The Lizard Cage (12 page)

“I can see that. You like them young.”

The tan-see laughs. “No. I like hard heels and strong hands.” He nods to the little masseur, who approaches the bars with his head down, his hand out. Sein Yun frowns at the tan-see, who says, “Go ahead, give it over. He doesn’t bite.”

It’s bloody insulting, to smuggle something valuable into the hall just to hand it over to a pretty boy. Look at that: the tan-see has just rolled over on his belly again. He’s not a tiger, he’s a sloth. Grudgingly, Sein Yun reaches into his secret pocket and resists the impulse to toss the vial into the cell. He slips it into the rat-killer’s outstretched, oiled hand. The kid steps back to Tiger and hands him the vial.

“Someone will bring you your gift tomorrow,” Tiger announces in a leisurely drawl, face still turned away. Sein Yun has half a mind to demand
his payment right there and then, but of course, in the interest of further work, he says nothing, just glares at the pretty boy again, who is cleaning his feet, getting ready to step up onto the tan-see’s back. Sein Yun turns on his heel and retreats the way he’s come, through the cave of men’s voices.

To reach the fourth row, where he lives, he must carry on to the end of the first row, turn left, and pass the openings of two more rows. The long tunnels of bars make him feel as though he is looking into a trick mirror. Cage after cage is replicated, reflected through the one beside it, and all the eyes looking out are cage eyes, like his own but not so yellow, circled with the bruised purple-brown of bad sleep and bad food.

By the time he gets to his place, he has almost always regained his balance, a biting observation ready on his stained lips.

Entering, he crushes his fear, squashes it without hesitation, the same way he kills the cockroaches that come to his cell in search of food.

S
mall white cup in hand, Chit Naing stands at the door of the warders’ quarters and stares out into the floodlit compound. Close to his face, moths batter the screen, trying to get to the light beyond him, two naked bulbs and one tube of fluorescence hanging over the wooden tables.

When the senior jailer finally takes a sip of his tea, he’s disappointed to find how cold it is. Behind him, a dozen warders and guards waiting for their shift changes chat over card games and teapots. He angles his watch into the harsh light. No one needs a watch here, not really. An iron-beater is always there, marking their hours, their routines. Soon he will strike eight o’clock.

A swarm of annoyance follows the jailer around tonight like a fresh hatch of mosquitoes; he can’t get away from it. The woman’s voice singing on the dust-covered tape recorder is sentimental and twangy. He looks over his shoulder. “Whose tape is that, anyway? My ears are bleeding!” A few men laugh, but no one gets up to change the music. He sees Handsome out of the corner of his eye, watching. He is always watching, that guy. Instead of turning away, Chit Naing steps back into the room and meets his gaze. The intensity of Handsome’s dislike for him is well known. They
have worked the same number of years, but Chit Naing is superior in rank. The fact that his wife is from a military family has helped Chit Naing’s prison career, which alternately disgusts and pleases him. In a petulant mood, he forces the junior jailer to engage in small talk, knowing Handsome is obliged to respond. “Your shift over?”

Handsome nods.

“I’m on my way out too. Do you want to leave together?”

The junior jailer replies slowly and carefully, “I’m not leaving just yet.”

“See you tomorrow, then.” Chit Naing steps out into the night, even more annoyed with himself. He’s as petty as any of them. But it’s necessary to show Handsome that he is not afraid, that he wields enough power to feign a sort of friendliness.

The Chief Warden has been using Handsome for various unsavory jobs. There’s no doubt he’s an active informer, telling the Chief who’s doing what, where, when, how. And he’s got that palm-reader working for him too. Dirt always attracts more dirt. But how could the Chief Warden have put such a violent man in charge of the singer?

Away from the cheroot smoke of the warders’ quarters, Chit Naing can smell the rain and wet brick chips. When he passes under the windows of the main office, he glances up at the lit windows on the second floor. No figure passes, no figure leans out. Perhaps the Chief Warden is taking his evening bath.

Chit Naing has never liked him much, but now his dislike of the balding, bulldoggish man makes him angry. The Chief always wears trousers, even off-duty. Chit Naing has never seen him wearing a longyi or smoking a cheroot. The Thai cigarettes he smokes are becoming favorites among the young warders, who can barely afford to buy them. The Chief’s son has gone to study at a school in Singapore. These details awe the younger men under his command, who mistake money for style and foreign luxuries for power. And why does he have to stay on the grounds all the time? He owns a big house in the city, but he usually prefers to stay in the suite on the second floor. It’s a common perversion, the way the prison makes prisoners of men who believe they are free.

What such people hate most are those who
are
free. That’s why the Chief can’t stand the politicals. Asked what he thought of Daw Suu Kyi’s release, he replied without hesitation that she should have been shot before
she became so famous. He takes her freedom from house arrest as a personal insult, and his extreme views on the matter, loudly expounded in his office, are repeated by some of the higher-ranking warders: Why was this traitorous, foreigner-marrying bitch never locked up in a real prison? And isn’t it likely that her husband, an Englishman, works for the British secret service? Eventually, through Daw Suu Kyi, Britain could come to rule Burma again.

The theory is laughable at best, paranoid at worst, but some of the warders are influenced by the Chief Warden’s persuasive, know-it-all way of speaking. His charming, almost nonchalant authority makes weaker people want to believe him.

Chit Naing leaves the shadow of the office wall to cross the compound. He masks his contempt for his boss from others, but not from himself. He can’t hide anything from himself anymore. Only a year ago—just before he started to oversee the teak coffin—he was sure that the substance of his life would never change.

A man has to swallow his revulsion and get the job done, even if it means living a farce. But the cage, so riddled with deceit, never lies: every broken thing in the country comes in through its iron doors and proclaims itself. Every goodhearted and idealistic thing comes in too. Since Daw Suu Kyi’s release, they’ve rounded up a new group of politicals, her party members, some young, some as old as seventy. They’ve already arrived, shackled like animals. Last night Chit Naing dreamed of a student alone in a cell, his face bruised purple and bloody. He was crying, begging with a cracked voice for a cup of water. Chit Naing knew that he must not give him anything to drink. If he did, MI agents would find out about it and punish him, Chit Naing, by beating the boy to death. He started awake, heart pounding, to the cries of the baby, nestled beside his wife, who nursed their daughter back to sleep. But that was it for him; he was awake for the rest of the night. He lay in bed thinking about ’88, when hundreds of students were dumped in the prison, traumatized and bloody, and, true to his dream, often severely dehydrated after days of interrogation. Chit Naing knew—everyone knew—that thousands more had died in the streets because of two unpardonable crimes: knowing they deserved a decent life and having the nerve to demand one.

He has begun to think seriously about doing something else, anything
else, for a living. But the only real prospects—a transfer to a northern work camp, or those depressing offers from his in-laws—are snares, tricks to deepen the pit he already lives inside.

Just last year his wife’s uncle, a senior officer at Interrogation Center Twelve, offered him another MI job. It was the third or fourth time that her well-connected family had tried to help them by improving Chit Naing’s status. He politely turned down the offer, explaining that he had a duty to continue his work at the prison. When his wife found out about his meeting with her uncle, she screamed at him, “Loyalties to the
prison
? What about
me
? What about your children? There is so much more money in military work! And you insult my family once more by not accepting my uncle’s offer. I don’t understand you!”

He tried to explain what MI work meant. It wouldn’t be like the cage, where he could protect certain inmates. (Failing that, he could protect himself by finding someone else to do the dirty work. But he never said this out loud, not to his wife, not to anyone.) An MI officer at an interrogation center, he told her, has to hurt people.

“But only people who are enemies of the state.”

“How can I, as a Buddhist, torture helpless men, terrorize young women?”

She had no reply to that, but he saw from the cold, closed look on her face that she thought he was cowardly—and stupid, tossing away this opportunity when opportunities were so rare. After that argument, she refused to sleep with him.

His insomnia became a nightly rule. Four o’clock in the morning would find him beside his wife’s warm body, gazing at the curve of her hip, wondering who she was. For that matter, who was he? And how could he escape going to work in the morning? Night after night he wandered around in the maze of these and a dozen other questions. During the days, only his three children gave him any pleasure. They loved simple, good things: eating, playing with their toys, watching one of the neighbor’s goats escape from the yard and wander into the city street, causing a ruckus among the car drivers and rickshaw pedalers. The children clapped, they laughed. Sometimes their pureness of heart made him more frustrated with himself.

Then, as if by magic, everything changed.

Of course, it wasn’t magic, was it? It was just Teza, talking. It was just a visit to a laundry.

Chit Naing smiles to himself and takes a deep breath through his nose. He loves the damp smell of the rainy season. It doesn’t matter that they’ve cut down all the big trees in the compound. He can still smell growing things.

A
t the beginning of July last year, the Chief Warden assigned him to oversee the teak coffin. He’d been at it for just three days when his new prisoner surprised him by asking for a string of jasmine flowers, the kind used for offering at the pagoda. The singer’s manner baffled him as much as the request itself. Teza did not cower. He didn’t even respect prison protocol by keeping his head down. He stood in his cell, a bit left of center. The teak door was open. Chit Naing was on the other side of the threshold, feeling awkward because he was used to his inmates dropping to a squat or moving away from him. But after Sammy the giant had left with the latrine pail, Teza actually took several steps toward him. He looked the jailer in the eye, asked forthrightly for jasmine, then continued in a thoughtful tone, “Or even just a small branch with leaves, it doesn’t matter what kind of tree. Flowers are the thing, or the smell of green leaves.”

Chit Naing thought, The man is insane. Teza, the singer, was mad, and no one, typically, had bothered to inform him. Or perhaps no one knew. What else could explain this bizarre fearlessness? A request for
flowers
? He looked at his prisoner with such obvious, eyebrow-knitted confusion that the singer smiled at him, which only unbalanced Chit Naing further, because he saw that Teza was completely sane, and that with his openhearted, friendly smile, he was trying to put Chit Naing at ease. This was a complete reversal of anything the jailer had experienced in the cage. It wasn’t that the singer had overstepped the boundaries between prisoner and jailer. It was that he acted as if those boundaries did not exist.

Teza kept smiling intently into his jailer’s worried eyes, showing off a row of very white, very straight teeth. He’d lost a couple in the bottom row, but the gaps took nothing away from his fine-boned face, with its strong brow and narrow, high-bridged nose. Malnourishment and beatings
had made Teza thin and weak, but a genuine playfulness mixed with yearning shone in his eyes. Chit Naing felt unexpectedly touched: the look on the prisoner’s face reminded him of his children. Teza’s smile shifted and broadened as his eyebrows rose, questioning, prompting the jailer to respond. Without thinking, Chit Naing smiled back.

Sammy rattled them from their silent communication by lumbering down the corridor, metal latrine pail dangling and clanking at the end of his long arm—and then he stared down at Chit Naing as if
he
were crazy. The jailer flushed dark red. Did Sammy think he had propositioned Teza in a sexual way? He took a handkerchief out of his breast pocket and started to polish his glasses. Sammy handed the pail back to the prisoner and grunted. Without saying a word, Chit Naing waved the server out of the teak coffin, hurriedly closed the door, and locked up.

But the next day, when Sammy left with the latrine pail again, Chit Naing pulled a string of jasmine blossoms out of his breast pocket—the sweet scent flared like white sparks against the odor of shit—and handed it to Teza. The singer thanked him and lifted the handful of jasmine to his nose.

“What will you do with the flowers?” Chit Naing asked.

The jailer’s low, conspiratorial tone made Teza laugh. “What do you think? I will offer them to the Buddha.”

Chit Naing glanced around the cell. “There is no altar here.”

“Ha! There’s no toilet either, but that doesn’t stop me from doing my business, does it?” He pointed to the back wall of the cell, high up. “The altar is up there, but it’s invisible. I don’t need to be able to see the Buddha to meditate and pray. There’s not much else to do. I never would have become so interested in Buddhism without this enforced retreat.”

Chit Naing raised his eyebrows. “That’s what you call twenty years in solitary confinement?”

“On my better days. The cage is a big monastery and my sentence is a very long meditation. I’m sure that’s how my mother thinks of it too.”