The Lizard Cage (29 page)

When his meditation goes well, Teza remembers those lines from the Buddha’s First Sermon. Other times, pain sears everything from his body and memory. What light can arise from this violation? He tries to focus his meditations on letting the pain do its work without clinging to it, without identifying it as himself. This is very hard to do, especially in solitary.

T
hree weeks after the beating, Chit Naing carries a new food parcel to the white house, opens the cell, and gives the htaung win za over into the singer’s long-fingered hands. A painful, gargled cry escapes Teza as he stares down at the parcel, two plastic bags wrapped around and around with sticky brown tape. It’s so obviously from his mother, and full of food he cannot eat. The senior jailer had the parcel cleared the day it came in, before anyone had the chance to put his dirty hands all over it and steal whatever he wanted.

Chit Naing leaves the cell very quickly, excusing himself with talk of other duties. Teza barely notices his departure. The htaung win za is more important; his mother is inside it. Once again Teza examines the items of a food parcel.

There are five fish. Two bars of soap. Several small packages of tea leaves and sesame. Curry-dusted deep-fried beans. Peanuts. Ha! He cannot imagine eating a single peanut.

No, he cannot eat, but her presence is a different kind of sustenance. Before he undoes the careful wrapping, his double-jointed fingers move over the items one by one. She likes to fold things up in small pieces of cloth, often just scraps of old material left at the laundry, but among these
pieces is a small treasure, the clearest message: a threadbare white handkerchief, its edges still embroidered, very simply, with sand-colored thread. Folded inside are two cream blocks of thanakha. The very old handkerchief is a testament to the decidedly English influence his paternal grandmother experienced while growing up. It was she, who died when Teza was still a boy, who had embroidered his father’s handkerchiefs.

Outside the cage, the parcel means very little. It would be only what it is: plastic bags filled with food and toiletries, perhaps the possession of a traveler or a student going upcountry on the train. But in the cage, nothing that comes from home is inanimate.

Laying the items out on the floor, he thinks,
What I’ve lost comes back to me now. Not the way it was before, not the way I want, but transformed. I cannot understand it. How to comprehend the threadbare square of linen in my hand that sings to me about my father? I can only hold it, lightly, and if I could speak, I would say, Yes, I accept this gift, the love that brought it here. I hear the song in this silent thing
.

A
n hour later, at eleven, his server arrives. The strange boy. He’s wearing the green
FREE EL SALVADOR
T-shirt again, with the turquoise longyi pulled up between his legs like shorts. His other outfit is an old white undershirt and a green school longyi. Where in the cage did he find a student’s school-issue sarong? This is a minor but compelling mystery, one more reason that Teza wishes he could talk—not that the boy would answer his questions. In his green T-shirt and shimmering sarong, he comes as a bearer of color and food, not words.

Whenever Teza sees a flash, sudden as heat lighting, in those keen eyes, he expects the kid to speak. Every day he sees that spark, unveiled, and every day the small, thin body twists away from him, away from the cell. Teza wonders if it’s because of his battered face, the chin warped toward the broken jaw. The black eye and other bruises are healing very slowly. Is the boy frightened of him? Has it come to that?

Two or three times a week, either Chit Naing or the old warder comes, opens the grille, and lets the boy take out the latrine pail. But whether or not an adult accompanies him, Teza is always impressed by the child’s politeness. It’s a matter of form, of course—the singer knows the kid eats
some of the food before he appears, but he never eats it all. And when he arrives at the cell, he is a creaturely little gentleman, lifting his fingers to his mouth quickly, repeatedly, his black eyes wide with the silent query
Do you want to eat
? If Teza gives a short wave toward his body, fingers pointing down, Free El Salvador squats and pushes the tray through the aperture. If Teza shakes his head or waves his hand away, the boy drops down as he did the first day and eats everything save a few spoonfuls of the soupy rice. If they’ve given him boiled fish—that’s what really sick ones get—the boy leaves that too. He fears the prisoner will get hungry later and regret losing his whole meal. Knowing that the free food depends on Teza’s continued generosity, the boy doesn’t want to offend him by appearing greedy.

While Free El Salvador deftly slurps down the boiled rice, the singer examines his face. The inflamed scratches on his cheeks and arms are from mosquito bites he has worried to bleeding—Teza has a few of those himself—and the boy has the rashes of scabies too. But where did the scar on his cheek come from? And the other gash, on his forehead?

Why is he working in the prison? Teza hasn’t tried to ask Chit Naing—there are always other things to worry about when the jailer visits. Teza stares hard at the boy, as if the intensity of his gaze might open the child’s guarded face. Free El Salvador’s aloof expression rarely changes, not even when he’s eating, head down, concentrating. Teza is no longer sure if the child resembles Aung Min at all. Maybe all boys have the innocence of brothers until you see the scars on their faces.

Chit Naing has told him the boy can talk, but for Teza, this new server is worse than the tongueless Sammy, who at least had a varied vocabulary of grunts and sighs. The boy is silent in both speech and body. The grating sound of the tray, pushed into and out of the cell, is the child’s only voice. And though he makes a small, grateful inclination of his head after he eats, he also shows that he’s not beholden to Teza. Occasionally, when the singer waves the food to him, he doesn’t want it. He pushes the full tray into the cell and quickly leaves. Teza understands this as Free El Salvador’s claim to independence.

Teza tries to draw him out. Some days he points to the sky or smokes an invisible cheroot, but the boy gives him neither a childish monologue about the weather nor a single smoke. Planning a new solicitation, Teza
pushes yesterday’s dented tray out of the cell. Picking it up, the boy glances at the singer, who jerks his thumb back toward the latrine pail with comical exaggeration, then rises into a half-squat and graphically mimes his need for toilet paper. Free El Salvador tosses him a lopsided grin, which might just as well mean
You are a fucking nutcase
. Then his face goes cool again. Teza sees that unreadable mouth and knows the boy won’t come back with a few squares of toilet paper.

He’s looking past Teza now, deeper into the cell, where he’s glimpsed something on the floor. Plastic bags, small squares of laundered cloth. A little oblong block of thanakha. Things from Outside! Now the boy lifts his head slightly and actually sniffs. Teza sees him searching it out. Through the latrine pail and the damp and the prisoner’s sweat, the boy catches the old-seaweed odor of dried fish.

Free El Salvador glances up fearfully, as if caught in a new act of theft. That spark in the boy’s eyes has become a flare lighting his face. Without a word, the child speaks, and Teza recognizes the familiar cry:
Give me something to eat!

But when the boy looks from the food to the singer, his expression is not one of supplication. No, he glares at the man. Teza blinks. He can’t talk yet, can’t move his mouth to make the words
Wait, I
will
give you something
, though he takes a step back, ready to turn and get a fish. But the boy is already standing, an angry sneer on his face. Teza gurgles sound out of his throat, trying to call him back, but Free El Salvador has turned, he’s marching away. His jutting shoulder blades, the nicked velvet of his skull, and his rapid stride all proclaim that he is a boy who does not look back.

And he does not.

T
he boy hurries across the compound, fists clenched at his sides.

Even that old broken-face gets food from Outside. So what? The boy doesn’t care. He knows how to find his own food. He doesn’t like the way the singer needles him with desperate eyes, trying to find things out. Whatever the boy’s secrets are, he will keep them to himself.

He thinks of the pen. It’s his now, not the singer’s. Anyway, Handsome would have confiscated the pen from the Songbird. The boy’s glad he buried it in his shack. No one can take away his treasure.

Wearied by this unexpected storm of emotion, the boy would like to crawl into his shack right this minute and pull his rag blankets up over his head.

But he has things to do.

First of all, he’s going to fetch his own damn fish. When he returns the used tray to the kitchen, he also picks up his payment. This is a fine new job, because it gets him a fried fish every day. A small one, but not stinky and dried; this fish is cooked in oil.

Unfortunately, he must ask Eggplant the cook for his payment. Eggplant is the only fat man the boy has ever seen, a giant, oil-sweating pervert
in the kitchen of the world. The boy has learned to stay away from him. He does nasty things to the young convicts who get sent up for kitchen duty. Sometimes these new inmates seem barely older than the boy, and they are much less savvy about the cage. They stumble out the back door with a beaten look on their faces even though they’re not bruised.

The boy wipes his mouth and lifts his chin, trying to get a better view of his enemy. Though he hates Eggplant, this food-filled kingdom attracts him. Sometimes there are smells of fried chicken. Sometimes big bones still laced with meat sit on the chopping counters that line the entire west wall of the long building. The boy looks over the wet concrete floors, past hundreds of pots and pans, piles of vegetables, big sacks of beans and lentils. Beside the last row of gas burners, near the back doors, the cook is stretched out on a small mountain of bagged rice. His eyes are closed, but he’s not sleeping. One fat hand covers his mouth as the opposite hand picks away at his teeth.

Just inside the entrance, the dishwashers squat among piles of battered trays, talking and joking among themselves. They pay no attention as the child silently adds Teza’s tray to the others and then takes off his slippers, darts over to the chopping counters, and stealthily makes his way toward his fish. If the chance arises, he will steal something to eat. Beyond the cook, against the back wall of the building, two important pots contain the chief warden’s food, rich curries with tender lips of fat still hanging off the meat. The boy thinks about them every time he visits the kitchen, but he’ll have to wait for months before he can touch them again.

During March and April, when heat puts Eggplant to sleep like a drugged pig, the boy sneaks in after the morning trays have been collected. The cook lies on one of the cool wooden counters, a trail of saliva on the lower half of his cheek as though a snail has just emerged from his mouth. When the boy hears his guttural, sloppy snoring, he steals into the back part of the kitchen and tiptoes past the cook. By the time he reaches the big frying pans, his heart is thumping and his mouth is salivating uncontrollably. Careful not to knock any of the aluminum pots off the burners or hit a stirring spoon to the floor, he slowly lifts the large pans to his lips and drinks the leftover curry oil. There is no other taste like that of spiced, stolen oil.

He sighs. It’s late August now. The sleep-inducing heat of March is still very far away.

Eggplant rolls over on his side. A crease parts in the man’s oily skin, a single eye slivers open. “Come here, Little Brother, I’ve got something nice for you to put in that mouth of yours.”

“I’m here for my fish, sir.”

With surprising ease, the big man sits up and swings his legs off the sacks. “Yeah, yeah, I know what you’re here for, you little brat.” The cook throws his toothpick on the floor. “Are you sure you just want fish? Huh? Have you eaten rice yet? How about some nice curry? I’m sure you’d like it.” He rumbles a low laugh, his hand moving back to the knot of his longyi. The boy knows better than to make any trades with Eggplant.

“I’m here for my fish, sir.”

They stare at each other. The cook snorts and goes into the back kitchen, a large, covered area outside the main building, where prisoners, under Eggplant’s direction, take care of the rice-boiling and soup-making for thousands of men and fry the fish for those who can pay for it.

The cook turns to one of the big scalloped frying pans, grabs the boy’s payment by the tail, and quickly turns around, tossing the fish onto the slick concrete, where it flips and slides as though coming back to life. “Oh, no! The oil made it slip from my hand! But don’t you worry, the floor’s so clean back here you can eat off it.”

The boy does not make a move to retrieve his payment from the filthy cement, but calmly stands and stares at Eggplant.

“What the fuck are you looking at? Pick that thing up and get out of here, you little Indian bastard!”

But the fat man leaves first, shaking his fat fist, calling out angrily to the dishwashers. When Eggplant has gone back inside, the boy bends down and collects his payment.

J
ust outside the back kitchen, he rinses off the fish at the water tap and eats it whole, bone-ladder and all. After drinking from the tap, he watches the water rush down a twisting gutter and feed into a shallow stream. On the narrow strip of land between the buildings and the high prison walls, several streams of refuse from the kitchen join other ones from the hospital. During the monsoons, this dirty confluence transforms a meandering thread of water into a real current.

The boy scans the gray-bellied clouds. It won’t start raining for a while. There’s time to follow the stream down to the prison walls. He steps into the water. When the stream becomes shin-deep, the gravel under his feet gives way to velvety silt. He stops to wiggle his toes and dig them deeper into the cool mud. Plastic bags bump against his calves, and thick messes of dirty cotton, oily rainbows, old leaf-wraps from betel nut, clumps of gristle, chicken feathers, the occasional chicken foot from the kitchen or a tumbling knuckle of bone. The stream is his classroom: he studies the precious refuse it carries, the creatures who drink from it and the spirits who gather between the water and the prison walls.