The Lizard Cage (7 page)

Sein Yun smiles directly into Teza’s eyes. The force of the look is physical, as though the man has grasped his shoulder. “There’s a good boy.”

“Where’s my food parcel?”

Sein Yun replies, slightly offended. “Little Brother, they told me nothing about it. No one tells me anything. I’m just the one who carries the crap around.” To emphasize his point, he puts out his hand.

Teza turns to fetch the latrine pail. “Is there anything else about Daw Suu Kyi? Any other news? Has she been able to speak to the public?”

“Now, now, that’s enough for one day. I have to get on with my work. I suspect your friend Chit Naing will be here soon enough with all the juicy details. I’ve heard this sort of thing interests him …”

Again Teza does not acknowledge the trailing bait. “Everyone, even you, is interested in what happens to her.”

“True. We are all interested, but for different reasons. The men are going crazy about the whole thing. They’ll gamble on anything. The bet of the day is how many weeks it will take the SLORC to assassinate her.”

Teza gasps.

“Yeah, those guys in Hall Four, a savage bunch, I agree, but that’s the wager. Like father, like daughter, they say, and why else would the SLORC have released her? So the generals can have her killed and pretend they had nothing to do with it, right? Then they’ll announce that the house arrest was for her own good and it’s a shame they ever freed her. Our heroes!” Sein Yun claps his hands, then lowers his voice dramatically. “You know, there are still rumors that Ne Win was behind her father’s assassination. And if he could have the great Bogyoke Aung San and his whole cabinet shot to death right in their offices, his lovely daughter doesn’t present much of a challenge.”

“Ko Sein Yun! Don’t say that. I don’t want to hear it.”

“I thought you wanted to know what was going on. That’s what the men are saying.”

“The generals wouldn’t dare touch her. She’s too well known. The entire world would despise them.”

Sein Yun cocks his head to the side. “Has that ever stopped them before? It will be very interesting to see what happens next.”

Teza frowns. “Ko Sein Yun, who’s taking the bets?”

“Hmm?” The palm-reader is backing up, turning to the door.

“Somebody must be making money.”

The slashed grin comes again, a silent part of Sein Yun’s vocabulary. “Little Brother, a very good question. I have no idea. And I don’t mean to offend you, but I’m sick of standing here with your shit in my hands. I’m going to empty this bucket.” The cell door heaves shut.

Teza stands in front of it, shaking his head. When the leader of the National League for Democracy is released from six years of house arrest, the palm-reader responds by organizing a betting racket on the date of her possible assassination. He really is sick. And the only human being Teza speaks to on a daily basis.

Less than five minutes later the palm-reader reappears at the coffin door and hands him the emptied pail. It’s surprisingly clean inside.

“What, you washed it?”

“No, I got the rats to lick it out.” Sein Yun flashes his teeth. “Sometimes the tap at the latrine hole actually works. I sprayed the thing clean.”

Teza stares at the pail. None of his servers has ever done this before. The unexpected kindness and weird intimacy of the act catches him off guard. He had no idea there was a tap at the latrine.

“Don’t look so amazed, you’ll dirty it soon enough. Take it as a token of my friendship.” For once the palm-reader meets Teza’s eye without making a snide comment.

Teza feels genuinely touched. “Thank you.”

“Not at all. It’s your shit that’s getting me out of here. I’m cutting down my sentence with every pail. That’s how we buy freedom in Burma.” He emphasizes his statement by letting go a sonorous fart.

The singer laughs. “I am glad to be contributing in some small way to your impending freedom, Ko Sein Yun.”

“Little Brother, I only wish my shit could do the same for you.” He steps over the threshold of the teak coffin but turns to wink at Teza before he closes the heavy door.

“Ko Sein Yun?”

“Yes?”

“If the next food parcel is empty, I will stop eating. Let them know, would you?”

Sein Yun snaps disapprovingly, “They? They? Who is they?”

“Whoever steals the food.”

“Oh, fucking politicals! If you’re hungry, you stage a hunger strike. Is that intelligent behavior? Eat your fucking breakfast.”

“There was only one fish in the last parcel.”

“I know, I know, one fish and now you’re dying. Try to remember, Songbird, you are too important for them to starve you to death. All right? The parcel is coming. In the meantime, one of these nights you should sing. You know, to celebrate Daw Suu’s release. The cage would go wild. We could have a riot!”

“I could lose more teeth.”

“If you ever need to pull one, let me know, I have a foolproof technique. And I can get you all the paracetamol you want for the pain. Ko Sein Yun, palm-reader extraordinaire, at your service. See you later.”

He pushes the teak door closed. The bolt cracks back into place; the key turns in the lock. Sein Yun’s shuffling feet retreat down the long corridor.

T
he palm-reader’s smell—the ammonia of old sweat, the pungent scent of betel and lime-slaked leaves—hovers in the cell like an unwashed ghost. Teza wrinkles his nose. Then a familiar twitch sends his eyes down to the floor. He swears loudly and stamps his foot, but the cockroaches aren’t afraid. They know this prisoner well. Partly because of Buddhism, partly because their guts make such a mess, Teza doesn’t kill cockroaches.

He squats and glares down. They’re on their way to his breakfast. The only way to keep them at bay while he’s eating is to give them their own little meal. “You’re worse than the damn wardens!” He collects the rice Sein Yun spilled and places it, in several discrete portions, in front of the advancing battalion.

He shifts the tray to the center of the cell, away from the roaches, quickly rinses his hands, then sits down to eat, facing the teak door. His fingers pause at the tray’s edge.

Pea curry. Pea soup, really, because a curry requires spices and oil, two ingredients that are mostly absent from this gray water. Completing the menu is half a teaspoon of very low-quality fermented fish paste and a clump of broken rice.

The evening meal is slightly different: a kind of vegetable soup, also mostly water, also served with rice normally fed to pigs. Sometimes the “vegetable” is simply grass, or stalks of cauliflower. Occasionally he receives a piece of gristle in his soup. The prison kings believe this piece of gristle is meat, which shows how corrupt, well-fed men gradually lose touch with reality.

Dissatisfied with plain rice, a few of the cockroaches have begun a hesitant advance toward Teza, who claps his hands together. “Get away from me, you fascists, get away!” It depends on his mood. He also calls them socialists, capitalists, Americans, imperialists, Chinese businessmen, and bloody dictators.

With oily grace, the troop disperses, back to the rice, into the dark corners.

Still sitting before his food, the singer clasps his index finger and thumb around his wrist. It used to be that the index finger wouldn’t reach his thumb. Only the middle finger could close the bracelet. But now index finger meets thumb with room to spare. The prison is erasing him.

Weighing himself this way, or looking down at the knobbed bones of his hips, or feeling the holes in his gums where teeth used to be, Teza experiences a disturbing lucidity of vision, as though he is dreaming of someone else. There he is, a man with dark eyes and famine wrists, black hair grown to his shoulders. He sits in the center of a small cell, encircled by a shifting ring of cockroaches. Taking a deep breath, he begins to eat the broken rice with his long fingers, pinching the grains into a ball, dipping it into the fish paste and the soup, lifting the food to his lips. With the third bite, his teeth close on a small stone. One of the reasons he eats slowly is to catch these dangerous bits. He once found a piece of iron the size of a fingernail in his soup.

His tongue delivers the stone out of his mouth. Like a child on a riverbank, he turns it this way and that, as though it might bear a secret mark of worth. But it’s just a small gray rock. He places it on the tray’s edge, for later. Nothing is useless in a coffin.

Nausea undulates through his stomach, ripples up into his throat.
Ya-deh, ya-deh, ya-ba-deh
. Never, never mind, it doesn’t matter. He disciplines himself to chew, chew. No matter how bad it tastes, every meal is a small event in the abyss of prison time.

Chew, chew, chew. It’s like gnawing the mat at the entrance to a noodle shop. There is food somewhere beyond it, on a higher plane.

Now comes the inevitable swallow.

He’s sad to admit how good it tastes, once the first few mouthfuls have gone down. Saliva floods in. His stomach stretches inside his body, opening like the mouth of a famished child. Only after eating can he think clearly about the palm-reader’s news.

W
hat does it mean, really, that Daw Suu has been released from house arrest? He would like her freedom to mean something, to change everything, but his lips shut tightly and pull inward like an old man’s. Daw Aung San Suu Kyi’s hands are clean of blood and of blood money. But she’s no different from her many supporters, the brave, outspoken ones, the silent ones. She is no different from her brilliant, murdered father. She is only human.

He shakes his head and gazes around his cell. His memories can be so painfully vivid. Perhaps some law of physics intersects with a law of incarceration: that is why prison chronology runs backward. The past is the most compelling evidence toward a future different from this moment: the walls, the lizards, his bucket of shit and piss, the clay water pot, its sides slicked with algae.

He touches his hair. Sein Yun is full of crap. How can he wash his hair with water from his drinking pot? Why don’t they just shave his head? On a sudden impulse, he yanks out a few oily strands. As soon as the interrogators were finished with him, white began to salt the hair directly above his left eyebrow, the one split in two by a boot. Jailer Chit Naing told him there’s a thick swath of white now. Teza stares at the pulled hairs in vague disbelief. No one in his family, not even his grandparents, had such pure white hair. He might as well have snow on his fingers.

H
e wonders if his mother’s hair is graying now. After all she’s been through, he wouldn’t be surprised. Hpo Hpo, his maternal grandfather, had streaks of white in his always-pomaded black hair; his
grandmother, who died years before her husband, dyed her hair so dark that he remembers it shining velvety purple.

They are the faces that made my face, Teza thinks. He closes his eyes and brings them to the surface of his mind one after the other. His mother. His father. His grandparents on both sides. Aung Min too. And Thazin. Daw Suu Kyi. These are the faces he keeps in his heart. His aunties and uncles, his cousins. Friends from university. Certain beloved teachers. He wonders how much the living have changed. Not as much as he has. And the dead stay as they are.

He remembers the old family photographs displayed on the wall of the sitting room, below the altar. In one of them his mother was still a girl, wearing a traditional blouse of homespun cotton, the cloth-knot button closed gracefully at the neck. She is smiling demurely, round-faced and dimpled, but from the glint in her eye and the almost ironic tilt of her head, you suspect that she wants to stick out her tongue and cross her eyes. In some of the photographs from the early years of her marriage, Daw Sanda
did
make funny faces, mugging for the camera or grinning broadly. As their lives became more difficult, her smiles grew subdued or disappeared altogether, and her arms cradled each other, as though carrying some invisible weight.

Her serious expression in the more recent pictures was similar to much older photographs of great-uncles and -aunts and grandparents. These people stared bleakly forward, pressed into time through the narrow black hole of the camera. Most of the portraits were taken shortly after World War II, and the harshness of the Japanese occupation still showed in their solemn eyes.

There were photographs of his father, Dr. Kyaw Win Thu, on the wall too, a slender man with a slightly impish grin and penetrating eyes, eyes that looked so directly at Teza that he sometimes had to turn away from their gaze. The doctor’s mouth often seemed to be puckered slightly, as if he wanted to speak but was hesitating. What? What was he going to say? When Teza was a teenager, his father’s photographs impressed him as much as Bogyoke Aung San’s did; both men’s faces showed so much purpose and intelligence. And both were inseparable from a devastating sense of loss.

Bogyoke Aung San’s face was and still is everywhere. It stared out from the front wall of every classroom Teza ever entered. They had a picture of him in the family sitting room too; it was the first thing you saw when you walked into the house. He remembers Bogyoke Aung San’s intelligent eyes turned toward a future they would never see. In that image the singer finds Daw Suu’s more delicate narrow jaw and cheeks, the fine bone structure visible through the flesh, giving both father and daughter a severe and haunting dignity.

Now the daughter’s face is iconic, revered in the same way, but it’s illegal, and very dangerous, to exhibit her portrait in public. As soon as she became politically involved, images of her started to circulate. Teza once showed her photo to people in a tea shop. Country folk, in the city to join the demonstrations for a day, they crowded around his little table and asked him hushed questions about the famous lady, daughter of the great man.

She does look like him. But her popularity can’t be explained solely by her link to Bogyoke Aung San. Part of her power, Teza thinks, lies in the fact that she is both Burmese and foreign. She has come from the outside world and chosen to stay in this isolated country. She is a refined Burmese woman, and a Buddhist—the latter is very important for the people. But what she carries from her life abroad is the future, which is already happening everywhere outside of Burma. She is the link between that future and Burma’s past.