The Lizard Cage Read online

  The bait is easy. He watches a moth spiral down toward the clay water pot, which he has set under the light for this purpose. Attracted to the light’s reflection, various flying insects end up in the water, wings spread and shuddering on the glassy surface. He plucks a velvety, pulpy moth out of the water. Almost immediately it starts to flap and dance between his left thumb and forefinger.

  Fingertips and knuckles glittering with silver dust, Teza raises the insect up as close as he can to the light, stretching his arm and standing on his toes. Within ten seconds the lizard sharply swivels its head toward the fluttering moth. Then the singer walks slowly to the wall; above him, on the ceiling, the creature follows in its darting, relentless way. From fingers to hand down through his straining arm and back, Teza’s ropy muscles pull long and taut. He likes to pretend he is magic, drawing the creature down with a spell. The lizard hesitates, trying to hold on to the enormity of the hand, the figure beyond the moth, but the reptile’s own predatory instinct leads it into the hand of a bigger predator. The wings whisper the irresistible h’dah-h’dah-h’dah, the sound of injury or entrapment, and on the lizard comes.

  The singer brings his body close to the wall so his right arm—the lethal weapon—will not have to extend too much. The moth whirs like a tiny engine as Teza’s elbow bends, pulling hand, insect, and lizard down. The reptile runs smoothly, then stops, returning to its jerky forward paces. The singer thinks, If I were a bird, I would pluck it off the wall this second, in my beak.

  Just a little farther down now.

  In the looming presence or scent or shadow of the human body, the creatures sometimes turn tail and scurry back up the bricks. Even then the singer will make a move, and he often gets them.

  When his left hand is parallel to the top of his rib cage, he stops moving it and holds the moth lightly against the wall. His right hand is loose-fingered, ready. The lizard rushes for the head of the moth, unhinging its jaws and already gulping as the wings beat against the reptilian snout. The moth flaps furiously, pushing the tips of the singer’s fingers. It’s hard to resist the illogical impulse to release the moth, let it have a last chance at its own life. But the lizard will escape if he does this, so Teza stifles his sense of charity. Still pinching the insect as it enters the lizard’s mouth, the singer takes advantage of the small, violent flurry and slaps his palm down on his prey.

  It’s hard to kill a lizard with your bare hands. A crude method at best.

  The lizard’s head and jaws and the moth between them are crushed against the brick. These are the singer’s least favorite executions, because of the blood and moth innards and wing dust smeared on the palm of his hand. The lizard’s legs still run, escaping uselessly into the air, while the singer picks insect from crushed reptilian jaws. Other times, he manages to catch a tail or break a couple of legs; the lizard drops neatly off the wall and lies writhing on the cement. Then Teza breaks its narrow neck as though he were twisting the cap off a bottle.

  He puts the twitching lizard on the floor and moves the water pot back to its corner. Then, lizard in hand again, he squats down and pours a cup of water over the small corpse, rubbing the sides of the bloody and flattened head to get rid of the moth. He doesn’t like raw insect.

  It’s absurd. What’s the difference? Raw reptile, raw moth? May May would be completely horrified either way if she could see her good son devouring his innocent cellmates.

  The singer likes to make fun, but it’s true. If his mother could see him now, squatting like an old man by the water pot, avid and shining-eyed after the hunt, she would begin to cry in her silent way. If only she had howled like the melodramatic women in the Indian movies he and Aung Min grew up on. But no, they had a mother who held herself in stoic silence.

  Despite these thoughts of his family, the singer is weirdly lighthearted. Squatting, he puts the dead lizard, its dull khaki skin still on, into his mouth. He doesn’t bother to strip them anymore.

  Yes, he is very much himself this way, teeth cutting through the meager flesh, crunching the little bones. It tastes only of what it is: lizard skin and cool blood, neither sweet nor bitter, just raw, and nothing at all like chicken, despite the evolutionary connection. He chews the lizard until he knows the bones are safe enough for his throat. At the moment of swallowing, he is without any remorse, secure in the knowledge that as long as he can do this terrible thing, he can survive the terrible things they do to him.

  That night, before the lights are switched off, he eats six lizards. Or seven. Or eight. Nine? He really doesn’t count anymore.

  But when he’s lying in the dark, a black wave of shame rolls over him. He speaks to the night in an unequivocal voice. “There is no alternative.

  “And furthermore, I am not the only one.”

  The darkness pounds on and on, moralizing.

  “Whatever happens has happened before. I am not the first. Others did this, and later, they were men again.” He raises his voice, to make sure the darkness hears him. “I am still a man. My name is Teza.”

  . 3 .

  The military intelligence agents—the MI—hated his name.

  In ancient Pali, teza means fire, the fire of glory, of power.

  But that wasn’t the only association that pissed off his interrogators. Teza had been the nom de guerre of the great general Bogyoke Aung San, architect of Burma’s independence from the British and still revered as a leader. When the MI agents beat Teza, the young singer, it was not only his body they wanted to crush and destroy, it was that word they shared with him.

  “Teza!” shouts Teza. The cockroach scurries back out of the cell, under the coffin door. It’s almost breakfast time, and the morning patrol of hungry vermin is gathering at the gates.

  The fire of real power and glory, Teza thinks, is the sun shining through monsoon clouds. Light drops over the high outer walls of the cage and pours through the air vent. The singer stands and steps into the warm stream. He lifts his face toward the invisible sky. From this new position, he sees that the spider has spun his web at an extraordinary angle. It gleams like the blueprint of a jewel, the spinner at the center a living ruby.

  How would the spider taste?

  Hungry body, abominable mind!

  How long have I been hungry? How long is hunger?

  “Hunger is as long as all your bones laid end to end in an empty field. Times five.”

  Kicking off his slippers, Teza begins to walk it out, back and forth, back and forth, between the aluminum shit pail and the clay water pot.

  As though from a great distance, Sammy the iron-beater strikes the time. Teza keeps pacing. He counts each clang with a footfall. When he turns on his heel and walks back toward the door, he stares at the stained teak and speaks to it directly. “I will be fed. You must feed me. I am truly hungry now. Feed me!” Eleven o’clock is the hour of the morning meal.

  The door whispers, Teza, you are an idiot.

  The singer nods. The door is a good-natured realist. They could leave Teza in here to starve. No one would know. The Chief Warden could report that the prisoner contracted a wasting illness. Tuberculosis, say. It’s a big problem in the cage. Or dysentery, that other killer, so common and so feared.

  Minutes pass. The sunlight slowly retreats. The intricate web and its ruby spider disappear. He wishes he could have a plant, some green thing in his cell. It’s true that when he was first imprisoned, he believed his name was his only weapon, one that he would never relinquish. But now he would trade his name for a potted orchid.

  As a boy, he knew that messages are meant to be given away, passed along, but he wondered how he was supposed to give away his own name.

  The realization came slowly, through music. Like many Burmese boys, he grew up strumming a guitar, but by the time he was in high school it was clear he had more talent than most of his schoolmates. This dismayed his mother—Daw Sanda wanted him to be a doctor like his father—but delighted his friends. The girls especially loved having a musician around
; Teza knew all the popular songs, including the sappy love ballads. At university he started to write and perform his own music at parties, in small concerts. He became known on the Rangoon campus as the Singer.

  In 1988 he was in his last year of an English lit. degree, finishing several semesters late because of failed exams. Becoming a serious musician made him an indifferent scholar, though no one could deny that university life was good for writing lyrics and spending time with one’s friends, which is why he wanted to prolong it indefinitely. The depressing specter of adulthood loomed at the gates of Rangoon University, beyond which lay a city, a whole country, perfectly empty of opportunity, especially for someone like him. Only children of high-ranking military officers or businessmen with good connections could get excited about the future.

  His family was decidedly unconnected to the regime. On the contrary, both Teza and Aung Min were guilty by association. When they were small boys, their father, Dr. Kyaw Win Thu, had been imprisoned as a communist sympathizer. Very poor, with two young sons and a husband in prison, their educated, cultured mother made a surprising but pragmatic move. She went into business for herself and opened a laundry. It was successful enough to keep them all fed and clothed and to educate the boys. As Teza grew up, however, the laundry became a source of embarrassment. He did not want to live from the proceeds of cleaning other people’s clothes. He wanted to be a rock star.

  But this was no solution either. In Burma, famous rock stars were just as poor as everyone else. Both the bass player and the lead singer in Teza’s favorite band lived in humble rooms at the bug-infested YMCA on Mahabandoola Street. If those two jeans-and-guitar-sporting icons could stand living at the YMCA, Teza realized, he had to tolerate living comfortably from the proceeds of a laundry. Taking cleaning orders after class and helping his mother to manage the accounts, he learned to ignore what he didn’t like.

  Aung Min, on the other hand, lacked the Burmese apathy gene. “Little Brother,” Teza said to him once, “you are not being a good Buddhist. You spend too much time thinking about the future and stewing about the past. What about the present?” He was only partly joking when he added, “Maybe you should go on a meditation retreat with May May.” Their mother was a disciplined meditator. “Remember the wisdom of the breath.”

  Aung Min raised a skeptical eyebrow. “I would breathe better, Teza, if I were not being suffocated every bloody day.”

  True to his mother’s wishes, Aung Min was studying medicine. He used to come home from his classes and, like his doctor father before him, talk angrily and articulately about the idiocy of the government. But he was louder and more charismatic than his father, and to May May’s great consternation, he had a dirty mouth. Though he didn’t swear in front of her, his voice cut right through the walls. “In Southeast Asia, only Cambodia is more fucked up, and that’s simply because Pol Pot was so stupid and brutal that he killed everyone. But our old bastard Dictator Ne Win is smart and brutal enough to keep us alive! What good are dead slaves?”

  May May came into the kitchen, tongue clicking, and closed the windows. Speaking out against the dictator or his regime was dangerous on the street and at home; the MI had paid informers in every neighborhood.

  Listening to Aung Min’s latest passionate rant, Teza carefully masked the awe he felt for his little brother.

  “You remember what the country used to be called, right? The rice bowl of Asia. We were a huge rice producer. Now the farmers have to buy their own paddy back from the military. At [pound!] inflated [pound!] prices! [pound!] The farmers themselves don’t have enough rice to eat. One of my professors thinks that two children in five are malnourished. In isolated areas, probably three or four in five. And most of Ne Win’s cronies are so fat!” Mataya wa-dey was the phrase he used—unjustly fat. Teza burst out laughing.

  “It’s not funny, Teza.”

  “I’m laughing at the expression, that’s all. Hpo Hpo used to say the same thing, remember?” He smiled, hoping to lure his brother into calmer territory by reminiscing about their dead grandfather, for whom they shared a quiet love.

  Aung Min met his eye and said dryly, “You should come with me tonight.”

  “Uh-oh. Something tells me it’s not going to be a very fun party.”

  “The study group is meeting.”

  “That’s what I thought.”

  Teza lifted a cup of tea to his lips. Study group was a euphemism for the political meetings that Aung Min had been organizing on campus. Teza sometimes went to these gatherings, often to keep an eye on his little brother. If the elder student was known for his mellifluous voice and skill with a guitar, the younger was becoming famous for his big mouth.

  Aside from General Ne Win’s monster mouthpiece, the Burma Socialist Program Party, all political groups were illegal. Teza often chided his brother for not being careful enough; the MI had spies on campus too. The students met in each other’s cluttered dorm rooms or huddled around a table at an outdoor tea shop; voices would rise to an excited pitch when they were supposed to be whispering. Even a small group of four or five people was enough to catch the MI’s attention and lead to interrogation.

  Aung Min spent a lot of time preparing for these meetings. He hunted down banned books for the group to read and drew up subjects for discussion, then actually managed to keep the group on topic. He made contact with members of the student protest movement from the 1970s and persuaded one of the men to give a talk. Almost fifteen years before, in a prison work camp in the north, this dissident had known their father.

  Teza can still see that man speaking in his deep voice to the ring of close faces, young people hanging on his every word—words that turned out to be prophetic. He remembers everything so clearly: the pile of ragged chemistry textbooks in a corner, a tin can cut down into an ashtray, the fact that he just wanted to get the hell out of that smoky little room, away from the ominous predictions and the stifling heat. They were all sweating, wiping their faces with handkerchiefs. He was sitting close to the door—acting as a guard, ostensibly, but secretly hoping to make a break for it as quickly as possible. Yes, he’d gone to the meeting to honor the man’s friendship with Hpay Hpay, his father, but after two and a half hours he’d had enough.

  Yes, what about you, Teza? You wanted more than anything to leave and meet Thazin, hear her voice, touch her. If you stayed at the meeting too long, that delightful interlude would not take place, because her two roommates would return from the movies.

  What were you doing, really, while your brother was anticipating revolution?

  I was glancing at my watch. I was anticipating Thazin’s mouth, her breasts.

  • • •

  He is staring at the pitted teak door. The darkened grain reminds him not of blood and piss stains, but of Thazin’s hair. Her voice, murmuring into the phone, used to give him an instant hard-on. This was a hilariously embarrassing problem; his longyi stood up like a tent. How wonderful, how fine, that such problems exist in the world! He is sure that some young man in Rangoon right now suffers from the same affliction, and this makes him glad.

  But he felt more than lust, the body’s lightning, for Thazin. He loved her, wildly, flesh and mind and heart, every gesture of her hands, the changing shape of her mouth as she spoke. This love haunts and blesses him now. Because in the end he became as caught up in the protests as Aung Min. What he believed was most personal to him, most beloved—Thazin—ceased to occupy the core of his life. She was there beside him much of the time, but the politics and the songs and that history they were all living took him over.

  There was so much he did not understand. He did not know how far things would go, how bad the violence would get. Even when he was in an interrogation center being beaten black and blue, he wasn’t thinking of a long prison sentence. Then they told him. Twenty years in solitary confinement. For singing songs? It was too absurd, even in his absurd country. How could anyone, let alone a twenty-five-year-old university student, fathom what twenty ye
ars in solitary might mean?

  During the height of the demonstrations he had worked on the Twelve Songs of Protest every day, raw-voiced and shaking, quietly possessed, thinking, These songs are like my name.

  Grandfather remember that other war

  You watched a woman with hungry children

  rush into her hut and fall to her knees

  She tore open the burlap sack

  of rice with her bare hands

  In this war Grandfather

  our people like that woman

  are tearing open history

  with their hands their mouths

  Finally we will eat the truth.

  Teza’s songs became a manifestation of the country transforming around them, in Rangoon and its townships and dozens of cities and villages all over Burma, in the singer too, a new country was being born. The words swept through Teza’s mind and flew from the mouths of the protesters, men and women and children in the streets shouting Doh ayey, doh ayey, doh ayey. Our business, our cause. It was the old dream, the oldest music, written again in human blood, soiled by human excrement, with shoes bereft of feet scattered all around. The chorus was a single word: freedom.

  . 4 .

  Like a dirty joke, the word freedom usually makes Sein Yun, the palm-reader, laugh out loud and roll his eyes suggestively. “Freedom,” he likes to say, “is one more thing you can buy at market, if you have enough kyats.”

  Teza hears the distant sound of shuffling feet. A smile begins and fills his entire face as the feet come closer.

  Despite the double-thick door, the shuffle-slap-slap, shuffle-slap-slap of slippers is audible to his keen ears. The singer listens for Jailer Handsome’s footsteps behind the server’s. Usually he waits down the hall while Sein Yun opens the door, gives Teza his food tray, and takes away his shit pail. While chatting with the palm-reader, Teza often smells Handsome’s cheroot smoke.