The Lizard Cage (8 page)

The last time he saw her at the house on University Avenue was in mid-November 1988.

T
eza became a member of the youth wing of Daw Suu’s party because he believed in the work, but he also liked being close to her. It confused him to have a crush on such an old woman. Even though she looked very young and was very beautiful, she was actually forty-three, and married, and a mother. He was very much in love with Thazin and couldn’t explain his attraction to this older lady. He worked hard at keeping his feelings a secret. After the youth meetings, he sometimes played his guitar and sang songs with other musicians. Daw Suu’s house was often filled with an eclectic bunch of people, not only senior politicians and activists
but journalists and famous poets, well-known political comedians, actors. All of them agreed that Teza sang beautifully. Truly, his songs were written for the whole of Burma’s people.

Only Teza knew that he was singing to her.

If a beautiful woman laughs in a certain way, people will fall in love with her. Certain people will hate her for it too. The generals hated Daw Suu then, for many reasons, and surely they must hate her now, which makes her release more mysterious. Why have they freed her?

T
eza picks up the pebble, and holding it between his fingers like a single prayer bead, he whispers, “If Daw Suu is really free, something will shift.” He holds his breath for a moment, listening as the cockroaches scratch out an incomprehensible code.

Rolling the stone between his palms, warming it, he steps to the center of the cell and closes one eye, aiming carefully at the spider’s window, the air vent. He throws. And misses. The stone falls to the floor. He retrieves it, aims again. Whatever the object, a small stone or a dried pea—he’s used one of his own lost teeth—the projectile must be thrown accurately and with enough force to make it through the vent.

After two attempts, the stone flies up and escapes. When he hears it hit the ground outside, he smiles, bows, dances a jig. He celebrates the lady’s release with the liberation of a stone.

I
n the evening he prepares for the rest of the celebration.

Sitting cross-legged in the middle of the cell, the singer carefully places the cheroots in front of him. It’s a lucky thing that Sein Yun brought him two more today. Teza doesn’t like to perform the ceremony without at least ten of the long, slender cigars; the mathematical seriousness of the number appeals to him. It’s the filters he needs, not the cigars themselves. In the interest of formality and restraint, he tries not to smoke them before the ritual begins, but even if he breaks down and indulges, he carefully, religiously saves the butts. Ten cheroots take about a week or so to hoard, depending on the generosity of Sein Yun and his more irregular supplier, Jailer Chit Naing.

At university he read of the Japanese tea ceremony. From meditation, he knows the art of mindfulness. Each movement must come slowly, aware of itself but not ponderous. Sitting back on his heels, as though about to pray, he intones, “The Burmese Cheroot Ceremony” in a solemn voice.

In his second and third year, he occasionally laughed after saying this, but not a sigh of amusement escapes him now. The ritual has grown in importance
with the passage of time. He performs it to mark birthdays and anniversaries. Now he will honor Daw Suu. His back to the cell door, he runs one of the cigars under his nose: woodsmoke and trees. The vision rises in his mind as clearly as one of those photographs from the family collection. His grandfather is smoking in a tea shop near the Chinese market in Mandalay.

Inside a cheroot is the smell of Burma.

After eating and meditating, the cheroot ceremony is the most important event in his life. It is a challenge to perform it well. To peel the filters apart slowly enough is an act of discipline.

The filters are made with ridged, dried straw. Holding the filters tight is a band of newspaper.

Words.

The cheroots are not all the same brand. Some are finer, some coarser. One is even expensively wrapped in plastic, and thinner than the others. That devil Sein Yun, he has good connections. Going from right to left, Teza works the circular paper label off each cigar butt.

After years of practice, he’s able to peel open the cylinder of dried leaf without breaking it. He slowly draws out the filter. Then he pulls the newspaper away from the filter of rolled straw.

He pauses, holding his breath.

Nothing. No footsteps or voices outside the teak coffin.

His meticulousness is precaution as well as ritual; he is afraid of getting caught. The filter paper is smaller than a matchbook. It is actually two pieces of newsprint glued together, wrapped in a snug band and tucked into the first layer of straw. He carefully works the paper off, then separates it into its halves and lays them out before him. He tries to flatten them, but they always curl back into the shape of the filter.

Sometimes the cheroot-makers make the filters quite narrow. How upsetting! He depends on two inches of newsprint and sometimes gets only an inch or less. When a filter comes from a top or bottom margin, there are no words on it at all. While he unrolls this blank paper, his forehead wrinkles, pushing his eyebrows and nose into a scowl of accusation. He consciously smooths out his face again, as he smooths out the crinkled paper, but it’s difficult to stave off the feeling of annoyance.

He attempts to make it into a joke.

Don’t those damn girls know they’re preparing my reading material?

Don’t they care?

T
he cheroot ceremony returns Teza to his country. Performing it, he leaves the prison. Though he’s a city boy, he tramps to the villages, where the cheroot-makers work hard at their low tables. He wonders if they ever sing. At dawn the girls walk to the crumbling wooden house that serves as a factory. Fifty of them sit on the floor in a dim room. Cheroot after cheroot rolls from the girls’ hands, from seven in the morning until seven at night. Through the light of late afternoon they walk home again, the lanes of red dust busy with scrawny chickens. Ox carts sway back from the fields through the tall trees. The girls fall in love with village boys and marry. They become mothers. If their babies die, they make more. They make thousands of cheroots, smoked by millions of men and grandmothers all over Burma and read by an unknown number of political prisoners held in solitary confinement.

In his mind, the cheroot-makers are beautiful, goodhearted, with pale swirls of thanakha paste smeared, powderlike, on their cheeks. If they knew they were making cheroots for him, they would find a way to put Dostoyevsky into the filter,
The Brothers Karamazov
, Tolstoy’s
War and Peace
, a great tome by Pablo Neruda, and
Gone With the Wind
, a book he’s wanted to read ever since he saw a photograph of Vivien Leigh in an ancient
Time
magazine. They would fill their cheroots with popular Burmese novels and bowls of curry. They would send wreaths of the sweetest jasmine to him, sticks of incense and squares of gold foil for worship. They are fine young women. Teza ceases to be angry with the blank newsprint. He thinks of girls’ hands, working.

When the unwrapping is done, he lines up the tattered bits of printed paper.

He reads as slowly as possible, to make the words last.

The singer smiles at that last one. He’s sure his mother would have read the article.

May May is a great reader. She is one of those fearless women on the bus who will hold a page up to the light to read through the censorship ink. Black ink is impossible to penetrate, but if the ink is silver, you can hold it up to the light and make out the hidden words. She will even lift a blackened page up to the sky anyway, just to show her contempt. A man leaned over to her once and asked, with the urgency of fear in his voice, “What are you doing?”

In a stage whisper, she replied, “I am reading.” Then she went back to trying to decipher the inked-out words.

This is his mother, a small-boned warrior. Even if she did not purchase a copy of this particular newspaper, someone in the neighborhood would have brought her the article. Someone would have seen it and thought,
Ah, Daw Sanda will be interested in this, she will tell a story
.

Daw Sanda believes in the children who remember their past lives. Their stories are printed in dozens of popular magazines across the country. She clips these tales with red-handled scissors and places them in a series of numbered folders marked
REINCARNATION/REBIRTH
. Stories like the one from the cheroot filter, about boys who remember the names of strangers and tame snakes and know the location of household items in houses they’ve never seen before, are very popular. She retells these stories with the passion of a true believer, describing in artful detail even the unpublished parts of the accounts. She explains to her neighbors that most of us forget the secrets we knew at birth. Education and parents insist that we forget.

But determined children remember. Without having been taught, they can speak strange dialects from other parts of the country. They beg to visit certain men and women who live thousands of miles away. On meeting, they
recognize these strangers as their parents or friends of the past. Even friendly animals are considered to be reincarnations of recently deceased people.

Having grown up on a diet of these accounts, Teza believed in them wholeheartedly until he went to university, where he was informed that his mother was superstitious, old-fashioned. He gravitated toward those students who talked about doing away with superstitions and embracing whatever scraps of audacious modernity the world smuggled through Burma’s closed borders. That included rejecting the popular stories of reincarnation. But now, with reality shrunk to the dimensions of his cell and his mind, believing has taken on a new power.

Omens, dreams, the power of the sacred places, the secret messages of the cheroots themselves: these have become crucial. Everything his mother and his grandfather told him about Buddhism, the nats, and any kind of magic has been pulled out of the well of his memory and used to slake his thirst for meaning.

That’s why these tiny pieces of paper are so important. Pressing the palms of his hands together, the singer chooses another filter. The words are runes. Each piece of paper has a story, whether a sad romance from the literary section or a boring government announcement or a funeral notice. Whispering under his breath, Teza fills in the missing text.

After the story he searches for the secret, the message encoded on every bit of paper. The torn-edged missives seem anonymous, but Teza knows the world has sent them. The scraps emerge from the vastness of his country, across the rivers and fields, given by the hands of strangers. They pass through walls, gates, bars, enormous doors. They move across compounds, through cells in the halls Teza has never seen, down corridors filled with the very particular smell of imprisoned men.

He knows this ceremony of words and their secret messages brings illumination.

Sometimes the messages are not secret. The meanings are miraculously evident. The scraps of paper reveal Burma’s true history.

The tiny clippings are laid out before him. He picks his favorite one and places it in his opposite hand like a piece of jewelry.

Teza reads the small shred of paper again, and again. Part of the discipline of the cheroot ceremony involves sitting as though in meditation, not allowing himself to wander into memory and fantasy. He will keep this filter paper, and the one about reincarnation, instead of shredding them up with the others and dropping the pieces into his shit pail.

Until three years ago he kept all the scraps, using and reusing them, trying and sometimes succeeding in fitting bits of an article together from the same brand of cheroot. Then his cell was raided.

The warders found his little cheroot documents wrapped up in his
spare shirt. He had made a kind of daily crossword game out of the bits, and the Chief Warden said they were political messages, so the warders had to beat him and threaten him with the dog cells. They used to keep dogs in them, but during a prison riot the prisoners killed and ate most of the hounds. After that, the Chief Warden decided the cages would become punishment cells. Men live in them now, exposed to the elements and trapped for months at a time with the accumulation of their own urine and feces. Teza wasn’t sent to a dog cell because he would have had too much contact with other politicals. He was just given a good thrashing.

He doesn’t know how that particular session ended. The beatings melt into one another because they’re so similar. You have to assume a certain position—it’s in the regulations. Half squat on your toes with your legs farther apart than your shoulders. Hold your hands at the back of the neck with elbows in the air. It’s like stopping in the middle of a deep knee bend. Now you are ready, fully exposed: your genitals, your abdomen, your back, your face, your armpits. Your feet are bare and you are as terrified for them as you are for your balls. When the blows begin to fall, you must not move your hands from the back of your head. That is not part of the game. You must not fall over until you lose consciousness (even then they will kick you) or until they get tired, or bored, and stop.