Free The Lizard Cage by Karen Connelly

of the number appeals to him. It’s the filters he needs, not the cigars themselves. In the interest of formality and restraint, he tries not to smoke them before the ritual begins, but even if he breaks down and indulges, he carefully, religiously saves the butts. Ten cheroots take about a week or so to hoard, depending on the generosity of Sein Yun and his more irregular supplier, Jailer Chit Naing.
    At university he read of the Japanese tea ceremony. From meditation, he knows the art of mindfulness. Each movement must come slowly, aware of itself but not ponderous. Sitting back on his heels, as though about to pray, he intones, “The Burmese Cheroot Ceremony” in a solemn voice.
    In his second and third year, he occasionally laughed after saying this, but not a sigh of amusement escapes him now. The ritual has grown in importancewith the passage of time. He performs it to mark birthdays and anniversaries. Now he will honor Daw Suu. His back to the cell door, he runs one of the cigars under his nose: woodsmoke and trees. The vision rises in his mind as clearly as one of those photographs from the family collection. His grandfather is smoking in a tea shop near the Chinese market in Mandalay.
    Inside a cheroot is the smell of Burma.
    After eating and meditating, the cheroot ceremony is the most important event in his life. It is a challenge to perform it well. To peel the filters apart slowly enough is an act of discipline.
    The filters are made with ridged, dried straw. Holding the filters tight is a band of newspaper.
    Words.
    The cheroots are not all the same brand. Some are finer, some coarser. One is even expensively wrapped in plastic, and thinner than the others. That devil Sein Yun, he has good connections. Going from right to left, Teza works the circular paper label off each cigar butt.
    After years of practice, he’s able to peel open the cylinder of dried leaf without breaking it. He slowly draws out the filter. Then he pulls the newspaper away from the filter of rolled straw.
    He pauses, holding his breath.
    Nothing. No footsteps or voices outside the teak coffin.
    His meticulousness is precaution as well as ritual; he is afraid of getting caught. The filter paper is smaller than a matchbook. It is actually two pieces of newsprint glued together, wrapped in a snug band and tucked into the first layer of straw. He carefully works the paper off, then separates it into its halves and lays them out before him. He tries to flatten them, but they always curl back into the shape of the filter.
    Sometimes the cheroot-makers make the filters quite narrow. How upsetting! He depends on two inches of newsprint and sometimes gets only an inch or less. When a filter comes from a top or bottom margin, there are no words on it at all. While he unrolls this blank paper, his forehead wrinkles, pushing his eyebrows and nose into a scowl of accusation. He consciously smooths out his face again, as he smooths out the crinkled paper, but it’s difficult to stave off the feeling of annoyance.
    He attempts to make it into a joke.
    Don’t those damn girls know they’re preparing my reading material?
    Don’t they care?
    T he cheroot ceremony returns Teza to his country. Performing it, he leaves the prison. Though he’s a city boy, he tramps to the villages, where the cheroot-makers work hard at their low tables. He wonders if they ever sing. At dawn the girls walk to the crumbling wooden house that serves as a factory. Fifty of them sit on the floor in a dim room. Cheroot after cheroot rolls from the girls’ hands, from seven in the morning until seven at night. Through the light of late afternoon they walk home again, the lanes of red dust busy with scrawny chickens. Ox carts sway back from the fields through the tall trees. The girls fall in love with village boys and marry. They become mothers. If their babies die, they make more. They make thousands of cheroots, smoked by millions of men and grandmothers all over Burma and