” With a smile, he turns away from the river and begins to walk up the hill, the boys scrambling behind him.

  Teza breathes in, breathes himself out of memory. He’s supposed to be meditating, not wandering around in the past. Yet he would like to stay here forever with his father, his brother, his mother up the hill, all of them held safe in this realm of light and red dust and gray-yellow water, with hundreds of double-storied temple steps to ascend and mazes of brick to lose themselves in, though they never get truly lost, because the cavelike passageways always lead them out again into dry, hot sunlight.

  In the Golden Age, the great King Anawrahta had an army of white elephants, a ton of ivory, many ingots of gold and silver. Anawrahta gave, with the princes and kings who followed him, hundreds of measures of bronze and iron, white copper and red copper, nine kinds of gems, to make the kingdom great for the Lord Buddha. They filled the granaries with countless baskets of paddy rice, and their gifts of salt were enough to cover the temple platforms like northern snow.

  But King Kyansittha’s gold has worn away from the round stupas of the pagodas. Alaungsithu and all his riches are less than dust. King Narathihapate fled from Kublai Khan’s grandson Yesu Timor, the Mongol invader who ended the glory of Pagan. Only the temples still stand, the round bases of the pagodas, pounded daily by the sun, eaten away by rain and winter winds.

  Teza follows his father upward. But when he reaches the top of the bank, Aung Min is no longer behind him and their father is far ahead, near one of the white temples. He looks down and sees the bare earth between his child’s feet, ochre dust coating his toes and ankles. When he raises his head again, he sees Hpay Hpay walking up the steps of the many-tiered temple. A small figure under the pale, enormous sky, he follows his father.