Read The Lizard Cage for Free Online Page B

wanted to crush and destroy, it was that word they shared with him.
    “Teza!” shouts Teza. The cockroach scurries back out of the cell, under the coffin door. It’s almost breakfast time, and the morning patrol of hungry vermin is gathering at the gates.
    The fire of real power and glory, Teza thinks, is the sun shining through monsoon clouds. Light drops over the high outer walls of the cage and pours through the air vent. The singer stands and steps into the warm stream. He lifts his face toward the invisible sky. From this new position, he sees that the spider has spun his web at an extraordinary angle. It gleams like the blueprint of a jewel, the spinner at the center a living ruby.
    How would the spider taste?
    Hungry body, abominable mind!
    How long have I been hungry? How long is hunger?
    “Hunger is as long as all your bones laid end to end in an empty field. Times five.”
    Kicking off his slippers, Teza begins to walk it out, back and forth, back and forth, between the aluminum shit pail and the clay water pot.
    A s though from a great distance, Sammy the iron-beater strikes the time. Teza keeps pacing. He counts each clang with a footfall. When he turns on his heel and walks back toward the door, he stares at the stained teak and speaks to it directly. “I will be fed. You must feed me. I am truly hungry now. Feed me!” Eleven o’clock is the hour of the morning meal.
    The door whispers,
Teza, you are an idiot
.
    The singer nods. The door is a good-natured realist. They could leave Teza in here to starve. No one would know. The Chief Warden could report that the prisoner contracted a wasting illness. Tuberculosis, say. It’s a big problem in the cage. Or dysentery, that other killer, so common and so feared.
    M inutes pass. The sunlight slowly retreats. The intricate web and its ruby spider disappear. He wishes he could have a plant, some green thing in his cell. It’s true that when he was first imprisoned, he believed his name was his only weapon, one that he would never relinquish. But now he would trade his name for a potted orchid.
    As a boy, he knew that messages are meant to be given away, passed along, but he wondered how he was supposed to give away his own name.
    The realization came slowly, through music. Like many Burmese boys, he grew up strumming a guitar, but by the time he was in high school it was clear he had more talent than most of his schoolmates. This dismayed his mother—Daw Sanda wanted him to be a doctor like his father—but delighted his friends. The girls especially loved having a musician around; Teza knew all the popular songs, including the sappy love ballads. At university he started to write and perform his own music at parties, in small concerts. He became known on the Rangoon campus as the Singer.
    In 1988 he was in his last year of an English lit. degree, finishing several semesters late because of failed exams. Becoming a serious musician made him an indifferent scholar, though no one could deny that university life was good for writing lyrics and spending time with one’s friends, which is why he wanted to prolong it indefinitely. The depressing specter of adulthood loomed at the gates of Rangoon University, beyond which lay a city, a whole country, perfectly empty of opportunity, especially for someone like him. Only children of high-ranking military officers or businessmen with good connections could get excited about the future.
    His family was decidedly
un
connected to the regime. On the contrary, both Teza and Aung Min were guilty by association. When they were small boys, their father, Dr. Kyaw Win Thu, had been imprisoned as a communist sympathizer. Very poor, with two young sons and a husband in prison, their educated, cultured mother made a surprising but pragmatic move. She went into business for herself and opened a laundry. It was successful enough to keep them all fed and clothed and to educate the boys. As Teza grew up, however, the laundry became a