The Lizard Cage Page 3

  The methods he has imagined are no different from his comrades’. Anxious fingers swivel scraps of paper into cigarettes and cheroots. Words are scratched onto walls and plastic bags, pinpricked onto dry leaves, stuffed into the handles of baskets, held under armpits, in mouths, wrapped in clothes, breathed nightly in prayers. The brief missives, puny as insects, as embryos, are regularly caught and crushed, torn out by the guards and warders and swept away. If the prisoners are caught sending messages, they are beaten violently; they must bleed, that is the general rule. It’s also fine to knock them unconscious. Then their sentences are extended by two years, by four, by seven, by seven times two.

  The singer sits down.

  The spider crawls out. Like the singer’s grandfather, the spider always goes outside for a morning view of the world, even if it is raining, as it is today. As it was yesterday. It will rain off and on now for months. Teza cannot see the rain, but he hears it drumming, muttering, sighing, turning over and over, out of the sky to the earth back to the sky, washing away the layer of filth created by men, which encourages them to create more.

  Sometimes his dreams are very simple: rain falls into his cupped hands. In the base of that shallow well, there is a small lizard. Its tongue flicks at the clear, oversized drops, drinking the rain, which also washes Teza’s palms, runs through his fingers. The lizard licks at the rainwater, perfectly calm, fearless. The singer feels the small reptilian heart beat lightly against his human skin.

  • • •

  The lizard dream makes him think of food, and food makes him think of Sein Yun, and that makes him mad. Where is that sneaky little bastard?

  The yellow-skinned palm-reader with the long dirty nails and the jumpy manner has been Teza’s server for a month and a half. He’s an uncommon criminal, Sein Yun, but useful. A couple of weeks ago, the palm-reader brought in—from where, Teza will never know—some first-rate papaya, cut in cubes and served on a white plastic plate, as if a pretty lady vendor on Anawrahta Street had brought it into the cage herself. No warder or jailer would ever lower himself to the task of serving a prisoner food of any kind, or of emptying out his shit pail. Such work is reserved for criminal prisoners like Sein Yun who are trying to reduce their sentences.

  Teza’s previous server was Sammy, who has a new job now, as one of the iron-beaters. At least that’s what Sein Yun said last week. Teza likes to imagine Sammy out there, at the base of the watchtower, the great bulk of his long dark arms beating out the hours. Sammy is an Indo-Burmese of startling proportions, over six feet tall, the whole length and breadth of him thick with muscle. But when he was a server, all his strength meant nothing to the singer, because the giant has no tongue. His awful tonguelessness was intended—and received—as an added punishment for Teza.

  The only thing you want to do in solitary—besides everything else you want to do—is speak and be spoken to. Sammy could only grunt. The first time Teza addressed him, the Indian’s sad mouth yawned into an empty purple cavern. The web of skin from the lower palate connected to a small, wriggling stump of flesh. The singer’s first reaction on seeing that ugly amputation was not sympathy, or horror, or even distaste. Teza was so overwhelmed with self-pity that he wanted to cry.

  Whatever the palm-reader’s faults may be—clearly he has many—he also has a tongue, and uses it. Sein Yun is clever, happy to share his quick wit. Most important, he likes to pass on cage news. The singer already feels disproportionately grateful to him simply because he can talk.

  If he would just show up with the breakfast tray, Teza would bow in gratitude. He tilts his head toward the teak door and listens. Nothing, no footsteps. Only his growling gut.

  In December he will celebrate his anniversary: seven years, married to the cage. For seven years he hasn’t been eating enough, but right now his hunger has passed from aching into acute. His muscles, organs, bones, have all grown teeth; he can feel his body steadily devouring itself.

  His arms and shins and the backs of his knees are insanely itchy (scabies), as are his bites (bedbugs; rather, matbugs, for he hasn’t slept on a bed for as long as he’s been hungry), and his hair is so filthy it’s beginning to smell like bad meat. All that is fine; he’s used to it. Hunger is his only serious concern. He’s used to being malnourished. That isn’t the problem. The problem is that the food parcel, which keeps him from starving, is late by an entire week. And the last parcel, which came through three weeks ago, was a dud.

  His mother sends them. But before the food reaches him, it has to pass through the holding room to be checked for contraband. Three weeks ago, warders he doesn’t know, or Sein Yun, or some other lousy thief, took all but one of the dried salt fish and most of the deep-fried dried beans too.

  Why did the bastard bother leaving one fish? What kind of slap in the face was that? The jerk was just laughing at him. Was it Junior Jailer Handsome? Handsome has only recently started to oversee the teak coffin. He and Sein Yun came together. As Sein Yun replaced Sammy, so Handsome replaced Senior Jailer Chit Naing, a man who’s been a great friend to Teza. Chit Naing would never touch a prisoner’s food. But Handsome is a mean bastard.

  Who knows? Anyone could have stolen it. Teza is grateful to Sein Yun, but the man’s always on the make. He’s even friendly with Handsome. It would make good business sense: Junior Jailer absconds with the fish and Sein Yun sells them in the prisoner halls.

  If the Chief Warden permits these thieves to steal Teza’s food, what does he expect him to live on? Cockroaches? His political ideals? Lizards?

  He strikes the wall with his open hand. Then scolds himself for hurting his palm. He touches the bricks again, gently, as if to apologize.

  Above his head, closer to the teak door, a ceaseless parade of ants marches in a crooked line to where they divide into two streams. One flows into a very thin crack to the left; the other follows a right-hand route much lower down, into a bead-sized gap in the mortar. Before they reach their destination, both streams wind and loop over the neighboring bricks. This irregularity has puzzled him for years.

  Why do the ants meander? Why do they not take the shortest, most direct path to the cracks in the wall?

  We cannot say, They are stupid, their brains are small. Their reasons and their wisdom are beyond us. They can do what we cannot. O cell, o shit pail: how you alter the old shape of the world, the perspectives of a living man. On the floor below the bead-sized gap is a small mountain of cement dust, the ants’ excavations. The ants are burrowing their way out.

  Sometimes Teza hears the amber mandibles patiently crunching through the mortar between the bricks. Many legs push the bits back, back, back, passing a piece from one to the other until finally the last ant pushes it out of the wall and it falls into the pile on the floor. Of course he doesn’t hear the bit of mortar fall, but he can hear the ants working, grinding away inside the prison wall. A few hours later he can see how much the pile of cement dust has grown.

  After breaking a length of straw from his mat, he carefully disrupts the march and edges an ant onto the straw. The ant’s antennae wave about, tasting the air. Then he pauses to clean himself.

  “Yes,” Teza whispers above the ant’s head. “The air is dirty too. Wash yourself.”

  The ant obediently licks his brown hands, pulls the flexible antennae to his mouth, runs the thin feelers along his tongue.

  Teza tilts the straw down. The ant crawls up. He turns the straw over. The ant crawls down. The singer paces eight by eight feet with the ant crawling up and down, up and down.

  “I take the ant for a walk,” he explains in English. “I am walking the ant.”

  Promener, in French. But ant? He replaces it with cat.

  “Je promène le très très petit chat brun.”

  Among his prison lessons, he has learned how to distinguish eight different kinds of ants, possibly nine, though he is not absolutely sure. He has observed the different personalities of the ants too. Some black ants, contrary to popular belief, are more ag
gressive than some red ones.

  He wanted to speak fluent English and French. He intended also to read many books. As a boy, he touched as many books as he could in the bookstalls across from the main post office. He dreamed of owning a library to match his grandfather’s library in Mandalay.

  He puts an imaginary book in his hand and holds it out in front of him. Ant in one hand, invisible book in the other.

  After the rainy season, the pages smell like the forest.

  His grandfather’s bookshelves grew high.

  Hpo Hpo, why do the books smell like damp wood?

  Because every book, in its former life, was a tree.

  I take the ant for a walk.”

  The English words sound without reverberation, absorbed immediately into the walls, the heavy door. That’s partly how the teak coffin got its name. Instead of having bars, the cell is sealed shut with a door made of two bolted slabs of teak. It’s smaller than the other cells, and several men have died in it.

  Teza inclines his head, and in Burmese he speaks with the ant about small, daily things.

  An hour passes. Barefoot, he walks deeper and deeper into hunger. He’ll have to stop walking at the start of the next hour, to save his energy. He won’t want to stop.

  Sammy the iron-beater beats out two o’clock. Curious, isn’t it? Sammy used to see Teza twice daily but could tell him almost nothing. Now they can’t see each other at all, but the big Indian tells him something important every hour.

  Teza squats down in front of the wall and carefully returns his ant to the ant stream. A brief commotion ensues. Antennae wave. Ant hands touch ant faces as the laborers welcome their lost one back to work. Teza’s fingers spread against the wall as he watches two ants break from the line and begin to unstick a flattened mosquito. The singer’s blood glues the mosquito to the brick. With a mixture of clumsy determination and deftness, one worker drags the mosquito into the lower gap in the wall, where all such treasures are stored away.

  Years have passed while Teza has sat or squatted or stood craning his neck, listening. To the ants. The flies. The lizards. Sometimes hungry rats trundle in through the air vent, squeaking. He knows the voices of the crows and the pigeons on the ramparts. The spider spins and respins his secret web of history. They all have a way of talking in a language beyond human.

  Everything speaks. That is what he has learned here. Even ants pass messages in the labyrinth behind the bricks and mortar. Through messages they build their invisible, invincible world.

  . 2 .

  Six o’clock. He counts the beats carefully, hoping he is wrong.

  He is not wrong. The second and last prison meal of the day is supposed to come at five o’clock. But Sein Yun didn’t appear with his food tray.

  The singer accepts the sad truth. Today he will not eat rice. It happens. Sometimes, if an important prison authority or general has died, or when there has been a major raid or riot in one of the big halls, or when one of the criminal prisoners attacks a warder, the meals are cut, just like that, no explanation. The news has to filter through the cage on its own, which is fine for prisoners in the big halls. If you’re in solitary and your server has disappeared, there is no news at all. There is only the time passing.

  He stares at the door for a while, hoping. It’s his door. He cleans the years of sweat and spit and piss and crushed bugs out of its grain, twists the bolts from its flesh, tears out the locks. He returns the wood to the mill, un-saws it, heaves it back a great distance along plunging mud tracks, asks the elephants to drag it back up the steep hillsides. And then, among the profusion of thick grasses and liana and the calls of wild monkeys and birds, he sets the wood upright and it becomes a tree again, one of the trees in the last great golden teak forests on earth, the jungles of northern Burma.

  He lays his hands upon the brown, pitted surface of the door. It was alive once. The mystery is how everything changes. He closes his eyes.

  Do you remember the banyan tree on Mahabandoola Street, the one wrapped with ribbons and hung with puppets?

  Can you conjure the smell of a lime?

  Or his girlfriend’s skin, the soft inner wrist before it flooded up the rest of her arm? His fingers always wanted to go farther up her sleeve.

  The door remains closed. He presses his hands against the teak, then turns and leans against it, pushes his shoulder blades into the grain. He knocks the back of his head, once, against the wood, gets a sharp whiff of his black hair. He glances up at the vent. It’s getting dark outside. Soon the moths will appear. Despite knowing exactly what will happen, he feels a shiver of anticipation. Attracted by the light in his cell, the moths will flap in through the air vent. The lizards will come after them.

  He thumps his head against the door once more.

  It’s hard to catch a lizard with your bare hands.

  Sometimes they are far down the walls, already close. More often he lures them down from the ceiling with live moths, the odd fly. He once used a small praying mantis, but that was early on, before he knew better. The mantis was bright new-leaf green, a rare color in the cage, never to be used as mere bait.

  The lizard hunt is a shameful compulsion. Occasionally, disgusted with himself, he has stopped it for long periods.

  But it’s like giving up smoking. Starting again is irresistibly attractive.

  He has always needed the tiny reptiles. Always. How pathetic, to talk as if he’d been born here. Even when his food parcel arrives on time, he regularly supplements his diet with lizards. Despite his mother’s generosity, a parcel every two weeks is not enough food, because he shares what hasn’t already been stolen with Sein Yun. He’s not obliged to give his server food, but it makes his life easier. In exchange, Sein Yun will bring him extras: cheroots and lighters, rags and soap. Some time ago—he can’t remember if it was in his fourth or his fifth year—one of the servers, in gratitude for the extra food, used to bring Teza extraordinary and frivolous things, like real toilet paper, or a cup of warm tea. Some of the men have been as kind as the cage allows. He owes them a lot. Senior Jailer Chit Naing, for example. What would he do without him? Teza is sure that the Chief Warden himself somehow got wind of their friendship. That’s why Chit Naing’s duties no longer include overseeing the teak coffin.

  The singer will always be grateful to the senior jailer, but when he thinks about it pragmatically, measuring out his allegiances, he knows that he owes the lizards his life. The protein has been crucial, but the best part is the hunt. The anticipation and physical prowess involved in stalking are a great relief from the boredom.

  Even if you hate killing a lizard, a feeling of triumph fills you once the wriggling body goes still. Then you must eat it, because to waste the death is another crime.

  For the first couple of years of his imprisonment, Teza counted them. Three hundred and sixty-two. That may seem like a lot, but it wasn’t. The early years were the worst. His body rebelled against so many kinds of deprivation. The hunger for food was only one of many hungers, but it caused him a very particular anxiety.

  Three hundred and sixty-two times he sent apologies to his mother and reflected guiltily upon the First Precept, which is to refrain from harming or taking life. In his infinite compassion, the Lord Buddha would understand, but Teza suspected his mother would give him a big lecture. Daw Sanda might allow the eating of insects, but not small, four-legged creatures with red blood.

  His mother has been a vegetarian for years. She is a devout Buddhist.

  By the time he was an expert at catching and killing the reptiles, the numbers started bothering him, adding to his guilt. Certain records, he decided, shouldn’t be kept. He talks to himself often, without embarrassment, and when he decided to stop counting the executions, he said out loud, “Some records just go missing.” These words were followed by an unnatural, forceful silence. The silence spoke to him of 1988, when he and his mother lost Aung Min, his younger brother. Those eerily quiet days without Aung Min made them frantic, because
they didn’t know who’d been shot in the streets, or how many, or where the bodies were taken after the big trucks came through and the soldiers jumped down and dragged the students and other protesters off the sticky roads. All the bodies, even those with groaning mouths, were hauled away.

  Besides the blood and the broken, hand-drawn signs, many slippers were left behind, for hours, sometimes for days, missed in the cleanup by the regime’s squadron of overworked sweepers. The slippers lay scattered over the pavement, lodged in the gutters and at the base of the occasional shrine-bearing banyan tree. Shoes bereft of feet are capable of making terrible accusations. The people who scurried along the roads before the evening curfew knew ghosts were stepping into those slippers, the simple flip-flop kind with the single piece of leather or plastic that fits between the first two toes of each bony foot. During the day a few parents went out, and brothers and sisters, to search among the flip-flops, but it was hopeless, impossible to know which shoes belonged to whom. They were the kind everybody wore.

  Everybody wears them still. The singer always takes his off when he paces, because it’s not easy to get new slippers in the cage, and walking wears them out. He kicks them off just now, into a corner, as he always does before hunting. The flip-flop slap frightens his prey.

  Anyway, eating the lizards is a necessity. Most of his warders have had no idea, and surely Senior Jailer Chit Naing never knew. That sharp devil Sein Yun probably suspects—little bones in the shit pail—but he’s never said anything. Like masturbating and weeping, the singer tries to keep it private.

  Years from now, the lizard hunt will be a story to tell certain friends, close ones. It will become a tale from his heroic old days in prison. He won’t tell his mother, though. There are some things devoutly Buddhist mothers should never know.

  Here and now, in this cage of men, the singer thinks, Let no one see. Let no one know I do this.