The Lizard Cage

by Karen Connelly

  “I need time to think.”

  “Songbird”—the voice is quiet, almost coaxing—“time is exactly what we don’t have.”

  As Sein Yun backs away, he executes a serious bow. Then he picks up Teza’s shit pail, makes a rude joke, and leaves the cell.

  When he returns with the pail, he is petulant.

  “When do you need the letter?” Teza glances at the open door.

  Sein Yun carefully examines the singer’s nervous countenance before answering, “Tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow! How can I do it so quickly? I need to think—this is a serious decision. How can I just sit down now, after years of not writing, and do this?”

  “I would have thought that nothing would prepare you better than years of not writing.” Sein Yun smiles. “Listen, it’s good that you only have until tomorrow. The less time this stuff is in your cell, the better.”

  The open expression of bafflement on Teza’s face closes again into suspicion. “Why are you doing this, Ko Sein Yun? I thought you didn’t believe in politics.”

  “I don’t. But I thought, Why not do these poor bastards a favor? It’s the big dream, isn’t it, for you guys, sending out a message.”

  Teza is conscious that whatever he says will sound like an excuse. “Precisely. It is a dream. The reality is more complicated. I can’t do this without thinking about the repercussions. If I am caught, if my sentence is extended, my mother will suffer as much as I will. Perhaps more.” While this is true, Teza is keenly aware of his own possible suffering. Thirteen years left of a twenty-year sentence, plus seven more. Or ten. No chance, then, of an amnesty, an early release. It’s hard enough for him to say thirteen years to himself; it sickens him to think of yet more time stolen from his life.

  Sein Yun stares at him, disappointment plain on his face. “I hope you’ll know what you’re doing by dinner. Five o’clock. Tonight I’m supposed to tell them how the delivery went.” He squints for a moment at Teza, his head cocked to one side. “You know, among your friends, there was no question that you’d join them. Perhaps you’ve become so much the prisoner you’ve forgotten the power of your name.”

  He spins around and takes a few mincing steps out the coffin door. A good palm-reader knows when to shut up.

  Teza sits with his back pressed against the back wall of the cell. He closes his eyes and does not move. It is a hopeful paralysis. If he sits this way long enough, will he be exempt from making any decision?

  To think how he craved this parcel.

  Opening his eyes, he tries to keep them from straying to the bundle of clothes where the paper and pen are hidden. He tries to imagine who got the paper and pen, who put them in the box. If it’s not Jailer Chit Naing, then a warder or a guard must be in on this. There could be no other way. The thought of someone with power in the cage knowing about the plan makes him feel so vulnerable that he stares for long unbroken minutes at the teak door, straining to hear the sound of them coming.

  He knows there is a web outside his cell, one he cannot see and can barely fathom, because he’s always lived in solitary. There are deals that people would not make in normal times. An elaborate scaffolding of secrets and lies holds up a reality no one would choose if given a choice. Who would choose to build a prison, to be part of the prison world and then thrive inside it? But the prison is manmade, and the regime is manmade; they all made choices that brought them to this place. And when have times in Burma been normal? When has there ever been a time to make the right choice without risking one’s livelihood, or one’s life?

  The beginning of the letter should come easily to him. He has written so much in his mind. Why does he hesitate now, when he has the paper and the ink to write the words down? What would his mother say about this hesitation? Would his father be ashamed of him?

  He cannot answer his own questions.

  He stares for many minutes at the brick wall, his mind circling the paper, the pen, the letter, the beautiful woman in an old house on University Avenue. Daw Suu. The woman with flowers in her hair who faced down an army. During her election campaign tour, there was a time when soldiers kneeled before her entourage and raised their guns. Teza was already in prison then, but the story made such an impression on people that a warder and a server told him about it. Warning her student companions to stay back, she walked toward the soldiers, calmly, stepping toward the guns like a woman stepping into fire. The battalion commander lost his nerve and ordered the men to lower their weapons.

  The iron-beater strikes noon. Five hours to pass before Sein Yun comes again.

  This day will be longer than other long days, and dedicated to the Paper and the Pen. He won’t touch them. He’ll leave them tucked away among his fraying clothes. His hands cross over his chest to rub warmth into his goosefleshed shoulders. Tsshik-tsheek. He still hears the satisfying sound of the inky ballpoint clicking out, clicking in.

  But he won’t agitate himself further by touching them. Empty hands, clear mind.

  . 18 .

  The iron-beater strikes one. Sixty minutes, sixty seconds to a minute, three thousand six hundred seconds in the step between twelve and one. Yet that solitary strike is one of the easiest hours of the day to miss.

  Sitting, turned away from the teak door, the singer hunches over like an old man. The thin sheaf of unfolded paper rests in his left hand. In his right, he holds the pen. The longing overtook him without warning, intense, almost erotic. Now he’s undone by the sweetness of blank paper. The pen has such a particular weight. He clicks the nib out and sniffs the ink, then looks down at the pale rectangle of paper; it’s like the light contained by a door frame. He could go through it and be outside, speaking to the world.

  The paper is not really white, it’s rough second- or third-grade stuff, the color of very fine ash. There are minute constellations of flaws, blurred gray galaxies. He leans over to kiss the first sheet very lightly. His nose touches the paper, catches the earthen scent of it, damp because the cell is damp. This reminds him of his grandfather’s books. He thinks of his father, the tutorials.

  He knows his mother would want him to write a letter. His father? It’s hard to know what he would say from across the border of his death. Myo Myo Than is writing a letter; other politicals are writing letters.

  Teza returns the paper and pen to their hiding place and begins to walk back and forth, considering his options. If the letter doesn’t make it out of the prison, he may very well be pacing for seven or ten extra years.

  What will be left of him? Not very many teeth. Such vanity, to think first of his damn teeth! But the decline of the body can be made into a joke, if one is still capable of joking. He’s afraid to think of what will happen to his mind. He already struggles to maintain a connection to the movement outside the cage, then beyond, outside the country, where his brother and thousands of other Burmese exiles live. The Thai border is not so far away.

  His grandfather used to take him to a monastery in the Sagaing Hills. From his child’s memory of those vine-twisted slopes, he conjures an idea of jungle and envisions a bedraggled column of men tramping through the rain on paths transformed into mud and, farther on, into muddy water. Most of them have open sores on their feet and are wearing rubber flip-flops. His brother must be somewhere among them. That’s what Aung Min wanted, didn’t he? To fight the regime.

  He was shocked when Daw Sanda supported Aung Min’s decision to go. Now he wonders what would have happened if they had left together. Obviously, the past seven years would have been very different. But Teza was determined to stay in Burma, and he did his best to persuade Aung Min not to leave. By that time his younger brother was a Che Guevara in the making. He sometimes wore a peculiar flat black cap, which drove Teza crazy—it seemed so pretentious, so un-Burmese. Tears jump, ridiculously, to his eyes. That stupid black hat. Che Guevara became Che Aung Min, though it was not socialism or communism that interested him. It didn’t matter that the Western world was already making fun of democracy’
s many failures and hypocrisies. The Burmese didn’t have that luxury. Flat black cap or not, Aung Min had already decided he was joining the armed revolutionaries, and he couldn’t understand why Teza wanted to stay behind.

  He left at the end of October 1988, with a flood of other student dissidents. Doctors left too, and journalists, teachers, workers of various kinds, longtime political activists who’d been released from prison or hounded by military intelligence agents.

  A couple of weeks later Daw Sanda sought out other parents whose sons and daughters had departed for the border. Some of the students had phoned home in tears, or spoken in the cold, resolute voices of children who had become adults in the space of weeks. Many did not call at all, for fear of incriminating their families. Phones were tapped; private letters were opened as a matter of course. Aung Min, out of fear for his mother and brother, never called home.

  Yet by routes circuitous and secret, Daw Sanda ascertained that her younger son was alive and a new member of the student militia that was being trained for combat by the Karen National Liberation Army. Teza tried not to be too impressed by the thought of his brother running around with a machine gun slung across his back, or his chest, or wherever one slings a machine gun while running; he had no idea. He asked, “They’re armed?”

  Daw Sanda scratched her neck.

  Teza waited. His mother said nothing. “They are armed, aren’t they?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “What do you mean, not exactly?”

  “Apparently there are not enough weapons for them. So they are training with … with sticks.”

  “With sticks? And when they attack the SLORC troops, will they throw the sticks or charge and hit the soldiers over the head?”

  May May gave him a black look. He knew he should feel guilty for making the joke, but he didn’t. “And their food. What are they eating?”

  His mother’s fine-boned face lost its regal contours; she began to cry. Ashamed of himself, Teza shifted closer and put his arm around her shoulders.

  She cleared her throat. “The man I spoke to said that the last shipment of rice from a humanitarian group failed to reach them, and the Karen Army didn’t have enough rice for them all.” The Karen Army. Teza knew so little about the people of the borders, their struggles. He wondered how student politicals from central Burma would communicate with the Karen guerrillas of the jungle. He wanted to ask May May whether they even spoke the same language, but he bit his tongue.

  Rallying herself, she said, “Besides, it’s still raining. Both sides are in retreat. They’re not in danger of being attacked.”

  They were truly mother and son in that moment, wife and child of a doctor, thinking simultaneously of rainy season diseases—malaria, wound and eye infections, typhoid, cholera. Dysentery. If the students-turned-soldiers didn’t have rice, they surely wouldn’t have quinine, or antibiotics, or proper wound dressings.

  But Daw Sanda had learned to manage the unmanageable, the unbearable, the patently ridiculous, and the insane. Her next words sounded almost triumphant. “So they’ve been out in the jungle learning to snare animals for food. The Karen soldiers are also teaching them how to build huts out of bamboo. And the rice will come soon enough. It’s just a matter of time. La-may ja-may,” she said, that dependable Burmese refrain against ruin. It will come, it will take time. Daw Sanda had been saying that ever since Teza could remember. Composed again, though somber, very much the cool, beautiful moonlight of her name, she wiped her eyes as if some dust had had the audacity to blow into them.

  When the iron-beater strikes three o’clock, Teza stops walking and stares into the stolid face of the teak door. Memory has summoned the brave ones of his life so he can ask them what he should do. He ponders what he knows, what he does not know. Two whole hours until Sein Yun comes with his tray. It’s crucial to make the time go down bit by bit, like a fishbone lodged in the gullet. He begins to pace again.

  . 19 .

  You haven’t written anything yet, have you?”

  Sitting on the floor at the back of the cell, Teza shakes his head.

  The five o’clock food tray clatters down. “I can’t believe I’ve stuck my neck out like this for nothing. I’m not being paid enough!”

  Teza whispers, “You said tomorrow. It will be ready when you bring the morning meal.”

  Already turning to the door, Sein Yun stops and stares hard at the singer. “They are counting on you, Ko Teza.” Something very much like pleading—or is it fear?—raises the pitch of his voice.

  “I said, it will be done tomorrow.” Teza stands up, steps toward his food tray. “Give my regards to Ko Myo Myo Than.”

  “Of course I will.”

  A mosquito buzzes near his chin, lands on his chest. The singer remains motionless, watching the insect draw a long draft of blood. Who can tell what a single word, the right one, might do? He considers an entire letter. How far will it travel, whom will it find, what will it carry or leave behind in its wake? Whatever he writes will mean You have not silenced me. Despite all your power, you are not all-powerful. Men have often reduced his voice to gasps and weeping. They have crushed the power to speak from his body, from many bodies. But words written down outlive the vulnerability of the flesh. His songs still fly through the air like swallows. Recorded words can be passed along. In one form or another, they will be passed along. Movement is their essential nature.

  Teza unwraps his contraband items, clears a place on the smoothest part of the cement floor. He picks up the white pen, pushes out the nib, scribbles again on his hand. Leaning over the paper, one knee folded in, the other leg stretched out, he begins his letter to Daw Aung San Suu Kyi with a pounding heart and a sweating brow. It is like writing a love letter.

  He bites his lower lip as he begins, and cannot hold the pen without clenching it. How strange to see the words appearing, to feel the familiarity of writing come back into his hand like a surge of blood. He wipes his sweaty palms on his longyi. Twice he stands up and walks around, whispering the words to himself, not wanting to make a mistake on the paper. Just a few minutes before nine o’clock, when the lights in his cell go out, the letter is complete. Then the paper and the words and his anxious eyes are plunged into darkness.

  The parcel is in the center of the cell. Something is wrong.

  He crosses the teak coffin in agitation.

  Ants have got into the box. Within the sharp anxiety of the dream, he knows they’re in there, eating his food. He has to hurry. They are dangerous ants, soldiers. They will eat everything and he will go hungry again. But he can’t get the parcel open. Someone has glued down the cardboard flaps. What kind of glue is this? He struggles, tearing at the top of the parcel with his long fingers.

  Finally the cardboard slats give way. He peers into the box to see what’s happened to his food, but only ants are there, hundreds of big ants, a busy swarm crawling out of the box up onto his hands. He shakes them away, but they keep coming because he won’t let go of the parcel. Something is still inside, hidden.

  He tilts it to the side. What slides out from beneath the bottom flap? Not the white pen—something else, raw pink, flecked with ants. It’s a lizard, the skin already eaten off. Now the ants begin to devour the flesh on the skull. The two black eyes are still untouched, still alive. They peer up at his face.

  He stares at the skinned body, the writhing mass of ants. Their heads swivel this way and that as their mandibles close on the flesh. The understanding comes as a slow wave of horror. He opens his mouth to cry out, to call someone, but no sound comes. It’s not a lizard at all, though the shape is the same, the tail is there, the four short limbs. But it’s not a lizard. It’s a very small human fetus.

  He wakes in the dark, sluiced in sweat, shaking. He whispers, “Just a bad dream, Teza.” His voice sounds hollow.

  The iron-beater strikes four.

  He curls up like a child and rocks himself to sleep.

  With lights-on at six, he wakes and check
s his parcel. Indeed, the ants have discovered it—not the big ones of his dream, but the smaller breed he knows so well from their innumerable treks on the coffin walls. He picks the creatures away one by one, then lifts the parcel and walks back and forth with it in his arms.

  He paces for twenty minutes or so, to make the ants abandon the hunt for a while. Then he puts the parcel down again and rereads his letter, trying to commit what he has written to memory. There are several smudges of ink, which he regrets. Two drops of sweat blur a few words.

  He spends the morning in scattered meditation. A few minutes after the iron-beater strikes eleven o’clock, his stomach begins to churn. A rising anxiety causes him to sit for a long moment listening to the empty corridor.

  As soon as the palm-reader opens up, Teza whispers, “It’s ready.”

  Sein Yun hands him his food, puts a finger to his lips, whispers, “I can’t take it yet. Give me your empty tray. I have to go.”

  “But the letter is finished.”

  “Handsome just asked some questions. Shh!” They freeze, listening. “He’s coming down the corridor. I shouldn’t have anything on me right now. I’ll take it tonight.” He holds his hand up before he leaves, like a traffic cop. Stop. Wait. And indeed, Teza stands there unmoving, quiet.

  There is no sound in the corridor after Sein Yun’s slippers slap away. Teza hears the outer door of the building close too. Server and jailer are gone. The light overhead suddenly flickers, flares, flickers again, rippling over the objects in the cell. The singer unwraps the letter once again, holds the paper in his hand. There’s no need to reread it. He has it memorized.

  His bare feet thump lightly across the cell. The sound reminds him of a heartbeat. Or a moth caught between his fingers. The letter sits in front of him. Evidence, he thinks. He puts it away again and paces, listening to the sounds in the corridor. In the space of an hour, he hears seven rats and as many mice pass. He can tell the difference between them by the speed of movement, the weight of small, clawed footfalls. Outside, beneath his air vent, a work detail goes by, criminal prisoners laughing and swearing; a guard coughs and spits. Occasionally there is the grumble of far-off thunder.