The Lizard Cage (57 page)

Teza remains sitting cross-legged. When he reaches for his blanket and pulls it around his shoulders, his position shifts only slightly. Just as he
doesn’t permit himself to think about food, he takes his mind away from the friend who has left him. The child. His own child.

Upekkha. Upekkha.

The sky between roof and wall is a deeper blue now. He’s had many evenings watching that small bridge where birds and clouds cross over. He once saw the moon passing there. Sometimes he found a faint trailing of stars. And always this: the gradation of light through hours, one blue like fresh-dyed silk, another like worn turquoise cotton. Now dusk-mauve darkens the sky, and just before the big lights crack on and erase everything, a flood of indigo ink writes up the night.

Teza closes his eyes. He follows his breath through his body, down night-black lanes into streets of light and bone. It’s hard to sit in the evening, he’s so worn out by the day.

He finds himself leaning, falling over in slow motion, which strikes him as comical, and sad, because he doesn’t have the strength to halt the slow toppling. He ends up sitting sideways on the floor, stuck. Awkwardly, patiently, he scissors his legs apart and slowly stretches them out. He thinks, Ya-ba-deh, I will meditate this way, lying down.

After the necessary shifting, he finds his breath again, he comes back to his meditation word. Upekkha. But it’s not long before the word escapes him, and he sleeps.

Already the dream has come to him several times, and here it is again. Companionable now, it no longer confuses or pains him. Whether he wakes or sleeps on, the vision is the same. In old Pagan, Tattadesa, the great temple falls, with the Buddha and the boy and the man inside. The lizard, caught beneath the bricks, becomes a bird and flies. He dreams himself, flying, the earth spread out below him like a living body, his own and all that he loves.

T
he moment Senior Jailer Chit Naing steps into the releases room, he puts a prophylactic smile on his face and thinks, What a bloody nightmare.

Then, as he ushers the boy into the room, he thinks again, If only this
were
a nightmare, I might have the great relief of waking up and drinking a glass of water.

His mouth has gone bone-dry. Reflexively, he tries to lick his lips, but his tongue sticks between them like fine-grade sandpaper. At the same time—oh, such irony!—he feels the sweat begin under his arms. Within a minute, slick, narrow streams will be running down his sides. Turned away from the long table where possession searches take place, he quickly draws his hand across his upper lip. Smiling, murmuring to the boy, he pivots back, almost sick with the movement, because he can feel the pen shift in his pocket, sliding upward. He tries not to press his shirt against his body with his arms. He doesn’t want the Chief Warden to see the coming deluge of perspiration.

Because there he is, the Chief, leaning on the edge of the table, his arms crossed over his big chest, his bald head like wet bronze under the
light. His pack of Marlboros is on the search table; his gold lighter glimmers beside it. The bastard. He is not supposed to be here.

Yesterday afternoon he told Chit Naing that he had no interest in seeing the boy before his departure. He actually said, “The sooner the kid goes, the better, with as little noise as possible.” Stupidly, inadvertently, in some small gesture or flicker of eye, Chit Naing must have been visibly relieved, and that unconscious signal made the Chief suspicious. It’s Chit Naing’s own fault. He has conjured the man like a demon, and the Chief wears a demon’s grin to mock the senior jailer’s terse smile.

But it’s worse. Young Tint Lwin stands on the far side of the table, his hands obviously clenched together behind his back. The stricken expression on his handsome face whispers,
I’m frightened
. What is immediately clear is that Tint Lwin is frightened for him, for Chit Naing. Can he see the pen? It’s everything Chit Naing can do not to look down at his own hip, and he doesn’t want to put his hand in his pocket either. He gives Tint Lwin a sharp glance, wishing the young warder would pull himself together. There’s no telling how quickly the Chief might turn around and see that desperate look.

Soe Thein is here too, standing a few steps away from the door. How predictable. These two men—one low-ranking, one senior—both have reputations as decent, nonviolent warders. Soe Thein is careful not to be overtly sympathetic to political prisoners, but a few people know how much he respects Daw Aung San Suu Kyi and her party. Through his network of eavesdroppers and whisperers, the Chief Warden must also know. As for Tint Lwin, he’s just green, a good boy who isn’t cut out for the prison. Yet here he is, working in the cage, his wages feeding who knows how many people. Such men are always viewed by their superiors with suspicion. Just a sympathizer waiting to happen.

Chit Naing believed their duties here were a gratuitous blessing, a good and lucky chance. What a fool! He realizes that both of them are here to receive a warning. And if there is a more serious lesson to learn, they will learn it right now.

Being older and smarter than the young warder, Soe Thein doesn’t allow his deeply lined face to show any emotion. But when Chit Naing meets
his eye, he hears the warder’s crusty voice quite clearly:
I hope the kid’s not carrying anything out or you’re both fucked
.

Trying to calm his breathing, Chit Naing stands one step behind the child, whose head is bowed in deference. The Chief pushes himself lightly from the edge of the table and stands up to his full height. His voice is very loud, and reverberates in the bare room. “So today’s your big day, eh, kala-lay?”

“Yes, sir,” the boy replies in a respectful voice. Chit Naing swallows. No saliva goes down.

“Your life sentence is finished! Congratulations!” The Chief Warden chuckles at his own joke. “You must be very happy.”

The boy whispers, “No, sir.”

“What? What’s that?”

“No, sir. I am not happy. I want to stay here.”

A stillness descends upon the four men. Taken aback, they stare down at the boy, who keeps his eyes on the cement floor.

Chit Naing knows he has to speak first. He clears his throat. “But Nyi Lay, the Hsayadaw is waiting for you. He’s come to take you to the monastery school.”

“Yes, Saya Chit Naing, I know.”

“And you’re all ready to go. You’ve said good-bye to everyone here, you’ve packed all your things.”

“Yes, sir.”

The Chief Warden opens his Marlboros, picks up his gold ingot, and lights a cigarette. Exhaling a bluish cloud, he begins. “But you
are
leaving, kala-lay. Good Jailer Chit Naing and his wife have gone to all this trouble to find a place for you at the pongyi-kyaung, so you mustn’t be ungrateful now. Right, my boy?”

“Yes, sir.”

While the Chief is talking to the boy, his eyes bore into Chit Naing’s cheekbone. The jailer is careful not to look at him. He stares at the boy’s head, the words
his wife
reverberating like distant artillery fire. Sweat shows through his shirt now, long bars of it under his arms. He doesn’t want to turn around lest the Chief see the round, damp target in the center of his back. He puts his hands in front of his body and clasps them together, but it’s too much, too close. His fingers let go of each other and he
thrusts his right hand deep into his pocket. There it is, the pen. His hand closes around the plastic casing, pushing it down again, the nib against his thumb.

“You see,” the warden continues, his voice smooth and deep, “that’s why I’ve come down to bid you farewell, kala-lay. I just want to take a look through your things before you go. Could you put your bags up here on the table? There we go. That’s a good boy.” The Chief slides to the left as the boy shuffles forward, pulling the handle of his sling bag over his head. He places the bag carefully on the gray metal table. Then he hoists the woven market basket into the air. “This one too?”

“That one too.”

Smelling the blanket, the boy wrinkles his nose as he swings his colorful suitcase up on the table. The Chief won’t mind a little shit-stink, especially if he finds the ledger. That would make the big man happy, and Nyi Lay would get to stay in the cage.

“My boy, no need to keep staring at the floor. Lift up your chin.” As the Chief talks, he watches the boy’s face. He opens the blue sling bag by touch, without looking down at his hands. “I just want to make sure that our friend Junior Jailer Nyunt Wai Oo is as crazy as everybody seems to think. When he heard you were leaving, he called me. I know he’s not too friendly, but he’s a hard worker, even when he’s away from the prison. This little search was his idea.”

The Chief sees that the mention of Handsome doesn’t intimidate the child; his knees certainly aren’t knocking together in fear. On the contrary, having received permission to lift his head, Nyi Lay stares into the Chief’s eyes. The bald man sniffs the air, looks left and right, and sniffs again. He seems about to say something, but instead just tosses his cigarette on the floor. Nyi Lay doesn’t jump away from the arc of the red coal. He doesn’t even look down, nor does he cower when the Chief Warden takes a quick step toward him and squashes the burning cigarette with the toe of his boot.

The man slides his cigarettes and lighter out of the way and upends the sling bag, shaking its contents out onto the table. In the space of fourteen seconds, he undoes the boy’s careful packing.

The only thing that immediately interests him is the nail, which clatters on the metal table. Prisoners use them as weapons against each other. He
picks it up by the pointed end and asks in an almost sexual voice, “You’re not an enemy of the regime, are you, kala-lay?” He isn’t looking at the boy now but at Chit Naing, the grin on his face like the nail in his hand.

The boy answers, “No, sir, I’m not an enemy of the regime, sir. I want to be a prison warden when I grow up.” All the warders love it when he tells them this.

The Chief Warden laughs loudly, predictably flattered. “You do, do you? My, my, that’s quite a grand hope for such a little boy. It’s not an easy job, you know. This nail”—he wags the point of it at the boy—“you can’t keep this nail. It’s prison property.”

“Yes, sir,” replies the boy. The Chief keeps pawing through his things. He touches the new bar of soap, opens up the thanakha tin.
His going-away presents
. The Chief unrolls the new, still-damp towel and shakes it out with a snap. Nothing hidden there. Two bent, tattered postcards are splayed on the table—the Shwedagon Pagoda and a Buddha from Pagan—but they don’t interest the Chief. One by one he examines several bags of food: pickled tea leaf and deep-fried beans, a big clump of rice, green spirals of cabbage and lettuce. He pushes them away with the nail, puncturing each bag in turn.

“What’s this?” He picks up the matchbox and shakes it.

The boy hesitates. “Hpay Hpay …” His eyes are on the matchbox. “Hpay Hpay …” he begins again. The word for father. The other words are stuck.

“What’s in here, kala-lay? Hmm?” The Chief Warden glances at the tongue-tied boy, then brings the box closer to his face and slides open the little drawer. At first he doesn’t understand what he sees. There is a pointy cylinder of pale wood, brown and bonelike at one end. He tilts the box toward himself and something else slides into view just as the boy finally spits the words out, proudly, “My father’s tooth.”

But the Chief isn’t listening. He sees the lizard now, half skeleton, half flesh, the flesh part moving slowly, sensuously, many small white mouths, chewing. “It’s full of fucking maggots!” he shouts, thrusting the box away in disgust. It falls open on the table, dislodging perhaps a dozen maggots from their meal. The tooth has also jumped out and dropped with a musical
tink
on the Chief’s gold lighter, from which it bounces to the floor.

Repulsed, waving his hands, the Chief steps back. “Bloody filthy! Filthy. Get them off the table!”

Zaw Gyi drops to his haunches. His hand darts out and grabs the tooth off the cement. He quickly stands again, and not knowing what else to do with the maggots, he tweezers them up in his fingers with the deftness of a gem dealer. One pinch at a time, he deposits the wiggling creatures back in the box and closes the drawer. “Sir, I am sorry. Sir, I am very sorry,” he whispers, hunching his shoulders up around his ears.

But the Chief is too upset to hit him. Those maggots were a mere foot away from his mouth. “Ugh! Ugh!” he says, grimacing and wiping his hands on his trousers. He walks behind the table and circles past Tint Lwin, then paces to the other side of the room, where Soe Thein stands, his face still unreadable.

The Chief addresses him for support. “Wasn’t that revolting? What a weird little bugger he is.”

Soe Thein agrees in a low voice, “Yes, sir. But the cage is a weird place for a boy. That’s the problem.”

The Chief nods briefly, impressed by his employee’s logic. “You’re right, Warder Soe Thein. You’re quite right.” He strides back to the table and scrutinizes the surface to make sure that the maggots are all gone. “All right, let’s get on with this, shall we? Warder Tint Lwin, check the boy.”

Tint Lwin rounds the table and searches the boy gingerly, running his hands down the boy’s back and front, relieved to find nothing tucked in his longyi, nothing under his arms or tied to his legs. “He’s clean, sir. Just taking out his own skin and bones.”

“And a box of fucking maggots. Great. Now, what do we have here?” The Chief pulls the market bag toward him and opens the twin handles. His hands are already tugging on the rolled blanket when the dank smell rises into his face, but this time he doesn’t push the bag away; he just yanks his hands off it and steps back. “And what the fuck is in there? No, don’t tell me, I can guess. He’s smuggling out a latrine pail!”

Fallen from grace because of the maggots, the boy has lowered his head again. He bites his lip. The Chief looks at Chit Naing in bewilderment. “What the fuck is in that basket?”

Preparing to remove his hand from his pocket, Chit Naing presses the
pen down hard, ready to leave it there, safely stowed. Instead he hears a sound as loud as a human voice:
Tsshik-tsheek
.