The Lizard Cage (26 page)

That’s how Jailer Chit Naing explained it later.

The boy should have been killed too, because he was so close to his father, two fingers tucked into the waist of the thin man’s longyi. The truck came over the rise roaring, a beast without eyes. The headlights were broken. The boy thought the truck swerved—not to miss them but to hit them, for they’d almost reached the dirt and weeds beyond the pavement. They were two steps away. He felt his father’s hand hit him in the back harder than he’d ever been hit in his life—one heavy blow—and the ground shoved dirt into his mouth and pounded the air from his chest. The
boy coughed as though he had the sickness; he couldn’t breathe. Tears stung his eyes as he fought for air. Then he just lay on the ground for a little while, resting, pushing small pieces of dirt out of his mouth with his tongue. He felt dirt clinging to his lips and chin.

The stillness of the morning had returned, but the sun was up now, exhaling red light and heat. In the distance, he saw women walking from their village path onto the road, just as he and his father had done, except they were going in the opposite direction. He watched their straw hats until they disappeared into the rising sun. For a long time he stared at the places their bodies had occupied. Then he lay again on his side. Once, he lifted his head and looked along the side of the road, thinking his father would have fallen close by. Not until his eyes reached the middle of the lane did he find what he was looking for. He could see his father’s bare feet stretching out toward him. Like hands, he thought. His eyes flitted here and there over the asphalt, searching. He felt a pang of sorrow; where were his father’s slippers? They were almost new. Hpay Hpay would be very angry to lose them. He saw his father’s legs too, also bare, his longyi torn and yanked up around his waist. But his body was twisted in such a strange way that the boy could not see his bloody head.

When no one came—the place was a fair distance from the prison—the boy stood up and walked to the prison gates. He discovered that one of his teeth had pierced his lip when his father pushed him; he put his hand to his mouth, then looked at the blood. He did this again and again. He told the gate guards what had happened. Two men went out with a truck and took his father’s body away. The boy never knew where. No one washed the blood off the road. Afraid to go home, the boy stayed at the prison that night. He didn’t want to cross the road because of the ghost of his father. Where had they taken the body? The boy didn’t know, and he was afraid to ask. But he knew that an unburied body had no choice but to become a ghost, a wandering spirit. The boy felt guilty about this. But how could he have buried his father by himself? He didn’t own a shovel.

He walked as far as the blood. The flies had been busy all day, licking it up. It would be gone in no time. There was a thick black mat of them making a fierce noise. Two days after the accident, he saw a bit of white sticking up out of the coagulated smears. Brushing away the flies, he squatted down. It was one of his father’s teeth. Shocked that he could recognize
it, he wished he’d looked carefully at his father’s body. From the forgotten-remembered image of his mother, the boy knew his father’s image would fade too, merge into the faces of the other men, the faces from the cage. The flies covered the tips of his fingers while he picked out the tooth. Then they sank into the small hole where the tooth had been. The flies were green as peacock feathers. Some were blue-backed. Some were brown. Many were black. He was afraid of the wasps. All together, the noise they made was like an engine, like the roar of the truck that had killed his father. He wiped the blood-rust on a leaf, put the tooth in a small box, put the small box in his sling bag, and ran back to the prison.

Only once did the boy walk across the road, through the field, and into the shantytown. He went for his other clothes and his father’s clothes. Little else was important enough to take. He took his mother’s tins of thanakha without knowing exactly why, for he’d already lost the childhood habit of smearing the fragrant paste on his skin. The landlord was waiting. As the boy walked down the road, the landlord came up behind him and asked for the rent. The boy explained that he had no money. The landlord said, “I’ll call the police and they’ll come and take you to jail.”

The boy replied, seriously, “But that’s where I’m going.”

The landlord slapped the boy’s head and grabbed his shoulder.

When the boy explained he was working at the prison now and promised to bring the rent in small amounts, the landlord released his shoulder, poked the soft place in the joint with his forefinger, and warned the boy not to lie. The boy was astounded by the uncanny way grownups could read his mind. His lie to the landlord was his first real lie. He swore he was not lying, which was his second. He understood, at seven years old, that this was a skill he had to work hard to perfect. He never went back to the house made of bamboo and leaf thatch. The cage became his world.

A
t first he lived in a little open storage shed near the shrine. It was a favorite place for warders to take naps and read the newspaper, and they didn’t mind him bedding down in there at night. But the shrine and the storage shed sat between the hospital and the kitchen, and both Chit Naing and Tan-see Tiger warned him away from the big cook. It was the jailer’s idea for the boy to make a little place outside the warders’ quarters.
There are more men here, coming and going, and the cook never uses the warders’ latrine, because the warders hate his guts. The low-ranking warders hardly make enough money to feed their families, while the cook runs a food racket and gets fatter and richer every year. The boy made himself a shed from scraps of wood and strips of corrugated metal. The shed is low, like a doghouse, but it’s his home. His treasures are safe.

The boy works hard. For cage work, he gets paid in rice and in cheroots, which he smokes like the small, fierce man he tries to be. As a rat-killer, he is popular with the inmates who do not have families to send them food. The rats are city rats, not paddy rats. Very tough, they have the taste and smell of garbage in them, like pigeons. He sells them to the prisoners, five kyats per rat, depending on how poor the prisoner is, occasionally ten kyats if the rat is big and the guy’s got money. When he eats rat himself, he gets a terrible stomachache. He dislikes rat meat so much that he will trade one rodent, or two, or three, for any fair amount of Outside food, but to hold his bargaining power he keeps his desperation a secret from the prisoners.

When the men have visitors from Outside, they usually get some money. Outside is where money is made. The boy imagines that the paper kyats come from a place bigger than Hall Five, a cage full of paper and scissors. Spotting a pair of black-handled scissors in an office he was cleaning, he asked one of the other floor-scrubbers what they were. He then dared to open and close the long jaws. The cleaner took a piece of paper from the wastebasket and began to snip away. The boy watched in silent wonder as a crooked, five-pointed star fell out of the paper.

He would love to have a pair of scissors, but he’s never seen them anywhere but in that office. He has seen razor blades inserted into pieces of wood, and the junkies’ syringes and the metal bars whose ends are sharpened into points for stabbing—these poke bars are the best murder weapons, he knows, especially if you get the heart, the lung, or the intestine. With a few pokes in the stomach, it’s hard to stanch the blood.

But with a pair of scissors, he could cut shapes out of the paper in his books. He would cut his hair instead of getting it shaved. He would cut Bogyoke Aung San’s face out of a blue five-kyat bill and glue it to the wall beside his other picture of the famous general. The tan-see of Hall Four, the ruling convict of all the convicts in the entire hall, has given the boy
many lessons about the Bogyoke. The big man even has a picture of the general hanging on the wall in his cell. Bogyoke was a hero, a great
soldier
. At the word
soldier
, Tan-see Tiger raises his arms and his voice. None of the soldiers today are as great as the
great
Bogyoke. And the generals, the
generals
of today are just a bunch of crooked
pricks
, nothing like the Bogyoke. He defeated all the terrible
British
and all the cruel
Japanese
who had overrun
the whole country
, which, the boy supposes, is Rangoon, Mandalay, and the immense field in between.

Sometimes the boy dreams of going to visit Rangoon. Chit Naing has told him it’s less than an hour away by car, more on the bus. But the boy would never go in a car or a bus or anything else with an engine. He would walk.

And when he got there, he would see everything: the Shwedagon Pagoda, the Sule, Chinatown, the Chinese temples. These places, he knows, are made of pure gold, with real mirrors (not pieces of shiny metal) and walls full of rubies and emeralds and sapphires. Mahabandoola Street. Scott Market. Inya Lake: the prisoners have told him it is beautiful and big and shines in the sun; there’s more water in the lake than he has ever seen in his life. But by foot, those places are a thousand lives away. And everything about the city feels dangerous. Next year, he thinks. I will save up some money and go. He doesn’t like the road with its roaring trucks and buses. He remembers the men in his neighborhood getting on a bus with a horde of people crammed inside, going off to Rangoon to work. So many
people
out there, so many
streets
. Sometimes standing at the big cage gates makes him anxious; everything about those looming metal gates means unfathomable, dangerous departure. The man who killed his father might live in Rangoon. All those buses and trucks and cars and people, they could so easily crush a boy. Chit Naing chides him, “Nonsense! You have to go to Shwedagon Pagoda, you’re Burmese. Are you just going to live out here forever and never go into the city? You have to go to a pagoda, a temple. Have you ever been to a temple?”

The boy stares at the ground. His father was a Zairbadi, a Burmese Muslim. He has dark-morning memories of his father kneeling and praying. He watches the Muslim prisoners bowing down during the day and murmuring their mysterious words to Allah. The Buddhists pray too, at the shrine before the Buddha. When Chit Naing told him that the Buddha
is not the same as Allah, the boy felt the insult like a nasty pinch.
Of course
the two are not the same—what does Chit Naing take him for, a retard? Chit Naing is a kind, wise man, but sometimes he, like so many other old people, underestimates the boy’s intelligence. Allah is invisible and powerful and big as the wind—that’s why the Muslims bow down and whisper so much—while the Buddha is solid as clean gold, still and calm like his statue at the shrine. The boy knows these two holy forces, but no one has ever taught him how to pray. His mother was a Buddhist, and she kept a small altar in the house, but she was too weak for the pagodas.

“Well?” repeats Chit Naing. “Have you ever been to a temple?”

The boy shakes his head. The senior jailer knows many things, but how can he know the fear of getting crushed by the city? He is too big.

“Someday you will go to the pagoda, and you will like it very much. It’s a peaceful place.”

Yes, someday, thinks the boy, peaceful. But not now, not yet. He has too much work to do. He himself is liquid, part of the prison currency now, slipping through the corridors with messages, on missions. The boy speaks so rarely that some convicts presume he is a deaf-mute. This reluctance to talk makes him popular among the prison authorities, who sometimes choose him to do jobs on their behalf. He once overheard a senior warder say, “The little rat-killer was born with the ability to keep his mouth shut. Some of our men should take lessons from him,” which pleased the boy immensely. He doesn’t know what he was born with, but he quickly learned the importance of safeguarding a secret. It doesn’t matter whether it belongs to a warder or a jailer or a prisoner; they’re all the same. So the doctor sometimes uses him for black-market drug runs to the sick and needle runs to the junkies. Another senior warder once used him as a server to a very hairy Indian, who was on rationed meals for offending the Chief Warden. And now he has new work, serving the Songbird, which is the criminals’ name for the singer. It’s a job of some notoriety, a position that demands respect. The boy pretends he doesn’t know this; stupidity makes his life easier.

Thus he goes about his business with great care while looking unconcerned. He moves through the cage knowing exactly how it works and who rules whom, while his thin arms swing lightly, swiftly, showing the world that he is just a child rushing along under the eaves to keep out of
the rain. Without a word he delivers drugs, weapons, alcohol, little slips of paper tucked in the folded waist of his longyi. He works often, and with great loyalty, for the tan-see of Hall Four, the one who gives him history lessons about the great general. Besides running errands for him, the boy gives Tiger a massage twice, sometimes three times a week. It’s
just
a massage—he walks on the big man’s tattooed legs, kneads his tattooed back—Tiger doesn’t like screwing boys, big or little. More than once he has said, “You just let me know, Nyi Lay, if one of these faggots tries to fuck around with you, and old Tiger will bite off his dirty head,” and then he lets go a mighty, theatrical roar, grabs the laughing boy, and lifts him up over his tattooed shoulder.

The boy has his share of pleasure. In the hot season there are occasional water fights with Tiger’s cronies, and now, during the rains, he enjoys long, meandering walks along the stream that runs under the cage walls and out into the world. Sometimes he listens in on jokes he can’t understand, and he laughs with the men, who laugh at him for laughing. He spends some of his time with the Thai prisoners, a few of whom have become his friends, for lack of a better word. The Burmese inmates make fun of the Thais, getting back at them for wars of long ago and saying things like “Who is the economic miracle of Asia now, big guy?” The boy doesn’t care about all that. He’s more interested in the weird, ever-present fact of their language. If the men are in a decent mood, their chatter is like listening to birds tell stories. Before he started visiting the Thai cells, he took it for granted that everyone in the world spoke Burmese. The Thais taught him otherwise, and he hungrily learns words from their singing speech. In turn he provides them with important Burmese phrases that few others are willing to share. And because the Thai teak and drug smugglers are shocked to see a child roaming around in the cage, they always scrape together something for him to eat.