The Lizard Cage Read Online Free PDF Page A

which keeps him from starving, is late by an entire week. And the last parcel, which came through three weeks ago, was a dud.
    His mother sends them. But before the food reaches him, it has to pass through the holding room to be checked for contraband. Three weeks ago, warders he doesn’t know, or Sein Yun, or some other lousy thief, took all but one of the dried salt fish and most of the deep-fried dried beans too.
    Why did the bastard bother leaving
one
fish? What kind of slap in the face was that? The jerk was just laughing at him. Was it Junior Jailer Handsome? Handsome has only recently started to oversee the teak coffin. He and Sein Yun came together. As Sein Yun replaced Sammy, so Handsome replaced Senior Jailer Chit Naing, a man who’s been a great friend to Teza. Chit Naing would never touch a prisoner’s food. But Handsome is a mean bastard.
    Who knows? Anyone could have stolen it. Teza is grateful to Sein Yun, but the man’s always on the make. He’s even friendly with Handsome. It would make good business sense: Junior Jailer absconds with the fish and Sein Yun sells them in the prisoner halls.
    If the Chief Warden permits these thieves to steal Teza’s food, what does he expect him to live on? Cockroaches? His political ideals? Lizards?
    He strikes the wall with his open hand. Then scolds himself for hurting his palm. He touches the bricks again, gently, as if to apologize.
    Above his head, closer to the teak door, a ceaseless parade of ants marches in a crooked line to where they divide into two streams. One flows into a very thin crack to the left; the other follows a right-hand route much lower down, into a bead-sized gap in the mortar. Before they reach theirdestination, both streams wind and loop over the neighboring bricks. This irregularity has puzzled him for years.
    Why do the ants meander? Why do they not take the shortest, most direct path to the cracks in the wall?
    We cannot say, They are stupid, their brains are small. Their reasons and their wisdom are beyond us. They can do what we cannot. O cell, o shit pail: how you alter the old shape of the world, the perspectives of a living man. On the floor below the bead-sized gap is a small mountain of cement dust, the ants’ excavations. The ants are burrowing their way out.
    Sometimes Teza hears the amber mandibles patiently crunching through the mortar between the bricks. Many legs push the bits back, back, back, passing a piece from one to the other until finally the last ant pushes it out of the wall and it falls into the pile on the floor. Of course he doesn’t hear the bit of mortar fall, but he can hear the ants working, grinding away inside the prison wall. A few hours later he can see how much the pile of cement dust has grown.
    After breaking a length of straw from his mat, he carefully disrupts the march and edges an ant onto the straw. The ant’s antennae wave about, tasting the air. Then he pauses to clean himself.
    “Yes,” Teza whispers above the ant’s head. “The air is dirty too. Wash yourself.”
    The ant obediently licks his brown hands, pulls the flexible antennae to his mouth, runs the thin feelers along his tongue.
    Teza tilts the straw down. The ant crawls up. He turns the straw over. The ant crawls down. The singer paces eight by eight feet with the ant crawling up and down, up and down.
    “I take the ant for a walk,” he explains in English. “I am walking the ant.”
    Promener
, in French. But
ant
? He replaces it with
cat
.
    “Je promène le très très petit chat brun.”
    Among his prison lessons, he has learned how to distinguish eight different kinds of ants, possibly nine, though he is not absolutely sure. He has observed the different personalities of the ants too. Some black ants, contrary to popular belief, are more aggressive than some red ones.
    He wanted to speak fluent English and French. He intended also to read many books. As a boy, he touched as many books as he could in thebookstalls across from