The Lizard Cage

by Karen Connelly

  “If there is a general amnesty for politicals in the next couple of years—”

  Teza finishes the sentence, “They will not let me go.”

  “But they’ve let others go, men who served only eight or ten years.”

  “Thirteen years more. Because of the songs.” Still out there, flying around like birds.

  “At least they won’t add an extra seven or ten.”

  Teza only says, “Think of Myo Myo Than, the others.”

  “You can be sure they are happy for you.”

  That word again—how odd it sounds. Teza closes his eyes as the flame shoots up inside his jaw, into his skull. He wrenches his head to the right, to get away from that searing, but he cannot. The morphine will be a blessing tonight. Eyes closed, he says, “The boy. I would be happy to help the boy.”

  Chit Naing is nonplussed. “What boy? The rat-killer?”

  Both prisoner and jailer turn at the sound of the metal bucket clanking against a knobby knee. Free El Salvador looks up and grins widely, carelessly, out of character, because these two men are kind to him, in their different ways.

  The small dark face sparks and for an instant gleams, returning the child to an innocent country he’s never lived in. Teza hasn’t seen the boy smile like that before, and it has already disappeared, subdued into a goofy, self-conscious smirk. Free El Salvador slips to the edge of the cell, handing the singer who cannot sing his bucket, which was not full. Lips pressed together, he waits for the jailer to tell him he can go, which the jailer does.

  The boy glances at Teza, then he’s gone.

  But that moment of clean light in his face was enough. Teza knows now. He knows what he intends to do.

  . 39 .

  That night, while Teza is thinking about the boy, the boy is thinking about words.

  The corner of the shack where he lays his head, as far as possible from the door, is the driest place. His collection of nine paperbacks is stacked in two piles between the wall and his face, each pile on a brick. He keeps the books off the ground because water often seeps in. Curling like a cat, he turns his back to the books, head on his arm, knees near his belly. The candle flame flares high in a sudden draft, then drops again.

  Nyi Lay the little lizard clings to the low roof above the candle. For a long while the boy lies there watching him eat small moths and mosquitoes, happy that the lizard can get his dinner so easily. There are always enough insects for him.

  One moth, swooping in erratic circles around the candle, finally crosses the flame and sssstttt singes its wings. It falls free and clear of the wax, unlike several others, which are stuck to the candle, embalmed or burning up a mothy stink. The boy picks up the fluttering moth and, propping himself on an elbow, holds out the offering to Nyi Lay.

  Now he can smile without embarrassment, without even thinking of it, as Nyi Lay approaches his fingers, dives at the moth, and grabs it in his small jaws. Shake-of-head-swipe-of-lizard-hand, and the scrap of burned moth silk is gone, eaten up, just like that, swallowed into Nyi Lay’s stomach. The boy can still feel the slightest touch of lizard nose on two of his fingers. He would like to hold Nyi Lay, to have him ride around on his shoulder like a monkey—one of the prisoners had a monkey once, but then another prisoner had his food parcel stolen, so he was hungry, and he killed the monkey and roasted and ate it, and there was a big fight and a lockdown. But Nyi Lay doesn’t want to ride on anyone’s shoulder. He doesn’t want to be picked up at all. When the boy tried, the lizard ran away. So it’s better just to watch him and feed him and listen to him chirp-chirp his few words.

  The boy lies on his back, knees to the roof. From this position he can see the books. They did not disappear while he was feeding Nyi Lay. They are still here. Sighing, he looks at the variously worn and naked spines, the dried yellow glue. Why do I keep them? Why do I keep It? He can feel It beneath him, under the rag blankets, buried in the earth, wrapped up in the plastic bag. It pokes at his ribs like a bone-white finger, asking him the same question with wretched insistence: Why do you keep me? Why do you keep me?

  Through the drumming rain, he hears his beetle pawing in its box. Kratch-kratch kratch-kratch. The beetle has grown to twice the size it was when the boy first picked it up near the watchtower. He reaches over and opens the big matchbox. It pushes against his fingers and makes a brief inspection of his palm before climbing over a knuckle. The boy strokes the red triangles on its back as it marches purposefully up his arm, fearless, over his lime-green shirtsleeve and onto his shoulder, onto his bare neck, without trying to get away. He’s relieved that the creature never stretches out a hidden pair of wings. A flying beetle would want to fly off into the world.

  He pulls up his shirt and prods the armored insect down, letting it walk over his bare brown chest. The claws catch, small hooks in the boy’s flesh, but they only tickle. They never hurt, unless he plucks the beetle up too quickly; then the claws dig in, trying to hang on.

  Visiting with the beetle is not as much fun as it used to be. When both of them were younger, he used to play with the creature for hours, making little tracks in his rag bed and devising small adventures—the beetle pushes a pebble, the beetle hangs on to a finger upside down—but at the moment it’s pure distraction, to keep him from thinking about the books. He looks at them again and forgets the beetle as it crawls onto his longyi. Only when it reaches the inside of his bare knee does he sit up, giggling. He carefully detaches the little soldier from his skin and drops it back into the box, then pushes the cardboard drawer closed.

  Kratch-kratch-kratch. “Hey, you. Sleep! I’ll feed you tomorrow.” It’s a carrion beetle, patient muncher of dead stuff and lizard turds, nothing to recommend it but the red markings on its armor.

  The candle gutters and snaps, rippling shadows over the rippled walls. Kratch-kratch. The boy looks around, finds a few of Nyi Lay’s turds stuck to the wall, picks them off, and puts them in the box. Now the beetle will be quiet.

  Finally his hand darts out and grabs the book on top of the smaller pile. Books! The picture on the cover is a faded landscape of trees and sky. In the foreground, two tiny figures face each other on a curved bridge. Something about the picture makes him sad. He tries to see who the two people are, but their faces are indistinct. Inside the cover are lines, circles, and dots on cheap gray paper.

  Words words words words words words words words words words words, zaga-lone-dwei, like the very ones he speaks, bathazaga, but language written down, in dots and circles and pieces, by a hand that knows what it’s doing or one of the clattering machines in the main prison office. People can write words with their fingernails on plastic bags, and with pencils and pens too, ballpoint pens. Chit Naing once tried to explain writing. Every word is made of letters, and every letter is one of these curved spots. Understand?

  The boy didn’t understand, but not wanting to disappoint the jailer, he whispered, “Yes.”

  Edging closer to the candle, he flips the well-thumbed pages. He stops at a random page and searches through the long printed lines. He wants to find the beginning, the way he found the beginning of his shack at the place where he dug a hole and sunk a wooden post into the earth and buried it again, to hold up a slab of corrugated metal. Isn’t there a word like that, the beginning word that holds up a whole book? The boy grips the flimsy cover with both hands, tensing the muscles of his forearms and shoulders.

  But it’s not like lifting a slab of that corrugated metal or hauling bricks on his head—the thing can’t be done with the strength in his back and arms and legs. These books! They infuriate him even as he asks the inmates who are leaving to let him have any leftover printed treasures. He watches warders and prisoners alike read comics, magazines, bits of newspaper. After money, food, and weapons, printed words are the most valuable things in the cage. Occasionally the men laugh as they read. Other times, with a piece of paper from the prison office in their hands, their faces drain still and pale.

  With eyes steady on a gray p
age, the boy carefully copies the facial expressions of the men. Nothing comes of it but the sting of tears, which makes him bite his lip until the sting goes away. He cannot do it. He cannot find the beginning word. The tight lines of script do not open up. How is it possible that he can speak and know his language but fail to know this other thing, which is part of it, so close to it?

  The same time Chit Naing explained writing, he also explained reading. The Burmese alphabet, he said, has thirty-three consonants, fifteen vowels. Consonants? Vowels? thought the boy, frowning. The alphabet? All of them are letters, these little lines and circles. The jailer’s hand swept over the sheaf of printed papers on the table, beside the teapot and dirty cups. The boy nodded dumbly, though what he really wanted to do was bang his head against the wall. Who could learn all the letters, and remember them, and put them together to make language?

  All that’s left for the boy is to pretend, just like he does at the nat tree every day now, without fail. He says a prayer to the nat and makes an offering, pretending he knows how it works, he knows what to do. If he pretends well enough, his prayers will be real, his offerings accepted.

  His hard little hands hold a book—but never, ever upside down. Once he held a book upside down while reading and the warders made such fun of him that he retreated into his house in rage and didn’t go out to piss for hours. Now, by carefully examining the cover of the book and the first pages, he knows if the letters are right side up. On the threshold between his shack and the prison compound, the boy’s eyes maneuver over the page slowly, laboriously, like two ants carrying a piece of food many times their own size.

  The candle gutters again on another draft of air, but the boy ignores it. He has a very important job to do now: reading. Letters make words and words tell stories. Books are full of silent stories. Chit Naing explained that to him too. It was the one thing he really understood, because the cage is full of storytellers, men talking all the time, telling their lives large and small about the time before the prison so they remember that world and the people Outside. That’s why prisoners and warders alike are hungry for books, these very ones, this wobbly altar of musty paperbacks. Without making a sound, they are full of the world.

  The boy holds the book and believes it: I am reading I am reading. In the flaring, shifting light, the damp pages tell the story of the good nat and its tree beside the stream, where the big lizard lives who is green but also gray; and of the singer who cannot sing but prays; and of the boy who holds the book and reads what’s not yet written while the rain falls and the small lizard talks and the candle burns and burns, its flame reaching out, like each of them, like every one of us, for the invisible air.

  . 40 .

  The boy is not the only child in the cage. He’s just the only one who looks like a child. The rest of them are hiding, inside the bodies of men.

  One of these men sits at his desk in the small office he shares with one of the prison accountants, who, fortunately, is off pencil-pushing in another building at the moment. He is relieved to be alone. Under his right hand is a ballpoint pen, which he spins around on the wooden desk.

  He’s thinking about the power of the unexpected, decisive gesture. He is a tall man, barrel-chested, with large hands, the hands of a builder’s son. That’s how his mother referred to his father. The builder. For reasons the grown son knows nothing about, his mother left his father and took up with someone else, a policeman who was not overly fond of his stepchild. He was suspicious, jealous of the child from the beginning. When his new wife didn’t get pregnant, the policeman grew resentful, then angry. Without offspring of his own to weigh the balance, he began to feel unfairly burdened by another man’s child.

  One night after he’d been drinking, the policeman began to fight with his wife, goading her with a nasty joke, an insult, another harsh joke. This was normal enough. For a while she jousted back, her voice wheedled sharp with bitterness. Eventually she left the small room where they ate together, seeking an escape in the outdoor cooking area behind the house. It was the one place where her husband usually left her alone. This time, though, he followed, standing above her as she squatted and began to wash up the bowls and plates. He kept at it, accusing, poking.

  When he finally found the sharpest weapon to stick in and twist—shouting that she was like a dead-end street because she couldn’t bear his children—the insult broke her open, not to tears or an equal insult, but to rage. She replied, quite unexpectedly and not without a certain grace, by throwing a pan of cooking oil at him. It wasn’t that hot, but it hurt enough to infuriate him, and it ruined his uniform. He responded by grabbing her hair and dragging her a few steps to the kitchen water vat, one of the old clay ones. He pushed her down, hard, into the water. When he yanked her up, her face was purple and twisted with choking and coughing. He pushed her down again. Then again. Each time he pulled her out, her face was darker, more unrecognizable. But her six-year-old son recognized her. He came running out of the house to save her. When his stepfather screamed at him, he shrank away and began to cry. After a few more minutes of watching, his fear caught in his throat so that he couldn’t breathe properly.

  Finally the policeman let her fall to the ground. Choking, water bubbling from her nose and her mouth, she slowly found her breath again. When her husband was certain she was all right, he beat her. The boy watched his mother being drowned, then beaten, not with the cooking pan, which was too unwieldy, but with the policeman’s baton, which was always close at hand. The child knew the beating was his fault. He crawled under a low table and made himself very small. That is how his mother found him, when she was able to haul herself off the ground where her husband had dropped her. The man had fled the house, still cursing, but her child was there, in shock, shaking violently, milk teeth clacking together.

  The boy is a grown man in an office now, spinning a pen on his desk. His memories of that evening are small arrows lodged deep inside him, remembered-forgotten, slivered through his brain and his body. The moment he recalls vividly is the beginning: his mother’s unexpected reply, the amber oil flying through the air, his stepfather’s face frozen in mid-yell, comical in its utter surprise. It’s a relief to laugh about his stepfather thirty years later, to consign him to ridiculousness, just another powerless township copper lording it over his wife. The man’s terror as a child, and his anger, and his useless love—it saved no one, his love—are locked in a deeper mind, the mind of his body, heart and head and limbs, the strong legs that carry him to work every day.

  Since his accident on the stairs, Handsome’s knee bothers him constantly, but even in pain his body is as faithful as that old story about a terrified child. Determined to tell itself, that story has become the work he does, the man he is.

  It’s upsetting to think that this business over the pen might lose him his recommendation to work as an MI, but the Chief Warden is furious with him. He says the pen search has been a farce, causing more problems than it’s solved. In Hall Five, one of the convicts attacked a warder, and half the block joined in the cheering. Luckily it was Warder Soe Thein in charge and not anyone else. A few more minutes and there would have been a riot instead of just a lockdown.

  But no matter what happens, he’ll manage. He can do this work. He could do whatever is involved in being a military intelligence agent, any grueling job, he’s sure of that. He runs on a fuel that will not run out. If he had to name its source, a child’s anger and fear would not cross his mind, though he still thinks of cooking oil flung hot through the air. He thinks of the beautiful shock of the violent, righteous act, how it has the power to stun and silence.

  There is a slight tap at the door, which is already open, but the fellow hesitates at the threshold. “Come in!” Handsome calls out, and looks up to see the accountant. The young fellow is carrying a tray in his hands, two cups of sweet tea on it, along with a small pot of le-phe-yeh, the bitter brew. Handsome greets him, softens because of the two cups.

  He holds the tray
out, very politely, he’s a nice guy, in his mid-twenties, Chinese, clean-cut but not geeky like most of the pencil-pushers.

  “Thank you,” Handsome says, taking the proffered cup. The accountant sits down at the desk opposite Handsome and takes out one of the smaller ledgers. He licks the nub of a freshly sharpened pencil and begins copying a list of figures he’s brought over from the administration offices. Handsome stops playing with the pen and picks it up instead. He’s supposed to be writing a report on the results of the search.

  What a waste of time. He raises the cup of hot liquid to his lips. A bad smell drifts in, from the open window perhaps; the latrines are not so far away. The sweet tea, light brown in color, is already in his mouth when he realizes that the smell is so sudden because it’s right there, on his lips, that stink is in his mouth. There’s fury and disgust in his volcanic cough; he’s spitting out the smell and taste of shit, spraying it over his desk, the paper and pen. When his knee jerks up against the bottom of the desk, he gasps in pain, coughs harder. The accountant looks up.

  Handsome yells, “What’s in this tea? What did you put in the tea?”

  The remainder of the liquid flies from his cup and splashes from the accountant’s stunned face onto his desk, soaking ledger and papers. An unsteady “Ak-haa-hrrgggaa!” escapes him, rising two octaves at the end, part pain because the liquid is hot, part fear because Handsome is coming toward him.

  “There’s shit in the tea!”

  Fear overcomes the young man’s confusion. He begins to plead, “Sir, it’s just tea, I got it from the warders’ quarters. What’s wrong?” He stands behind the shield of his desk, measuring escape routes. There are only two. Window or door?

  Handsome screams, “There’s shit in my tea! Which of you bastards did this?”

  The window is the only way. The accountant knows he’ll never make it to the door; Handsome is blocking the way. Behind his desk, he carefully steps out of his flip-flops; it’s always better to run in bare feet. He makes a desperate appeal, “Jailer Nyunt Wai Oo, sir, if there was anything in the tea, sir, I didn’t put it, I didn’t put it, it wasn’t me.”