The Lizard Cage (16 page)

The prison camp dispensary had only aspirin and alcohol. With money, he could have bribed the prison doctor, begged him to buy the proper medicine outside. Or he could have paid the akhan-lu-gyi. Unlike Teza, he wasn’t confined in solitary; he lived with other men, criminals and politicals. The akhan-lu-gyi often received favors from the warders in exchange for protection money extorted from weaker prisoners.

The doctor knew precisely how to cure himself. More precisely, he knew that he could not. After a series of convulsions, he lay on his mat in a tight fetal fist. The whip snapping through his guts had transformed into
a knife. The blade slashed this way, that way, deep in the center of his body. The pain was so intense that he only longed for it to be over.

In his lucid moments, he kept thinking how simple the world was, how unbelievable. He didn’t need magic powers or a miracle to save his life. He just needed money, enough to bribe the akhan-lu-gyi or the tan-see. One of their people could fetch the medicine or at least send a message outside. Daw Sanda would have left the children with her cousin and started immediately on the journey.

Later, she thought it out: she could have sold the last of her grandmother’s gold to buy his medicine. He needed so little, really: a course of antibiotics and an IV of Ringer’s solution. He needed clean water. Clean water and medicine meant his life. All he had to do was survive for seven more years. Then he would return, to Teza, to Aung Min, who was beginning to look very much like him, and to Sanda, his moonlight.

For a long time afterward she made the calculation repeatedly, as though it were an alchemical formula for pleasing a powerful nat, one of those animist spirits that preside over the shadows of Burmese Buddhism. On a piece of paper torn from one of her sons’ exercise books, she scribbled down every possible variable, her forehead propped on her other hand. Always more or less the same calculation, it equaled nothing—two gold wedding bangles and the thin gold wedding chain were enough for the antibiotics and for the long journey. A bridge washed away in the rain, the trains slowed, the road a swell of mud: even with these obstacles, if she had known, she would have gone forth. If she had received a message, she might have reached him in time.

“There has been a small epidemic,” the prison doctor explained in his letter.

“Small? How do you define a
small
epidemic?” she cried, stricken, furious.

When this letter reached their house in Rangoon, when May May sat at the table in the kitchen with the piece of paper shaking in her hand, her beloved husband, their father, had already been dead for sixteen days. They were never able to discover where he’d been buried.

N
ine strikes against the iron. A moment after the last beat sounds, the lights go out. Darkness, like a guard he cannot see, pushes him into an empty well.

Suddenly he becomes conscious of the way his mouth draws in, the lips bunching slightly like an old man’s, like the old man his father never became.

When Hpay Hpay died, Teza stopped playing the guitar; he was just seventeen. His grief for his father demanded suffering, and hardship, and loss.

But Teza’s mother—in spite of her worries about a musician’s life—didn’t want sadness to guide her son. “Teza, your father bought you that guitar because he knew you were gifted.” Teza could play. Not just a few chords, not just a bit of street strumming in the evenings, but complex patterns, fingerpicking and blues triads. He could play any tune at all, anything. He used to echo the radio, just a few beats behind, or play complementary wandering riffs in the same key. Whatever he heard he could play, and he sang like a bird with honey on its tongue. “Teza, a gift is a responsibility. Go. Go upstairs. The guitar’s in your room, isn’t it?”

By the time he was in university, he was playing for himself again, quickly gaining recognition as the Singer, a handsome young man. In love.

Teza touches his lips. He closes his eyes. Sound looms before him like a sail.

Thazin. He’s not sure if he can remember her voice or not. Her life has continued without him. After his first year in prison, he understood she could not wait. He had to release her, and he did, in his own mind, as he was never permitted to communicate with her directly. In the third year, the news came to him, passed from one mouth to the next, that Ma Thazin, the famous singer’s love, had married someone else.

Still he tries to find her.

At Rangoon University, the boys saunter by Convocation Hall under shade trees like enormous green umbrellas. The girls refold their blue, yellow, orchid-purple tamins, their sarongs of fine patterns, fine cloth. Ugliness does not rule the world and Teza is twenty-two and will be handsome and talented for the rest of his life, which is forever. Why not? The girls remind him of butterflies breathing. When their sarongs loosen from walking, they pause, stretch the extra fabric out to the side, fold it across their bellies, and tuck it in tightly again. Some continue walking as they do this; some stop briefly on the path. The motion is the loveliest he knows, a gesture both discreet and laden with promise. All the girls do it, because every girl wears a tamin. Every curve of belly and slope of thigh is momentarily accentuated. When a girl walks through a pool of light coming down through the branches, her colors become as vibrant as wet oil paint.

Gitah-shay
, the boys whisper of the girls walking by the tea shops. “Guitar shape” is the highest compliment he and his friends can give a girl.

As the finest guitar player, he is a favorite for serenades, when dusk stretches indigo into evening. The trees with their shadows sway above them like dark green water. The scent of jasmine and night flowers fills the air; the boys, hoping the smell is perfume, drift toward the girls’ dormitories. They smoke cheroots without coughing; they attempt to swagger. On finding the windows of those they most admire, Teza tunes his guitar. Cheroot ash falls on the frets.

Aung Min blows the ash away and whispers, “I’m starved. She better give us food.”

Teza pauses in his tuning, stares at him. “Little Brother, you have no anadeh.” No shame, no proper sense of decorum.

Teza begins to play. The boys sing their hearts out. Girls lean from the
windows like flowers. When they like what they hear, they throw down snacks, packages of pickled tea leaves and deep-fried lentils, peanuts, Chinese sesame bars, deep-fried Indian pastries.

Ma Thazin throws down a book.

Aung Min leaps forward, snatches it off the ground, and brandishes it above his head, crying, “Sister, we don’t need literature, we need something for our bellies.”

As the girl stretches boldly out the window, a chorus of high-pitched laughter rises behind her voice. “That’s not for you, you little brat. Give it to your brother!”

The book is a photocopied, cardboard-bound version of Bob Dylan’s songs, in English. With chords and music.

Teza falls in love. He meets her at her favorite tea shop, on Inya Lake. They walk along the paths through the People’s Park, devising dozens of elaborate ways to rub shoulders, touch elbows, skim the backs of each other’s swinging hands. They go to movies, daringly alone sometimes, but more often with a group of her friends from the Faculty of Medicine. The idea of marrying a lady doctor thrills him. His father would have liked her. Even May May approves of this pretty but earnest young woman. Three times Teza pretends he is sick and three times Thazin becomes wonderfully serious, asking him to stick his tongue out, open his shirt so she can place her important stethoscope there on his pounding heart. “Breathe deeply,” she instructs, but how much more deeply can he breathe? Three times she scolds him: “You’d better not be faking it, Teza, or I’ll stop speaking to you.”

But she speaks to him again and again.

He sees her rewrapping her scarlet tamin, doing up the cream-colored blouse, her small fingers deft with the gold buttons. He mourns those buttons, and the shadow of a bra beneath her blouse. Once, after they had made love all afternoon, she jumped up and rushed to get ready to go. The sight of her bare feet on the wooden floor made him hungry and hard again. When he reached for her, she laughed and hit his hand. “Absolutely not!
You
are insatiable and
I
always miss this class!” He fell back on the bed and let her leave. He regrets that now.

Everything would be different if he could reach up one more time and pull the mother-of-pearl comb from that black waterfall of hair. Or watch her fine, strong feet walk toward him.

He takes his hands from his eyes and lays them on his chest. He loved her.

He knows she loved him also. That is why he remembers.

His hands slide down over his ribs. The blades rise out of him, xylophone keys placed side by side. The sensitive place beneath his left nipple, the bruised feeling, is another beating. The cracked rib didn’t knit properly. Interrogation Center Fourteen.

The jutting leap from his ribs to his lower belly would sicken her. He is glad she cannot see him now, with hipbones protruding like hooks.

His hands slip under the unknotted longyi. He scratches. He picks one, two, three bedbugs from his pubic hair. This act brings enough pleasure to release a flood of lust and the memory of lust. His yearning will be satisfied in seconds.

Certain moments rest in his body from the time before. The places she marked him are far below his skin, but he searches for them. Not scars, there were no scars with her, only the deep, worn groove where the shyness and fear of two virgins yielded to love in the body. His desire sings to hers, coaxing it forward, and her desire comes toward him. He unbuttons her blouse, pulls away the soft material of the bra; her nipples harden under his lips. Shy, she covers her breasts with her hair, hiding his face also. He floats above her, afraid to rest his weight on her, knowing he will have to use his weight, he will have to push. The nexus of tenderness and force confuses him. He did not expect to be so afraid of hurting her. Echoing his own thoughts, she whispers, “I’m afraid. You’ll hurt me.”

Maung-go lo-ba-deh. Chit-pa-deh
.

Despite their fear, these are words of love.

The spasm charging through his body makes no sound.

Wasted pearl fills his hand, spills down his wrist.

He rolls over on his side, jawbone chafing straw mat. The ants between the bricks have gone still, as though the wall itself has clenched tight and crushed them all.

T
he sky becomes ocean. Rain comes in waves, rises and falls; tide after tide of water beats the roofs and walls of the prison, drips into some cells, spares others, transforms the compound into an expanse of brick-chip mud and puddles. Teza sleeps through the pounding nightly lullaby, the iron-beater counting the hours of darkness.

He sleeps while the drainage stream behind the big halls and latrine holes swells like a river. In the tangle of weeds and garbage there, a snail battalion continues its endless labor of eating green. Rain crashes down even as the night turns, by imperceptible degrees, toward dawn. Teza sleeps through the mighty chorus of frogs, through the shouts of warders in the compound, through the spider plucking his web.

He dreams.

A child again, he sits with his grandfather on the front stoop in Mandalay. The old man is tight-lipped, unsmiling, looking down at something in his hand. The boy pulls his grandfather’s arm low enough to see what’s there, cupped in the palm. Then he jerks back in horror.

Bones. Tiny bones, white and fine as ivory toothpicks.

The boy rises, guilty. He wants to run away, to escape, but the old man
grabs his arm and asks in a stricken voice, “What have you done, Teza? Why did you kill it? Every lizard is a small naked man.”

The old man is still his grandfather, but the child begins to cry when he looks down at the birdlike claw that grips his bare arm.

T
eza opens his eyes in wild fear of the dream. Yet there is no solace in what he sees. He wonders how many times a man can be broken by dreaming, then broken again by waking. Still lying on his mat, bone-chilled, the sound of rain all around, he searches the wall for the spider, but the spider is gone.

Exhausted, he rouses his limbs with great effort. To stand up is work. Conjuring is work, remembering, remaking himself as he was in the world before the cage, the disappeared world: a person among people.

T
eza turns his head toward the teak door. He holds his breath to listen to the footsteps. It cannot be eleven, tray time. Surely he has not slept so long as that. He tries to hear through the crash of rain. It’s not Sein Yun, not the drag of flip-flops. Boots are coming down the corridor, solid, steady. Purposeful.

When the door opens, Teza is waiting with his head down.

“Come on, then. Shower day has come at last, because you stink so bad I can smell you down the hall. Get your stuff—hurry up.”

Teza silently pulls his shirt over his lowered head, steps out of his longyi. He picks up his slice of soap, his tin cup, clean clothes. He removes his slippers and stands there in threadbare shorts. Handsome moves away from the door, shouts, “Forward!” and spits down the hallway. Teza begins to walk. When he reaches the phlegm on the floor, he swerves around it. Handsome grunts, then punches Teza between the shoulder blades. The warder barks, “Back up. I said back up!”

The singer moves his feet back, step by step, through the spit on the floor.

“Now walk in a straight line.”

He advances through it again.

•   •   •

T
he walk to the shower room at the end of the corridor comprises the entire geography of Teza’s world. The room is a large brick-walled cell without a door or window. On the back wall and in the center of the room are two concrete troughs. A dripping faucet sticks out over the back trough, which is full of water. Since the building houses only Teza, the other trough sits empty. At the threshold of the room, Handsome barks, “Go ahead,” meaning
Go scare the rats down the drain
.