The Lizard Cage

by Karen Connelly

  Inside the temple, the air is cool as a grotto’s. The arched windows open in three directions. To the east, there is no window but the Buddha. Teza kneels in the confluence of breezes, his toes almost cold on the flagstone floor. He holds his hands together in reverence and bows, touching his forehead to the stone three times. Then his eyes rise above the garlands of flowers, above the flickering candles and smoking incense. He looks past the rounded knees and the plaster flaking from the still robes.

  In the crumbling hands of the clay-brick Buddha, in the worn clay face, the boy catches a glimpse of his father disappearing, his features resolving into dust.

  Then only one man remains, breathing in, breathing out of his cage, swaying slightly with the pulsing tide of his own blood. He goes in deep, deeper, until his bones grow light as pumice stone. Even his stomach, bitter with acid and little bones, becomes a quiet hollow. The breathing lets him be patient before his hunger like the holy men are patient before the teachings that still elude them.

  . 13 .

  When Teza thinks of his father, he can sometimes smell the distinctive inky scent of carbon paper.

  Even buying it was dangerous. Ne Win’s regime orchestrated shortages to stem the circulation of subversive writing. His father tried to get around this by stocking up, but the military intelligence agents paid shopkeepers to report anyone who bought large amounts of carbon paper. So he gave his young student doctors money and sent them to different areas of Rangoon to buy supplies, making sure they changed their routines and varied the shops to avoid arousing suspicion. If questioned, they always said the paper was for their tutorials.

  And so it was. For almost a decade Hpay Hpay managed to run secret tutorials without detection, supplying thousands of people in Rangoon and Mandalay with an underground news source. He executed this clandestine operation at the kitchen table, with the smell of curry and garlic wafting through the air.

  Teza remembers how the carbon paper on tutorial evenings slowly won out over the tantalizing kitchen smells. His father read slowly and succinctly from various pieces of newsprint and hand-copied missives. Teza sat at the back of the kitchen on a small stool, listening to the quiet, persistent stream of Hpay Hpay’s voice without understanding what it meant. Young men and women, faithful interns from Rangoon General, sat on either side of the kitchen table, bent over the inky sheets, writing hard.

  Sweat beaded on skin, slid down necks and noses while words filled page after page. Sweat dampened shirt collars and the waists of longyis. Windows were closed to make sure no one in the side street heard the doctor reading; the kitchen became a sauna. The interns treated Teza’s father with great deference and affection. If he murmured past the last of the cicadas into the cricket-song of night, the young doctors followed his quiet voice with black-smudged hands. The carbon paper rustled and sighed, sending a strong scent of ink to the small boys who sat poised on the periphery of the writing circle, anxious to be inside it, where their father was. They were both jealous of the young men and women, who knew how to read and write. Teza had just learned to read, and Aung Min, a year behind him, was still memorizing the alphabet.

  Though the interns changed every two or three years, their work remained the same: they pressed urgent words through several sheets of paper, then left the pages with May May, who organized the notes. She and the doctor passed them out to friends and colleagues, who in turn passed them on to others, until an elaborate network of people had read and absorbed the worn hand-copied writings.

  The boys knew the work was a secret. Their parents told them many times that they were never to talk about the tutorials with anyone but the fledgling doctors. No one was allowed to hear what they were doing. Then, one particularly hot April night, Hpay Hpay suddenly stopped reading. Teza waited for him to take a drink of water. He did not. The interns shook out their cramped hands and began to wipe handkerchiefs over their faces. The doctor turned around. Everyone waited. He seemed to be examining the closed windows. Looking over his shoulder with a mischievous grin, he asked, “It’s too hot, isn’t it?” His voice was unexpectedly loud. “We’re going to suffocate in here. Just what Ne Win wants.”

  He slowly unlatched and opened the windows. The young men and women looked at each other. Daw Sanda put three fingers over her mouth as her husband pushed the wooden shutters open. A current of cool air immediately poured into the room, bathing everyone’s faces and necks. Teza’s father turned around calmly. Before picking up his papers and continuing, he leaned over, his palms spread wide on the stained wood of the table. “Let them hear,” he said. “We are all cowards at heart, but we must try not to be afraid. If we are always afraid, they will always win.” He read for the rest of the tutorial in the cool air of evening.

  They copied widely, everything from banned news items and political satires to translations of Che Guevara and Lu Xun and directives from the Communist Party of Burma. The CPB sent out information about political and guerrilla action as well as strike organization. The doctor wasn’t a card-carrying communist, but he was ready to consider any alternative to Ne Win’s dictatorship.

  Shortly after Teza’s fourteenth birthday, he lay restless in bed, trying not to wake his little brother, who breathed steadily beside him. That night his father had given him wonderful news: he would be allowed to have his own sheet of carbon paper and try his hand at writing with the interns. Perhaps his copy wouldn’t be usable, his father warned him, but he would be permitted to try.

  Finally the ink would be his, smudged on his fingertips and shirt cuffs; he would join Hpay Hpay in his heroic, clandestine work. Sleep was out of the question. He lay wide awake in bed, pleased with his insomnia. Downstairs, right beneath him, his parents murmured in the sitting room. Teza wished he could join their serious conversation.

  Lifting up the shadow of the mosquito net to feel a breath of chilly December air on his face, he thought about the grand and daring act he would soon perform. The secrecy surrounding the tutorials was something he savored, a treat his friends at school were not allowed to eat. With one hand touching Aung Min’s back and the other flung extravagantly and bravely outside the mosquito net, he began to drift off, imagining how impressed the young doctors would be when he sat down with them next week, the newest and youngest recruit.

  The knock yanked him out of shallow sleep. Why would his mother knock at the bedroom door? He rose up on his elbow, dream-addled, half smiling in his confusion. The knock came again. This time he understood someone was knocking at the front door. Not the hurried rapping of a man with a sick child or with a wife in early labor, it was strangely polite. Who else would be calling so late?

  Teza held his breath. Aung Min was still asleep beside him. When his mother rushed into the bedroom, whispering, “Wake up, wake up! Come and say goodbye to your father,” Teza was already swinging his skinny legs to the floor.

  “Aung Min!” He shook his little brother’s relaxed body until it tensed awake. “Aung Min! Get up now. Hpay Hpay’s going away.”

  There were three men standing in the room. As soon as Teza saw that one of them was wearing trousers, he knew his father was in danger. Dr. Kyaw Win Thu did not like to be demonstrative in front of strangers, but he dropped to a crouch and enfolded both his children in his arms, so tightly that Teza lost his breath. When he released them, he continued to hold each boy tightly by the hand. He spoke quietly and quickly.

  “You must be very, very good boys while I am away. May May needs your help. I will be home as soon as I can. Don’t forget me.” He smiled at them, but neither was fooled. Their eyes began to shine with tears.

  The doctor squeezed his wife’s hands while looking into her dry eyes. She was not going to let military intelligence agents see her cry. Later the doctor was to wonder what more he could have done or said in the act of farewell. He had spent so many years loving her, it did not seem possible to convey this emotion in a brief, exposed gesture. He thought of his favorite endearment for her, “my moonlight”—a
reference to the ancient Pali meaning of her name—but he could not say it in front of military agents. So he simply held his wife’s hands for a moment longer.

  Somewhere behind and below them, Aung Min asked, “Where is Hpay Hpay going? Why is he going?”

  The authorities sent the doctor to a work camp in the north. The expense and the two days of travel involved in reaching the prison camp from Rangoon prevented Daw Sanda from visiting him very often. Taking the children with her on the buses and trains and, for the last leg of the journey, the ox cart—for a thirty-minute visit with their father—was exhausting. Twice they reached the camp and were refused permission to enter. Sometimes she had to bribe the guards to let her and the boys in. As months stretched into years, she sold most of their furniture. The wedding silks went too, then her jewelery, then her mother’s and most of her grandmother’s jewelry. Each possession paid for the next trip upcountry, and for her husband’s food. He was the first to wait for parcels from her.

  Three years after he was sentenced, the doctor woke one morning during the rainy season with a fever. He had been feeling tired, almost sick, sore in his muscles for a day or two, but he had attributed it to his new work detail in the nearby stone quarry. When the fever started, his first thought was malaria. The rains brought mosquitoes; some of the men in the camp could barely stay upright. He already had the more common vivax strain in his body, so he hoped to sweat out the attack on a little supply of paracetamol and quinine. He waited for the chills that follow malarial fever. They did not come. In the middle of the second night of high fever, violent cramping in his gut twisted the length of his body from one side to another, a whip of pain snapping inside him.

  Dr. Kyaw Win Thu realized it wasn’t malaria at all.

  The vomiting and diarrhea came before morning, with such violence that two friends held him over one latrine pail as he heaved into another. Such is the work of amoebic dysentery. During their invasion and colonization of the intestine, the parasites produce a poison into the mucous membrane of the gut. The weaker the body, through malnutrition or fatigue, the more severe the illness. The raw lining of those long, many-folded coils and loops refuses its normal task of absorption and begins to secrete fluid instead. The doctor tried to drink water but immediately threw it up. He knew he was dehydrating from the inside out. He also knew that if he didn’t get antibiotics, the parasites would burrow into the intestinal wall, causing peritonitis, or they would enter his bloodstream and infect other organs, most likely his liver.

  The prison camp dispensary had only aspirin and alcohol. With money, he could have bribed the prison doctor, begged him to buy the proper medicine outside. Or he could have paid the akhan-lu-gyi. Unlike Teza, he wasn’t confined in solitary; he lived with other men, criminals and politicals. The akhan-lu-gyi often received favors from the warders in exchange for protection money extorted from weaker prisoners.

  The doctor knew precisely how to cure himself. More precisely, he knew that he could not. After a series of convulsions, he lay on his mat in a tight fetal fist. The whip snapping through his guts had transformed into a knife. The blade slashed this way, that way, deep in the center of his body. The pain was so intense that he only longed for it to be over.

  In his lucid moments, he kept thinking how simple the world was, how unbelievable. He didn’t need magic powers or a miracle to save his life. He just needed money, enough to bribe the akhan-lu-gyi or the tan-see. One of their people could fetch the medicine or at least send a message outside. Daw Sanda would have left the children with her cousin and started immediately on the journey.

  Later, she thought it out: she could have sold the last of her grandmother’s gold to buy his medicine. He needed so little, really: a course of antibiotics and an IV of Ringer’s solution. He needed clean water. Clean water and medicine meant his life. All he had to do was survive for seven more years. Then he would return, to Teza, to Aung Min, who was beginning to look very much like him, and to Sanda, his moonlight.

  For a long time afterward she made the calculation repeatedly, as though it were an alchemical formula for pleasing a powerful nat, one of those animist spirits that preside over the shadows of Burmese Buddhism. On a piece of paper torn from one of her sons’ exercise books, she scribbled down every possible variable, her forehead propped on her other hand. Always more or less the same calculation, it equaled nothing—two gold wedding bangles and the thin gold wedding chain were enough for the antibiotics and for the long journey. A bridge washed away in the rain, the trains slowed, the road a swell of mud: even with these obstacles, if she had known, she would have gone forth. If she had received a message, she might have reached him in time.

  “There has been a small epidemic,” the prison doctor explained in his letter.

  “Small? How do you define a small epidemic?” she cried, stricken, furious.

  When this letter reached their house in Rangoon, when May May sat at the table in the kitchen with the piece of paper shaking in her hand, her beloved husband, their father, had already been dead for sixteen days. They were never able to discover where he’d been buried.

  . 14 .

  Nine strikes against the iron. A moment after the last beat sounds, the lights go out. Darkness, like a guard he cannot see, pushes him into an empty well.

  Suddenly he becomes conscious of the way his mouth draws in, the lips bunching slightly like an old man’s, like the old man his father never became.

  When Hpay Hpay died, Teza stopped playing the guitar; he was just seventeen. His grief for his father demanded suffering, and hardship, and loss.

  But Teza’s mother—in spite of her worries about a musician’s life—didn’t want sadness to guide her son. “Teza, your father bought you that guitar because he knew you were gifted.” Teza could play. Not just a few chords, not just a bit of street strumming in the evenings, but complex patterns, fingerpicking and blues triads. He could play any tune at all, anything. He used to echo the radio, just a few beats behind, or play complementary wandering riffs in the same key. Whatever he heard he could play, and he sang like a bird with honey on its tongue. “Teza, a gift is a responsibility. Go. Go upstairs. The guitar’s in your room, isn’t it?”

  By the time he was in university, he was playing for himself again, quickly gaining recognition as the Singer, a handsome young man. In love.

  Teza touches his lips. He closes his eyes. Sound looms before him like a sail.

  Thazin. He’s not sure if he can remember her voice or not. Her life has continued without him. After his first year in prison, he understood she could not wait. He had to release her, and he did, in his own mind, as he was never permitted to communicate with her directly. In the third year, the news came to him, passed from one mouth to the next, that Ma Thazin, the famous singer’s love, had married someone else.

  Still he tries to find her.

  At Rangoon University, the boys saunter by Convocation Hall under shade trees like enormous green umbrellas. The girls refold their blue, yellow, orchid-purple tamins, their sarongs of fine patterns, fine cloth. Ugliness does not rule the world and Teza is twenty-two and will be handsome and talented for the rest of his life, which is forever. Why not? The girls remind him of butterflies breathing. When their sarongs loosen from walking, they pause, stretch the extra fabric out to the side, fold it across their bellies, and tuck it in tightly again. Some continue walking as they do this; some stop briefly on the path. The motion is the loveliest he knows, a gesture both discreet and laden with promise. All the girls do it, because every girl wears a tamin. Every curve of belly and slope of thigh is momentarily accentuated. When a girl walks through a pool of light coming down through the branches, her colors become as vibrant as wet oil paint.

  Gitah-shay, the boys whisper of the girls walking by the tea shops. “Guitar shape” is the highest compliment he and his friends can give a girl.

  As the finest guitar player, he is a favorite for serenades, when dusk stretches indigo into evening. The
trees with their shadows sway above them like dark green water. The scent of jasmine and night flowers fills the air; the boys, hoping the smell is perfume, drift toward the girls’ dormitories. They smoke cheroots without coughing; they attempt to swagger. On finding the windows of those they most admire, Teza tunes his guitar. Cheroot ash falls on the frets.

  Aung Min blows the ash away and whispers, “I’m starved. She better give us food.”

  Teza pauses in his tuning, stares at him. “Little Brother, you have no anadeh.” No shame, no proper sense of decorum.

  Teza begins to play. The boys sing their hearts out. Girls lean from the windows like flowers. When they like what they hear, they throw down snacks, packages of pickled tea leaves and deep-fried lentils, peanuts, Chinese sesame bars, deep-fried Indian pastries.

  Ma Thazin throws down a book.

  Aung Min leaps forward, snatches it off the ground, and brandishes it above his head, crying, “Sister, we don’t need literature, we need something for our bellies.”

  As the girl stretches boldly out the window, a chorus of high-pitched laughter rises behind her voice. “That’s not for you, you little brat. Give it to your brother!”

  The book is a photocopied, cardboard-bound version of Bob Dylan’s songs, in English. With chords and music.

  Teza falls in love. He meets her at her favorite tea shop, on Inya Lake. They walk along the paths through the People’s Park, devising dozens of elaborate ways to rub shoulders, touch elbows, skim the backs of each other’s swinging hands. They go to movies, daringly alone sometimes, but more often with a group of her friends from the Faculty of Medicine. The idea of marrying a lady doctor thrills him. His father would have liked her. Even May May approves of this pretty but earnest young woman. Three times Teza pretends he is sick and three times Thazin becomes wonderfully serious, asking him to stick his tongue out, open his shirt so she can place her important stethoscope there on his pounding heart. “Breathe deeply,” she instructs, but how much more deeply can he breathe? Three times she scolds him: “You’d better not be faking it, Teza, or I’ll stop speaking to you.”