The Lizard Cage

by Karen Connelly

  Chew, chew, chew. It’s like gnawing the mat at the entrance to a noodle shop. There is food somewhere beyond it, on a higher plane.

  Now comes the inevitable swallow.

  He’s sad to admit how good it tastes, once the first few mouthfuls have gone down. Saliva floods in. His stomach stretches inside his body, opening like the mouth of a famished child. Only after eating can he think clearly about the palm-reader’s news.

  What does it mean, really, that Daw Suu has been released from house arrest? He would like her freedom to mean something, to change everything, but his lips shut tightly and pull inward like an old man’s. Daw Aung San Suu Kyi’s hands are clean of blood and of blood money. But she’s no different from her many supporters, the brave, outspoken ones, the silent ones. She is no different from her brilliant, murdered father. She is only human.

  He shakes his head and gazes around his cell. His memories can be so painfully vivid. Perhaps some law of physics intersects with a law of incarceration: that is why prison chronology runs backward. The past is the most compelling evidence toward a future different from this moment: the walls, the lizards, his bucket of shit and piss, the clay water pot, its sides slicked with algae.

  He touches his hair. Sein Yun is full of crap. How can he wash his hair with water from his drinking pot? Why don’t they just shave his head? On a sudden impulse, he yanks out a few oily strands. As soon as the interrogators were finished with him, white began to salt the hair directly above his left eyebrow, the one split in two by a boot. Jailer Chit Naing told him there’s a thick swath of white now. Teza stares at the pulled hairs in vague disbelief. No one in his family, not even his grandparents, had such pure white hair. He might as well have snow on his fingers.

  He wonders if his mother’s hair is graying now. After all she’s been through, he wouldn’t be surprised. Hpo Hpo, his maternal grandfather, had streaks of white in his always-pomaded black hair; his grandmother, who died years before her husband, dyed her hair so dark that he remembers it shining velvety purple.

  They are the faces that made my face, Teza thinks. He closes his eyes and brings them to the surface of his mind one after the other. His mother. His father. His grandparents on both sides. Aung Min too. And Thazin. Daw Suu Kyi. These are the faces he keeps in his heart. His aunties and uncles, his cousins. Friends from university. Certain beloved teachers. He wonders how much the living have changed. Not as much as he has. And the dead stay as they are.

  He remembers the old family photographs displayed on the wall of the sitting room, below the altar. In one of them his mother was still a girl, wearing a traditional blouse of homespun cotton, the cloth-knot button closed gracefully at the neck. She is smiling demurely, round-faced and dimpled, but from the glint in her eye and the almost ironic tilt of her head, you suspect that she wants to stick out her tongue and cross her eyes. In some of the photographs from the early years of her marriage, Daw Sanda did make funny faces, mugging for the camera or grinning broadly. As their lives became more difficult, her smiles grew subdued or disappeared altogether, and her arms cradled each other, as though carrying some invisible weight.

  Her serious expression in the more recent pictures was similar to much older photographs of great-uncles and -aunts and grandparents. These people stared bleakly forward, pressed into time through the narrow black hole of the camera. Most of the portraits were taken shortly after World War II, and the harshness of the Japanese occupation still showed in their solemn eyes.

  There were photographs of his father, Dr. Kyaw Win Thu, on the wall too, a slender man with a slightly impish grin and penetrating eyes, eyes that looked so directly at Teza that he sometimes had to turn away from their gaze. The doctor’s mouth often seemed to be puckered slightly, as if he wanted to speak but was hesitating. What? What was he going to say? When Teza was a teenager, his father’s photographs impressed him as much as Bogyoke Aung San’s did; both men’s faces showed so much purpose and intelligence. And both were inseparable from a devastating sense of loss.

  Bogyoke Aung San’s face was and still is everywhere. It stared out from the front wall of every classroom Teza ever entered. They had a picture of him in the family sitting room too; it was the first thing you saw when you walked into the house. He remembers Bogyoke Aung San’s intelligent eyes turned toward a future they would never see. In that image the singer finds Daw Suu’s more delicate narrow jaw and cheeks, the fine bone structure visible through the flesh, giving both father and daughter a severe and haunting dignity.

  Now the daughter’s face is iconic, revered in the same way, but it’s illegal, and very dangerous, to exhibit her portrait in public. As soon as she became politically involved, images of her started to circulate. Teza once showed her photo to people in a tea shop. Country folk, in the city to join the demonstrations for a day, they crowded around his little table and asked him hushed questions about the famous lady, daughter of the great man.

  She does look like him. But her popularity can’t be explained solely by her link to Bogyoke Aung San. Part of her power, Teza thinks, lies in the fact that she is both Burmese and foreign. She has come from the outside world and chosen to stay in this isolated country. She is a refined Burmese woman, and a Buddhist—the latter is very important for the people. But what she carries from her life abroad is the future, which is already happening everywhere outside of Burma. She is the link between that future and Burma’s past.

  The last time he saw her at the house on University Avenue was in mid-November 1988.

  Teza became a member of the youth wing of Daw Suu’s party because he believed in the work, but he also liked being close to her. It confused him to have a crush on such an old woman. Even though she looked very young and was very beautiful, she was actually forty-three, and married, and a mother. He was very much in love with Thazin and couldn’t explain his attraction to this older lady. He worked hard at keeping his feelings a secret. After the youth meetings, he sometimes played his guitar and sang songs with other musicians. Daw Suu’s house was often filled with an eclectic bunch of people, not only senior politicians and activists but journalists and famous poets, well-known political comedians, actors. All of them agreed that Teza sang beautifully. Truly, his songs were written for the whole of Burma’s people.

  Only Teza knew that he was singing to her.

  If a beautiful woman laughs in a certain way, people will fall in love with her. Certain people will hate her for it too. The generals hated Daw Suu then, for many reasons, and surely they must hate her now, which makes her release more mysterious. Why have they freed her?

  Teza picks up the pebble, and holding it between his fingers like a single prayer bead, he whispers, “If Daw Suu is really free, something will shift.” He holds his breath for a moment, listening as the cockroaches scratch out an incomprehensible code.

  Rolling the stone between his palms, warming it, he steps to the center of the cell and closes one eye, aiming carefully at the spider’s window, the air vent. He throws. And misses. The stone falls to the floor. He retrieves it, aims again. Whatever the object, a small stone or a dried pea—he’s used one of his own lost teeth—the projectile must be thrown accurately and with enough force to make it through the vent.

  After two attempts, the stone flies up and escapes. When he hears it hit the ground outside, he smiles, bows, dances a jig. He celebrates the lady’s release with the liberation of a stone.

  . 6 .

  In the evening he prepares for the rest of the celebration.

  Sitting cross-legged in the middle of the cell, the singer carefully places the cheroots in front of him. It’s a lucky thing that Sein Yun brought him two more today. Teza doesn’t like to perform the ceremony without at least ten of the long, slender cigars; the mathematical seriousness of the number appeals to him. It’s the filters he needs, not the cigars themselves. In the interest of formality and restraint, he tries not to smoke them before the ritual begins, but even if he breaks down and indulges, he c
arefully, religiously saves the butts. Ten cheroots take about a week or so to hoard, depending on the generosity of Sein Yun and his more irregular supplier, Jailer Chit Naing.

  At university he read of the Japanese tea ceremony. From meditation, he knows the art of mindfulness. Each movement must come slowly, aware of itself but not ponderous. Sitting back on his heels, as though about to pray, he intones, “The Burmese Cheroot Ceremony” in a solemn voice.

  In his second and third year, he occasionally laughed after saying this, but not a sigh of amusement escapes him now. The ritual has grown in importance with the passage of time. He performs it to mark birthdays and anniversaries. Now he will honor Daw Suu. His back to the cell door, he runs one of the cigars under his nose: woodsmoke and trees. The vision rises in his mind as clearly as one of those photographs from the family collection. His grandfather is smoking in a tea shop near the Chinese market in Mandalay.

  Inside a cheroot is the smell of Burma.

  After eating and meditating, the cheroot ceremony is the most important event in his life. It is a challenge to perform it well. To peel the filters apart slowly enough is an act of discipline.

  The filters are made with ridged, dried straw. Holding the filters tight is a band of newspaper.

  Words.

  The cheroots are not all the same brand. Some are finer, some coarser. One is even expensively wrapped in plastic, and thinner than the others. That devil Sein Yun, he has good connections. Going from right to left, Teza works the circular paper label off each cigar butt.

  After years of practice, he’s able to peel open the cylinder of dried leaf without breaking it. He slowly draws out the filter. Then he pulls the newspaper away from the filter of rolled straw.

  He pauses, holding his breath.

  Nothing. No footsteps or voices outside the teak coffin.

  His meticulousness is precaution as well as ritual; he is afraid of getting caught. The filter paper is smaller than a matchbook. It is actually two pieces of newsprint glued together, wrapped in a snug band and tucked into the first layer of straw. He carefully works the paper off, then separates it into its halves and lays them out before him. He tries to flatten them, but they always curl back into the shape of the filter.

  Sometimes the cheroot-makers make the filters quite narrow. How upsetting! He depends on two inches of newsprint and sometimes gets only an inch or less. When a filter comes from a top or bottom margin, there are no words on it at all. While he unrolls this blank paper, his forehead wrinkles, pushing his eyebrows and nose into a scowl of accusation. He consciously smooths out his face again, as he smooths out the crinkled paper, but it’s difficult to stave off the feeling of annoyance.

  He attempts to make it into a joke.

  Don’t those damn girls know they’re preparing my reading material?

  Don’t they care?

  The cheroot ceremony returns Teza to his country. Performing it, he leaves the prison. Though he’s a city boy, he tramps to the villages, where the cheroot-makers work hard at their low tables. He wonders if they ever sing. At dawn the girls walk to the crumbling wooden house that serves as a factory. Fifty of them sit on the floor in a dim room. Cheroot after cheroot rolls from the girls’ hands, from seven in the morning until seven at night. Through the light of late afternoon they walk home again, the lanes of red dust busy with scrawny chickens. Ox carts sway back from the fields through the tall trees. The girls fall in love with village boys and marry. They become mothers. If their babies die, they make more. They make thousands of cheroots, smoked by millions of men and grandmothers all over Burma and read by an unknown number of political prisoners held in solitary confinement.

  In his mind, the cheroot-makers are beautiful, goodhearted, with pale swirls of thanakha paste smeared, powderlike, on their cheeks. If they knew they were making cheroots for him, they would find a way to put Dostoyevsky into the filter, The Brothers Karamazov, Tolstoy’s War and Peace, a great tome by Pablo Neruda, and Gone With the Wind, a book he’s wanted to read ever since he saw a photograph of Vivien Leigh in an ancient Time magazine. They would fill their cheroots with popular Burmese novels and bowls of curry. They would send wreaths of the sweetest jasmine to him, sticks of incense and squares of gold foil for worship. They are fine young women. Teza ceases to be angry with the blank newsprint. He thinks of girls’ hands, working.

  When the unwrapping is done, he lines up the tattered bits of printed paper.

  He reads as slowly as possible, to make the words last.

  his mother explain

  but I don’t trust

  jealous of his love

  to crying every day

  escape the pressure

  sure he loves me bu

  not know his mother

  a terrible hell.

  the small America

  n man killed 17 p

  Including small c

  n lone old woman

  eapons are easy t

  ate of violence d

  many murders per

  decaying family v

  very different fr

  Burma uncorrupted.

  she was like a star wi

  loved me in the same m

  ver despite everything

  without her. She was w

  when she left, tears be

  like rain. When I woul

  without the clarity of

  later understood the d

  what I believed and no

  child remembered

  names of his former

  and siblings, includ

  the existence of a l

  boa constrictor with

  snake remained altho

  boy every night, ne

  nor aggression. Ko K

  described flawlessly

  even the kind of bla

  pots and pans, showi

  familiarity with all

  of Mandalay Division

  The singer smiles at that last one. He’s sure his mother would have read the article.

  May May is a great reader. She is one of those fearless women on the bus who will hold a page up to the light to read through the censorship ink. Black ink is impossible to penetrate, but if the ink is silver, you can hold it up to the light and make out the hidden words. She will even lift a blackened page up to the sky anyway, just to show her contempt. A man leaned over to her once and asked, with the urgency of fear in his voice, “What are you doing?”

  In a stage whisper, she replied, “I am reading.” Then she went back to trying to decipher the inked-out words.

  This is his mother, a small-boned warrior. Even if she did not purchase a copy of this particular newspaper, someone in the neighborhood would have brought her the article. Someone would have seen it and thought, Ah, Daw Sanda will be interested in this, she will tell a story.

  Daw Sanda believes in the children who remember their past lives. Their stories are printed in dozens of popular magazines across the country. She clips these tales with red-handled scissors and places them in a series of numbered folders marked REINCARNATION/REBIRTH. Stories like the one from the cheroot filter, about boys who remember the names of strangers and tame snakes and know the location of household items in houses they’ve never seen before, are very popular. She retells these stories with the passion of a true believer, describing in artful detail even the unpublished parts of the accounts. She explains to her neighbors that most of us forget the secrets we knew at birth. Education and parents insist that we forget.

  But determined children remember. Without having been taught, they can speak strange dialects from other parts of the country. They beg to visit certain men and women who live thousands of miles away. On meeting, they recognize these strangers as their parents or friends of the past. Even friendly animals are considered to be reincarnations of recently deceased people.

  Having grown up on a diet of these accounts, Teza believed in them wholeheartedly until he went to university, where he was informed that his mother was super
stitious, old-fashioned. He gravitated toward those students who talked about doing away with superstitions and embracing whatever scraps of audacious modernity the world smuggled through Burma’s closed borders. That included rejecting the popular stories of reincarnation. But now, with reality shrunk to the dimensions of his cell and his mind, believing has taken on a new power.

  Omens, dreams, the power of the sacred places, the secret messages of the cheroots themselves: these have become crucial. Everything his mother and his grandfather told him about Buddhism, the nats, and any kind of magic has been pulled out of the well of his memory and used to slake his thirst for meaning.

  That’s why these tiny pieces of paper are so important. Pressing the palms of his hands together, the singer chooses another filter. The words are runes. Each piece of paper has a story, whether a sad romance from the literary section or a boring government announcement or a funeral notice. Whispering under his breath, Teza fills in the missing text.

  After the story he searches for the secret, the message encoded on every bit of paper. The torn-edged missives seem anonymous, but Teza knows the world has sent them. The scraps emerge from the vastness of his country, across the rivers and fields, given by the hands of strangers. They pass through walls, gates, bars, enormous doors. They move across compounds, through cells in the halls Teza has never seen, down corridors filled with the very particular smell of imprisoned men.

  beyond a doubt

  triumphant

  prove

  He knows this ceremony of words and their secret messages brings illumination.

  mother

  trust

  love

  wish

  escape

  hell

  Sometimes the messages are not secret. The meanings are miraculously evident. The scraps of paper reveal Burma’s true history.

  thousands killed

  easy violence

  decaying Burma