The Lizard Cage (33 page)

“Nyi Lay, would you stop skulking around out there? You’re making me nervous. Come here and I’ll give you the breakfast money.”

The boy’s eyes open wide in surprise—how did Tiger know he was there?—but he marshals himself and steps forward. When Tiger grins at him with his big white teeth, he is relieved enough to snatch a glance inside the cell. There’s Hla Myat, and beyond him, sitting in the corner, is the old basket-weaver, rolling strings out of plastic bag strips. The other men are out on work details. When Hla Myat sneers at the boy, he quickly looks back at Tiger, who sticks his fingers into the breast pocket of his nice blue shirt and takes out some money. He also pulls out a short gray pencil and, riled again, shakes it at Hla Myat. “This is all they left me with. And I had to bribe one of the warders to let me keep the damn thing. It’s outrageous. How am I supposed to write my letters with a pencil? Those bastards!”

Tiger nods the boy closer. “Don’t worry, kid, I’m just in a shitty mood.
A good breakfast will make me feel better.” He puts his big paw through the bars and presses the bills into the boy’s palm. “Three bowls. One for you, one for Uncle in the corner there, and one for me. There’s enough here for you to get an egg for yourself, okay?” Tiger must be very mad at Hla Myat, to exclude him from food.

Nyi Lay whispers, “Thank you,” and slips away.

H
e passes through the cage gates, holding the kyats close to his body. Just outside the prison, a grumpy man in his sixties runs a noodle stand. Warders eat here sometimes, for a treat, and newly released prisoners, and people who’ve come to visit someone inside. But often the little wooden tables and stools sit empty, as they do now. The worn bills leave the boy’s dirty hand and return as a bowl of mohinga with one fine whole egg. When he’s finished, he’ll go back to Tiger’s cell with two plastic bags full of the same noodles.

Whenever he eats here, he sees the big road to Rangoon. If he’s feeling brave or bored or pissed off, he eyes that road and makes plans. Next year, he thinks. Next year, he will go to the city. But most of the time—this morning, for example—he turns his stool in the other direction, toward the fields, leans over his bowl, and carefully shovels the magic food into his mouth.

The white noodles are made by women. Breakfast food.
Mohinga, mohinga
. Sometimes he whispers this comforting word to himself before he falls asleep. He forgets-remembers that his mother used to sell mohinga under the twin banyan trees at the edge of the village, but he doesn’t think of her anymore, just that taste, salty-sweet soup drowning soft rice noodles. The food takes him back to a feeling he cannot name.

When there’s nothing but the egg left in the bowl, he lifts his head and looks out to the monsoon fields, green on burning green, colors undiminished by scattered villages and roadside tea shops, daubed here and there with figures tending bean plants, vegetables, rice. With great attention he watches the land, patched with fallow tan and mud but mostly spread out green, a color to stretch the eyes, pull the vision forward, farther, as if there were no end to how far he might see if he could just sit here all day, outside the cage walls. In a few of the paddies the rice shoots are still like
slender young grass, while in others they have become an emerald flood. The water they grow from reflects gray or blue or white cumulus, the whole glimmering sky stitched or thickly woven with rice.

The fields make him happy in a way the road to Rangoon never does. He smiles at the green expanse before him, then glances down and remembers. The egg.

It’s time to go. He has to deliver Tiger’s noodles. Then do his awful latrine detail for that crowded cell in the sentencing hall. By the time he’s washed up after that job, he’ll have to deliver Songbird’s breakfast. He pulls a plastic bag from his sling bag and quickly wraps the excellent, broth-soaked egg.

U
ntil Handsome broke his jaw, Teza never realized how much he spoke aloud: long minutes in monologue, or in discussion with the ants and the cockroaches and the copper-pot spider. One of the worst things is not being able to talk to himself and hear his own voice. This affliction is different from the physical pain, but there are moments when it’s almost as difficult to bear.

He knows he is sane, despite the physical agony that leaves his mind raw and shaky. He is sane, but he misses the spider dearly, the web spun and respun according to the creature’s secret need. He misses the perfection of that architecture in the midst of so much ugliness, and he misses the constant presence—even though the spider went outside, he always came back. Teza feels real concern. When the pen fell, did it hurt the spider? He knows how delicate and breakable they are, a spider’s jointed legs.

The singer rubs the smell of old urine away from his nose and gingerly touches his swollen eye. He pulls his knees up to his chest and stares down the sharp slope of shinbones. He has five broken toes, two on the left foot, three on the right. Though he has no clear memory of it, he suspects that one of the warders, or Handsome—probably Handsome—must have jumped up and
down on his feet. The toe bones are the broken pieces that have healed most easily. With tolerable pain, he is able to hobble. Talking is still very bad. And not talking is also very bad. Eating is the worst. His entire jaw is tight, raw-feeling, but the left mandible is the site of the fracture. No mirror, of course, but he leans over the water pot and sees the wavering reflection. His whole chin has shifted to the left, sunken into the shortened, half-shattered bone. His chin is the only place on his lower face that doesn’t hurt now—because it’s perfectly numb. The doctor says the nerve in that area has been severed.

The buzz and echo in his left ear come back at least a few times a day. Sometimes he thinks he’s gone deaf in that ear. Other times he still hears as well as he did before. Or does he? What worries him most is that he doesn’t know for sure. The left eye is bruised and still swollen but has stopped running pus. He washes it several times every day.

Taking stock this way is a necessary task, like returning to a city after the invading army has left, but it leaves him feeling like the most exhausted man on the planet. Chit Naing has told him that all the men who wrote letters to Daw Aung San Suu Kyi are in the dog cells. There hasn’t been a trial yet, but that doesn’t matter. Each man possessed “illegal” materials, which means they’ll all get an extra seven to ten years.

I was wrong to trust Sein Yun. We were all wrong to trust him.

But you cannot remain human if you never trust another person.

That is the crux of it. I am exhausted because I remain human.

Sammy strikes the time, but the singer isn’t counting anymore. Whatever time it is, he is old. He covers his crooked face with his hands. His long fingers pass over his cheekbones, his head. He smells the dirt on his hands and gets up to wash them at his water pot, using soap. He knows the sadness will leave him. It will change into something else. This is the truth of annica: all things are impermanent. He moves carefully to his mat, clears away a dirty undershirt, and wraps himself in his blanket. Forming a mental image of the Buddha, he turns toward the outer wall, the bars, and genuflects three times. He still bows gracefully, as he will until the day of his death, his head touching the cement through the triangular opening formed by his thumbs and index fingers.

Kneeling, his hands held before his chest, his eyes closed, he silently recites the Pali prayer:

He bows again three times and begins to breathe.

Though his eyes are closed, something interrupts him. Free El Salvador stands beside the outer wall, his body hidden behind it, his head visible, hovering over the food tray. Teza completely forgot that it was time for breakfast. The boy shifts his weight from one foot to the other, somehow asking if he’s welcome.

Teza cannot smile, but his eyes soften as he waves the boy closer. How long has Free El Salvador been watching him? With the fluidity of a mongoose, the boy comes forward, crouches. Teza notices that his expression is different. Why does he look more like a child today than he did yesterday?

Chin dipped against his chest, eyes lowered, Free El Salvador carefully pushes the tray into the cell. It’s shyness. The boy has become shy! Teza is delighted to recognize this emotion in the hard nugget of a face. Quietly, still looking away, the boy utters that single, beautiful word they share.

Sa.

Eat.

Teza whispers his thanks. “Tzey zu bay, Nyi Lay.”

The words, garbled because he cannot open his mouth, are clear as fire, and hang like fire in the air between them, burning with many meanings: nyi lay. Little Brother. A prison child. The lizard he keeps in his shack. Aung Min, living in a border country that Teza can only imagine.
Nyi Lay. Jailer Chit Naing calls both child and singer by this casually affectionate name.

Teza is still kneeling, the blanket gathered about him, while the boy squats with his hand on the tray and pushes it into the cell. His head almost touches the bars.

The boy whispers, “Sa! You’re too skinny.”

Teza points to his jaw and makes a falling ax of his hand. “It’s not easy to eat.”

Free El Salvador points to the tray. “Sa. Sa!” He sticks his arm in through the trap and pushes the tray closer to the singer, but Teza still doesn’t look at it. He’s too excited; the boy is finally speaking to him.

Free El Salvador says, “Pass me your dirty tray.” Now the singer will see. There is the familiar sound of aluminum rasping cement. Then a faint intake of breath. The boy snatches up the used tray.

The singer squints with his good eye, confused, then disbelieving. There it is, poorly concealed with a few spoonfuls of wet rice, something he has not seen for years. An egg.

When he looks up, his hands rise too, fingers spread, asking for an explanation, but Free El Salvador is gone.

H
e pulls the tray toward him. Yes. It’s a hard-boiled egg, the white turned brown with fish sauce and oil.

Teza picks up the slippery egg with his long fingers and inhales deeply.
Noodles
. On the other side of the egg, he finds mohinga. Mohinga! He smells the Forty-Second Street Tea Shop, behind the old jute factory. You have to be there before eight-thirty in the morning if you want to be sure to get a bowl. It’s a famous place. The crowds on their way to work or school stop for breakfast, then drink sweet tea or bitter tea or instant coffee, deliciously thick with condensed milk.

He breaks the egg with the edge of the metal spoon. It’s backward augury, for he cannot read the future in the yellow center, only the past. Early mornings with Thazin bent close over the corner of a low wooden table, his knees touching her knees, the bowls of mohinga empty and the sweet tea finished and the pots of bitter green tea beginning, that lovely, endless stuff, provided compliments of the shop, allowing them to stay longer, too
long, drinking not only tea but each other’s company, away from their friends and families, enjoying each other as much as they do when they borrow a dorm room or find a secluded spot in a park. Mohinga and the whole tea-shop ritual often made them late for their first classes.

He breaks the egg again, in quarters, then mashes it up without mixing it into the boiled rice, not wanting to dilute the taste. With the blanket pulled up around his shoulders, Teza eats his first egg since the days before his arrest in 1988. He eats slowly, his tongue pushing the crumbled yolk against the roof of his mouth until it becomes a wet paste. He winces, stops, keeps going.

The salty, sulfury taste is both utterly unexpected and deeply known. Home, the noodle and tea shops, the young woman he loved. Eating mohinga with Aung Min before they go to play football. And from far, far back, his father, who takes him to visit the Shwedagon in the new light of dawn. He is four or five years old. Aung Min is too small to come. Teza is a boy gloriously alone with Hpay Hpay, who buys jasmine and orchids from one of the flower-sellers on the grand stairway that leads to the gold stupa. He puts his son down to take the flowers, chatting and laughing with the old lady who sells them. She touches Teza’s cheek with one hand as she hands him a string of jasmine. Father and son climb a few more steps, stop again to buy incense and candles. Another small conversation ensues with the vendor, about the coolness of the morning, the coming heat of the day. Near the top of the staircase built into the angle of the hill, Hpay Hpay lifts Teza and carries him up the last of the steps into the round, glittering courtyards of the great pagoda. All around them, invisible and visible among the many shrines, monks are murmuring and chanting the prayers of dawn. Both father and son offer flowers. Hpay Hpay lights the incense and candles, then makes his own prayers with Teza sitting cross-legged beside him. After a while they bow again to the Buddha—Hpay Hpay places Teza’s hands in front of his head—then they stand and walk the night-cooled stones around the large circumference of the stupa. The small boy is patient and quiet, happy with his father in this circular labyrinth of many Buddhas and brightly painted statues. He knows what awaits them, after they descend the long staircase under the arched and painted ceiling, after they return to the wakening clamor of the streets around the pagoda. There’s a mohinga stall nearby. Each of them has a bowl. The little boy
gets an egg in his noodles. To help you grow big and strong, Hpay Hpay tells him.