“He is, but he’s away in Sagaing for a couple of days. The pongyi-kyaung is very full, but I think they’ll find a place for him. I’ve spoken to the Chief Warden. He’s willing to let the boy go. Last night I talked with the Hsayadaw’s assistant, a monk who grew up there. He knows you, he said, you played together as children. And he knows the songs.”
Teza puts a hand to his chest in a gesture of thanks. “This is the best gift, U Chit Naing.”
“But we can’t be sure if the boy will want to go.”
“Oh, don’t worry. I’ll talk to him again. He’s close to making the decision for himself. He’s just getting ready. It takes time. Doesn’t it?”
The two men look at each other without speaking. Teza sits cross-legged in his cell and Chit Naing crouches in front of him, one hand gripping an iron bar for balance. He knows he must quell his rising emotion. It’s disconcerting to realize how much he draws his own strength from the presence of this wasted prisoner, Teza of the beloved songs, the man in solitary who endures with dignity, grace, and humor. Where to put the unfathomable idea of his absence? He staunchly refuses the word death. The hunger strike won’t work. They’ll force him to eat. Chit Naing is ashamed to hear the thought forming in his mind, I will force him.
Teza no-longer-here shakes the very center of his mind. He grips the iron bar, the muscles in his hand and wrist and lower arm contracted and aching, until Teza whispers, “U Chit Naing, are you all right?”
The jailer blinks at him. He releases the bar and pulls his hand across his mouth. Before rising, he whispers, “If I can, I’ll come again tomorrow.” The visit will be for himself, he knows, as much as for Teza.
. 53 .
Sein Yun stares at the Buddha’s face. He’s trying for a holier-than-thou expression and thinking about water buffalo. About that proverb actually, so dear to his heart: When the buffalo fight, the tender grass gets trampled. Oh, well, that’s tough for the grass, isn’t it? Everyone has their karma in this shitty life.
Straightening the hair that kinks from his chin, he tries to throw a religious glance back across the compound. He’s waiting for Soe Thein to come by with a little package of quinine for a prisoner in Hall Three. The guy’s sick with an attack of malaria. Soe Thein is okay, he’s useful enough—he got Sein Yun some pills for his hepatitis—though he still refuses to bring in the hard stuff; he’s a warder with principles. Chuckling under his breath, Sein Yun shuffles away from the praying ground of the shrine and spits his betel juice, then returns to wait for the warder. Bloody principles! Their inevitable erosion is always pleasant to observe. Quinine and new syringes today, amphetamines and smack tomorrow. Or next week, or next year.
There will be a next year, and a year after that. Maybe more. Handsome is a fucking idiot. Why didn’t the palm-reader see that from the beginning? He’s done so much work in the past two and a half months. That whole laborious setup with the politicals, all the pen-and-paper-ferrying and rah-rah-rah-ing for the revolution, the bloody mess with the Songbird. Not to mention weeks of looking for that stupid pen. And what has all his magnificent bullshitting accomplished?
Handsome sent him a note last night. He was in a fit, an absolute fit, after another fuckup with that kid. Just what did the note say? Was it a thank-you note, commending Sein Yun for his psychic detective work? Was it perhaps a little poem, praising his great dedication to the retarded junior jailer?
No, it was two scrawled lines of poison cursing Sein Yun’s name and mother. Not only has the palm-reader lost his sentence reduction, but for the next two years he’ll have to put up with that asshole who couldn’t even manage to shake down a twelve-year-old. He didn’t find the pen. Sein Yun pulls and pulls on his unruly hair.
He knows the kid has the pen. He can feel it. He would bet every palm he’s ever read on it: Cut their hands off! The boy has that precious piece of contraband. Or he had the damn thing and somehow got rid of it in the nick of time. Unbelievable. Not once but twice—twice!—the palm-reader serves up exactly what Handsome orders and the idiot wastes it.
The more he thinks about it, the more pissed off he gets. The prison kings got what they wanted. Better said, they’ll give away what they want to give away when all the contraband cases go to trial next month. Right now the politicals are still in the dog cells, edging away from the tide of their own shit and enjoying the last of the monsoon on their bare heads. But at the end of October’s hearing, the Chief Warden will hand out about eighty years’ worth of extended sentences to the letter-writers from Hall Three.
So something went wrong with Teza. Is that the palm-reader’s fault?
Handsome was the one who screwed up, all because of a brat with a rat stick and a smart-aleck stare. How could they have been outsmarted by an illiterate, garbage-eating child? It’s disgusting. All those free palm readings, what does he get for them? Dick all.
Buggered.
The word makes him think of their own resident water buffalo. Forget the nickname Eggplant, the cook has more in common with an ox. His fleshy lower lip droops, as though the tendon that holds it up has been cut away. His big bottom teeth are almost always visible, the horizontal grain of them stained brown, just like a water buffalo’s.
The palm-reader’s scowl slowly turns into a smirk, which spreads into a smile. He thinks again about the little creature—kaung-lay, kala-lay, nyi lay, they call him by so many names—and remembers the school longyi the boy was wearing this morning, wrapped tight around his skinny hips, bright and deep green both, and he renames the child so easily, so aptly, it makes him laugh: little jungle snatch, little tender-assed patch of grass.
. 54 .
Teza sits and breathes. He unfolds his legs and opens his eyes to look at them, so thin and long on the cement floor that a vision of a praying mantis clambers into his mind. He thinks, Exoskeleton. His bones are so close to the surface of his skin that he might wake one morning only skeleton and rise up to do a clackety little dance.
That has been the meditation theme of his morning, not macabre but practical. The meditation of unmaking the body, letting it decompose and pass away, as it will, as it must. It’s fascinating to him that he feels so light, so lit from within, when he has spent the last two hours envisioning himself without life, the whole of him and the parts, inside and outside, rotting away and putrid. The stench of a rotting body is a disgusting one, but foremost in the meditation is detachment: that horrid reek, like the pain, is not him. It will not be him.
Ironically, he is most attached to what he cannot see, the most broken piece, his own face. After that, he mourns his hands. They are made for grasping, picking up, holding; it is not easy for the mind to let them go. To think of losing his hands is to remember the disappearance of his father, who had the same long, double-jointed fingers, like a dancer’s. The hands are his memory of music, fingers spidering over frets, stretching and bunching up for the unfamiliar chords that he used to impress his classmates, guitar-strummers all. Oh, the hands, which keep and give, which touch or stay folded with shyness. He looks around the cell, gazes at the bricks in the wall, the bars, the blocking wall beyond them. Human hands built this cage, just as they built the temples and painted a myriad of faces of the Buddha.
Teza refolds his legs. He closes his eyes again and breathes, inhaling and exhaling the passage of an hour, two hours, until he has died and bloated and rotted clean away. His rib cage sits open like an empty basket. Inside, his invisible heart beats, jumps like a bird or a frog. Or a lizard. Like any small animal waiting to get out of its cage.
Here is something new, and strange, and fine: he does not worry himself about the pen, or the ledger. The book is barely a quarter used; the spillage occurred on the last page bearing figures—there the writing is completely illegible, drowned in some mystery substance. He sniffs the paper. Ink, and mildew, or sour milk, and … tea? Can he smell tea? Tea! It would be nice to have tea, wouldn’t it, but in a tea shop, on the open street one evening, surrounded by friends.
The whole book is ruined, at least for the purposes of proper bookkeeping. Someone must have copied what figures he could before throwing the ledger away. Teza holds it in his hand, very happily. He turns it over and opens it and brings the wrinkled paper to his nose again. Tea, it whispers to him again, la-phet-yeh. Despite the damage, it’s still a sturdy book, paper-and-cardboard-bound with a dark purple cover. Pieces of black binding tape are folded over each corner.
The pen, of course, is familiar to him. After fishing it out of his clothing stash, he holds the plastic vein of ink on his palm and stares at it, marveling at how it helped to cause so much agony.
Tsshik-tsheek. The nib is thick with a glob of coagulated ink. He wipes it away with his thumb, then walks to the other side of the cell. “So you have come to me again, little troublemaker. This time I shall put you to better use.” He sits down against the brick wall that faces away from the white house entrance. If a warder appears unexpectedly, Teza will have a few seconds to hide his new book and his old pen. Sitting here is as much precaution as he will take. He is neither nervous nor afraid. On the contrary, a lightheartedness holds him, moves him slowly like sunlight moves a plant. The long meditations tire his body, but they almost always leave his mind spacious, as open as a plain. He can see all around himself, forward and back, his whole life and his one death in his hands. The simplicity of it brings tears to his eyes, not from sadness, or grief, but from clarity, and love.
Let the warder find him. One of the old songs warms in his throat; as much as he can, he smiles. Let Handsome himself come in and see the pen in his hand, scribbling verses, or a list of food he will never eat again, or the day from his childhood that he remembers so often, when Daw Sanda caught him and Aung Min breaking the First Precept and sent them alone to the pagoda. Laughter sighs out of him, mixes with the remnants of song. He mouths a few words. Oh, to sing at the top of his lungs again, to get his hands on a guitar and feel the thin wood warm as he plays it. Let the prison kings read his memories, or whatever else he might write—nursery rhymes or poems for his lovely Thazin or a letter to the world he loves and will leave, is leaving now. He balances the open ledger on his knees and takes up his pen and begins, whispering the words to himself as he goes. Finally the singer writes his first prison song.
Dear Nyi Lay, you are so far away
I can see you only with my eyes closed
while I hum the songs that separated us
my ardent phrases for the revolution
Now those boys love one another
by map and moon and lizard
clinging to brick wall
If you examine the map with care
you will see men with Hpay Hpay’s hands
lighting their cheroots at the tea shop
behind the jute factory
The twin boys born without fingertips
still crawl among the low tables
They have a big business now
digging bottle caps
out of the dirt with a pointed stick
Remember? We once bought them mohinga
They laughed to the bottom
of the bowl then danced for more
My Brother my dreams
have changed but sometimes
I walk down the same street to an old house
where a woman summons moonlight
to help her orchids flourish
under tattered nets
If there is a wind
white sheets snap
on the lines nearby
the starched arms
of shirts twist and flail
like ours did when the soldiers
came out with Bren guns
with bayonets
Nyi Lay
I wish I could touch your eyes
and wipe away what they have seen
visions that ravage the iris
and drop shards of broken skull
down the pupil’s black hole.
The dish of the ear still fills
with cries from a road
where the blood
stayed for many days.
Remember their cautious gasps,
the people who came slowly out
of their hiding places to collect
the slippers, the hand-painted signs.
Still they are gathering the words
from frozen-open mouths.
We must remember the voices
of dead women the voices
of dead men the voices
of children
our own voices.
My Dear Nyi Lay,
I am happy
because you will understand
every message in this little parcel.
Do you still have the slingshot?
If there is a telephone in your jungle
do you dare call the woman of orchids
our mother May May?
Sometimes I lean over my own map
here in the cage pattern of grit
on the floor wet trailings
of roaches after they drink my soup
the lines on my hands make this map
and I see a night when the guerrillas
come drunk and singing up the hillside
young men thin as corpses but laughing
Hunger you say
keeps them alive
I stand behind you
in the shadows you stand
before me near the fire
not a gun
but a warped guitar in your arms
One of the men roasts
a small bird on a stick
You strum one of my songs
but they are too tired
too hungry to sing it
I lean over my map
and see your face lit by flames
You refuse to eat the flesh
I venture a prediction: in peace
you will become a passionate vegetarian
like our mother.
Now we are men! Finally we know
what she was doing down there at night
among the flowers in their clay pots
surrounded by her orchestra of crickets and frogs
She was cleaning the salt from her eyes
crying pure water into the orchid pouches
Dear Brother, I’ve never told you this before
because you would have laughed
Still you will laugh but now I am glad
Nyi Lay I heard her voice
before my birth
I remember May May
singing to me inside her
That’s why I grew into music
like one of her orchids purple open mouth
crying out the truth of its own color
Dear Brother, here where all the doors are closed
I have learned to walk through brick walls
A copper-pot spider was my good friend
and many lizards fed my heart
Now every dream I see assumes
the shape of a skeleton key.
Once I heard Grandfather’s voice
calling me back through the trees
but I can’t go home that way
I will return by an older path
over the plain on the river
My offerings as I travel
through the city of temples
will be bones and tears
Burma, the generals say Myanmar
to make us forget our country and
their crimes but we will not forget
they built a cage around our lives
Only the ants know the strength
the weakness of its walls
and perhaps the child knows
who knows too much the white ghosts
of maggots on the edges of my pail
the dark ghosts of men who haunt him
He knows the living tree of language
but cannot climb it yet
my broken face he knows
he knows my hunger feeds him
&n
bsp; as yours feeds the men on the border
as May May became a vegetarian
when Hpay Hpay died so her sons
might devour the meat in every dish
Everything shattered is sharp
and often shines
A sliver of glass in the hand
can make the history
that alters history
here in the cage and there
in your cramped room in that house
without nation the new country
is no distance away at all.
Sometimes I almost see it
growing like a web
now invisible now
suddenly shining
Nyi Lay, here where the flesh
becomes spirit
the borders dissolve
with the flayed skin
Here there is no separation
Brother, sometimes I fear for you
Will you enter a new era
only to make up another word
for murder?
I cannot see the weapons you carry
only that warped guitar
As for me I have forsaken
every weapon but the voice
singing its last song
And the hand Dear Brother
my own hand
writing it down
with metta
Teza
. 55 .
The iron-beater strikes five o’clock. Dinner hour. Teza looks up and sees four sparrows bathing in the puddle near the outer wall, shimmying water over head and wing. In response to a chirp from him, two of them pause expectantly, then flutter out of the puddle. Hop-hop, a little closer. Hop-hop to the left, then more quickly again, to the right, undecided. Teza chirps again—the tongue sucking, clicking lightly away from his palate. It hurts, but not so much. One small skull tilts sideways at the sound. Hop-hop on spindly legs, straight toward the cell. Teza sits a couple of feet behind the bars.
“Soon, little one, soon enough, a bit of rice.” The sparrow eyes him.
Another bird comes hopping up and gives its companion a peck on the shoulder. The first bird rises into the air, wheels away, then returns and pecks back. The well of space between the outer wall and the cell quickly fills with small raucous argument, four sparrows taking sides. The other two bathers, still puffed up like miniature feather dusters, fly up and drop closer to the cell, shivering water off their backs as they scold each other.
The Lizard Cage Page 38