The Lizard Cage Read Online Free PDF

the main post office. He dreamed of owning a library to match his grandfather’s library in Mandalay.
    He puts an imaginary book in his hand and holds it out in front of him. Ant in one hand, invisible book in the other.
    After the rainy season, the pages smell like the forest.
    His grandfather’s bookshelves grew high.
    Hpo Hpo, why do the books smell like damp wood?
    Because every book, in its former life, was a tree.
    I take the ant for a walk.”
    The English words sound without reverberation, absorbed immediately into the walls, the heavy door. That’s partly how the teak coffin got its name. Instead of having bars, the cell is sealed shut with a door made of two bolted slabs of teak. It’s smaller than the other cells, and several men have died in it.
    Teza inclines his head, and in Burmese he speaks with the ant about small, daily things.
    An hour passes. Barefoot, he walks deeper and deeper into hunger. He’ll have to stop walking at the start of the next hour, to save his energy. He won’t want to stop.
    S ammy the iron-beater beats out two o’clock. Curious, isn’t it? Sammy used to see Teza twice daily but could tell him almost nothing. Now they can’t see each other at all, but the big Indian tells him something important every hour.
    Teza squats down in front of the wall and carefully returns his ant to the ant stream. A brief commotion ensues. Antennae wave. Ant hands touch ant faces as the laborers welcome their lost one back to work. Teza’s fingers spread against the wall as he watches two ants break from the line and begin to unstick a flattened mosquito. The singer’s blood glues the mosquito to the brick. With a mixture of clumsy determination and deftness, one worker drags the mosquito into the lower gap in the wall, where all such treasures are stored away.
    Years have passed while Teza has sat or squatted or stood craning hisneck, listening. To the ants. The flies. The lizards. Sometimes hungry rats trundle in through the air vent, squeaking. He knows the voices of the crows and the pigeons on the ramparts. The spider spins and respins his secret web of history. They all have a way of talking in a language beyond human.
    Everything speaks. That is what he has learned here. Even ants pass messages in the labyrinth behind the bricks and mortar. Through messages they build their invisible, invincible world.

. 2 .
    S ix o’clock. He counts the beats carefully, hoping he is wrong.
    He is not wrong. The second and last prison meal of the day is supposed to come at five o’clock. But Sein Yun didn’t appear with his food tray.
    The singer accepts the sad truth. Today he will not eat rice. It happens. Sometimes, if an important prison authority or general has died, or when there has been a major raid or riot in one of the big halls, or when one of the criminal prisoners attacks a warder, the meals are cut, just like that, no explanation. The news has to filter through the cage on its own, which is fine for prisoners in the big halls. If you’re in solitary and your server has disappeared, there is no news at all. There is only the time passing.
    He stares at the door for a while, hoping. It’s his door. He cleans the years of sweat and spit and piss and crushed bugs out of its grain, twists the bolts from its flesh, tears out the locks. He returns the wood to the mill, un-saws it, heaves it back a great distance along plunging mud tracks, asks the elephants to drag it back up the steep hillsides. And then, among the profusion of thick grasses and liana and the calls of wild monkeys and birds, he sets the wood upright and it becomes a tree again, one of the trees in the last great golden teak forests on earth, the jungles of northern Burma.
    He lays his hands upon the brown, pitted surface of the door. It was alive once. The mystery is how everything changes. He closes his eyes.
    Do you remember the banyan tree on Mahabandoola Street, the one wrapped with ribbons and hung with puppets?
    Can you