The Lizard Cage (19 page)

As though reading his mind, Sein Yun whispers, “Let me tell you, it has been a nerve-racking time. A lot of people are risking their necks. More people than you might imagine.”

“Which people?”

“The fewer names you know, the better, in case someone fucks up. Just remember that you have friends. Another criminal prisoner has agreed to take the messages out. A criminal! So don’t think we’re good for nothing. He leaves in four days, and the releasing officer has been doing business with him for years, so he won’t be checked when he leaves.” Sein Yun clasps his hands together and stands up, then squats down again just as quickly. His gold teeth gleam among the stained ones as he bends closer. “So can I tell them you’ll join them?”

Teza doesn’t know what to say. Sein Yun’s yellow eyes shine with urgency. He breathes the words: “Why do you hesitate?”

“Because I am surprised.”

“Are you afraid?”

Teza cannot reply.

Sein Yun impatiently shifts his pack of betel from one cheek to the other. “There’s not much time. Myo Myo Than is waiting. We have to get the messages together.”

The
we
enters Teza like a needle.
We
is the movement, the people.
We
is what he longs to feel viscerally, but cannot. He is alone. Though he is a political prisoner, he does not feel like a politician.

Myo Myo Than was Aung Min’s good friend, a fellow strike leader and organizer. He was arrested just before Teza. For one week they shared a holding cell at Interrogation Center Twelve. Teza spent night after night listening to the strike leader screaming in the room across the hall. Myo Myo Than, in turn, spent his mornings listening to Teza. The destruction forged a tender bond between them. Myo Myo Than was the only political prisoner Teza shared a cell with as he became one himself.

“I need time to think.”

“Songbird”—the voice is quiet, almost coaxing—“time is exactly what we don’t have.”

As Sein Yun backs away, he executes a serious bow. Then he picks up Teza’s shit pail, makes a rude joke, and leaves the cell.

When he returns with the pail, he is petulant.

“When do you need the letter?” Teza glances at the open door.

Sein Yun carefully examines the singer’s nervous countenance before answering, “Tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow! How can I do it so quickly? I need to think—this is a serious decision. How can I just sit down now, after years of not writing, and do this?”

“I would have thought that nothing would prepare you better than years of not writing.” Sein Yun smiles. “Listen, it’s good that you only have until tomorrow. The less time this stuff is in your cell, the better.”

The open expression of bafflement on Teza’s face closes again into suspicion. “Why are you doing this, Ko Sein Yun? I thought you didn’t believe in politics.”

“I don’t. But I thought, Why not do these poor bastards a favor? It’s the big dream, isn’t it, for you guys, sending out a message.”

Teza is conscious that whatever he says will sound like an excuse. “Precisely. It is a dream. The reality is more complicated. I can’t do this without thinking about the repercussions. If I am caught, if my sentence is extended, my mother will suffer as much as I will. Perhaps more.” While this is true, Teza is keenly aware of his own possible suffering. Thirteen years left of a twenty-year sentence, plus seven more. Or ten. No chance, then, of an amnesty, an early release. It’s hard enough for him to say
thirteen years
to himself; it sickens him to think of yet more time stolen from his life.

Sein Yun stares at him, disappointment plain on his face. “I hope you’ll know what you’re doing by dinner. Five o’clock. Tonight I’m supposed to tell them how the delivery went.” He squints for a moment at Teza, his head cocked to one side. “You know, among your friends, there was no question that you’d join them. Perhaps you’ve become so much the prisoner you’ve forgotten the power of your name.”

He spins around and takes a few mincing steps out the coffin door. A good palm-reader knows when to shut up.

T
eza sits with his back pressed against the back wall of the cell. He closes his eyes and does not move. It is a hopeful paralysis. If he sits this way long enough, will he be exempt from making any decision?

To think how he craved this parcel.

Opening his eyes, he tries to keep them from straying to the bundle of clothes where the paper and pen are hidden. He tries to imagine who got the paper and pen, who put them in the box. If it’s not Jailer Chit Naing, then a warder or a guard must be in on this. There could be no other way. The thought of someone with power in the cage knowing about the plan makes him feel so vulnerable that he stares for long unbroken minutes at the teak door, straining to hear the sound of them coming.

He knows there is a web outside his cell, one he cannot see and can barely fathom, because he’s always lived in solitary. There are deals that people would not make in normal times. An elaborate scaffolding of secrets and lies holds up a reality no one would choose if given a choice. Who would choose to build a prison, to be part of the prison world and then thrive inside it? But the prison is manmade, and the regime is manmade;
they all made choices that brought them to this place. And when have times in Burma been normal? When has there ever been a time to make the right choice without risking one’s livelihood, or one’s life?

The beginning of the letter should come easily to him. He has written so much in his mind. Why does he hesitate now, when he has the paper and the ink to write the words down? What would his mother say about this hesitation? Would his father be ashamed of him?

He cannot answer his own questions.

He stares for many minutes at the brick wall, his mind circling the paper, the pen, the letter, the beautiful woman in an old house on University Avenue. Daw Suu. The woman with flowers in her hair who faced down an army. During her election campaign tour, there was a time when soldiers kneeled before her entourage and raised their guns. Teza was already in prison then, but the story made such an impression on people that a warder
and
a server told him about it. Warning her student companions to stay back, she walked toward the soldiers, calmly, stepping toward the guns like a woman stepping into fire. The battalion commander lost his nerve and ordered the men to lower their weapons.

The iron-beater strikes noon. Five hours to pass before Sein Yun comes again.

This day will be longer than other long days, and dedicated to the Paper and the Pen. He won’t touch them. He’ll leave them tucked away among his fraying clothes. His hands cross over his chest to rub warmth into his goosefleshed shoulders.
Tsshik-tsheek
. He still hears the satisfying sound of the inky ballpoint clicking out, clicking in.

But he won’t agitate himself further by touching them. Empty hands, clear mind.

T
he iron-beater strikes one. Sixty minutes, sixty seconds to a minute, three thousand six hundred seconds in the step between twelve and one. Yet that solitary strike is one of the easiest hours of the day to miss.

Sitting, turned away from the teak door, the singer hunches over like an old man. The thin sheaf of unfolded paper rests in his left hand. In his right, he holds the pen. The longing overtook him without warning, intense, almost erotic. Now he’s undone by the sweetness of blank paper. The pen has such a particular weight. He clicks the nib out and sniffs the ink, then looks down at the pale rectangle of paper; it’s like the light contained by a door frame. He could go through it and be outside, speaking to the world.

The paper is not really white, it’s rough second- or third-grade stuff, the color of very fine ash. There are minute constellations of flaws, blurred gray galaxies. He leans over to kiss the first sheet very lightly. His nose touches the paper, catches the earthen scent of it, damp because the cell is damp. This reminds him of his grandfather’s books. He thinks of his father, the tutorials.

He knows his mother would want him to write a letter. His father? It’s
hard to know what he would say from across the border of his death. Myo Myo Than is writing a letter; other politicals are writing letters.

Teza returns the paper and pen to their hiding place and begins to walk back and forth, considering his options. If the letter doesn’t make it out of the prison, he may very well be pacing for seven or ten extra years.

What will be left of him? Not very many teeth. Such vanity, to think first of his damn teeth! But the decline of the body can be made into a joke, if one is still capable of joking. He’s afraid to think of what will happen to his mind. He already struggles to maintain a connection to the movement outside the cage, then beyond, outside the country, where his brother and thousands of other Burmese exiles live. The Thai border is not so far away.

His grandfather used to take him to a monastery in the Sagaing Hills. From his child’s memory of those vine-twisted slopes, he conjures an idea of jungle and envisions a bedraggled column of men tramping through the rain on paths transformed into mud and, farther on, into muddy water. Most of them have open sores on their feet and are wearing rubber flip-flops. His brother must be somewhere among them. That’s what Aung Min wanted, didn’t he? To fight the regime.

He was shocked when Daw Sanda supported Aung Min’s decision to go. Now he wonders what would have happened if they had left together. Obviously, the past seven years would have been very different. But Teza was determined to stay in Burma, and he did his best to persuade Aung Min not to leave. By that time his younger brother was a Che Guevara in the making. He sometimes wore a peculiar flat black cap, which drove Teza crazy—it seemed so pretentious, so un-Burmese. Tears jump, ridiculously, to his eyes. That stupid black hat. Che Guevara became Che Aung Min, though it was not socialism or communism that interested him. It didn’t matter that the Western world was already making fun of democracy’s many failures and hypocrisies. The Burmese didn’t have that luxury. Flat black cap or not, Aung Min had already decided he was joining the armed revolutionaries, and he couldn’t understand why Teza wanted to stay behind.

He left at the end of October 1988, with a flood of other student dissidents. Doctors left too, and journalists, teachers, workers of various kinds, longtime political activists who’d been released from prison or hounded by military intelligence agents.

A couple of weeks later Daw Sanda sought out other parents whose sons and daughters had departed for the border. Some of the students had phoned home in tears, or spoken in the cold, resolute voices of children who had become adults in the space of weeks. Many did not call at all, for fear of incriminating their families. Phones were tapped; private letters were opened as a matter of course. Aung Min, out of fear for his mother and brother, never called home.

Yet by routes circuitous and secret, Daw Sanda ascertained that her younger son was alive and a new member of the student militia that was being trained for combat by the Karen National Liberation Army. Teza tried not to be too impressed by the thought of his brother running around with a machine gun slung across his back, or his chest, or wherever one slings a machine gun while running; he had no idea. He asked, “They’re armed?”

Daw Sanda scratched her neck.

Teza waited. His mother said nothing. “They are armed, aren’t they?”

“Not exactly.”

“What do you mean, not exactly?”

“Apparently there are not enough weapons for them. So they are training with … with sticks.”

“With
sticks
? And when they attack the SLORC troops, will they throw the sticks or charge and hit the soldiers over the head?”

May May gave him a black look. He knew he should feel guilty for making the joke, but he didn’t. “And their food. What are they eating?”

His mother’s fine-boned face lost its regal contours; she began to cry. Ashamed of himself, Teza shifted closer and put his arm around her shoulders.

She cleared her throat. “The man I spoke to said that the last shipment of rice from a humanitarian group failed to reach them, and the Karen Army didn’t have enough rice for them all.” The Karen Army. Teza knew so little about the people of the borders, their struggles. He wondered how student politicals from central Burma would communicate with the Karen guerrillas of the jungle. He wanted to ask May May whether they even spoke the same language, but he bit his tongue.

Rallying herself, she said, “Besides, it’s still raining. Both sides are in retreat. They’re not in danger of being attacked.”

They were truly mother and son in that moment, wife and child of a doctor, thinking simultaneously of rainy season diseases—malaria, wound and eye infections, typhoid, cholera. Dysentery. If the students-turned-soldiers didn’t have rice, they surely wouldn’t have quinine, or antibiotics, or proper wound dressings.

But Daw Sanda had learned to manage the unmanageable, the unbearable, the patently ridiculous, and the insane. Her next words sounded almost triumphant. “So they’ve been out in the jungle learning to snare animals for food. The Karen soldiers are also teaching them how to build huts out of bamboo. And the rice will come soon enough. It’s just a matter of time. La-may ja-may,” she said, that dependable Burmese refrain against ruin.
It will come, it will take time
. Daw Sanda had been saying that ever since Teza could remember. Composed again, though somber, very much the cool, beautiful moonlight of her name, she wiped her eyes as if some dust had had the audacity to blow into them.

W
hen the iron-beater strikes three o’clock, Teza stops walking and stares into the stolid face of the teak door. Memory has summoned the brave ones of his life so he can ask them what he should do. He ponders what he knows, what he does not know. Two whole hours until Sein Yun comes with his tray. It’s crucial to make the time go down bit by bit, like a fishbone lodged in the gullet. He begins to pace again.

Y
ou haven’t written anything yet, have you?”