Free The Lizard Cage by Karen Connelly Page A

read by an unknown number of political prisoners held in solitary confinement.
    In his mind, the cheroot-makers are beautiful, goodhearted, with pale swirls of thanakha paste smeared, powderlike, on their cheeks. If they knew they were making cheroots for him, they would find a way to put Dostoyevsky into the filter,
The Brothers Karamazov
, Tolstoy’s
War and Peace
, a great tome by Pablo Neruda, and
Gone With the Wind
, a book he’s wanted to read ever since he saw a photograph of Vivien Leigh in an ancient
Time
magazine. They would fill their cheroots with popular Burmese novels and bowls of curry. They would send wreaths of the sweetest jasmine to him, sticks of incense and squares of gold foil for worship. They are fine young women. Teza ceases to be angry with the blank newsprint. He thinks of girls’ hands, working.
    When the unwrapping is done, he lines up the tattered bits of printed paper.
    He reads as slowly as possible, to make the words last.
      his mother explain
 but I don’t trust
jealous of his love
to crying every day
  escape the pressure
sure he loves me bu
not know his mother
a terrible hell.
     the small America
n man killed 17 p
Including small c
n lone old woman
eapons are easy t
ate of violence d
many murders per
decaying family v
very different fr
Burma uncorrupted.
    she was like a star wi
  loved me in the same m
  ver despite everything
 without her. She was w
when she left, tears be
 like rain. When I woul
  without the clarity of
 later understood the d
what I believed and no
      child remembered
 names of his former
 and siblings, includ
the existence of a l
 boa constrictor with
  snake remained altho
 boy every night, ne
  nor aggression. Ko K
described flawlessly
even the kind of bla
 pots and pans, showi
 familiarity with all
  of Mandalay Division
    The singer smiles at that last one. He’s sure his mother would have read the article.
    May May is a great reader. She is one of those fearless women on the bus who will hold a page up to the light to read through the censorship ink. Black ink is impossible to penetrate, but if the ink is silver, you can hold it up to the light and make out the hidden words. She will even lift a blackened page up to the sky anyway, just to show her contempt. A man leaned over to her once and asked, with the urgency of fear in his voice, “What are you doing?”
    In a stage whisper, she replied, “I am reading.” Then she went back to trying to decipher the inked-out words.
    This is his mother, a small-boned warrior. Even if she did not purchase a copy of this particular newspaper, someone in the neighborhood would have brought her the article. Someone would have seen it and thought,
Ah, Daw Sanda will be interested in this, she will tell a story
.
    Daw Sanda believes in the children who remember their past lives. Their stories are printed in dozens of popular magazines across the country. She clips these tales with red-handled scissors and places them in a series of numbered folders marked REINCARNATION/REBIRTH . Stories like the one from the cheroot filter, about boys who remember the names of strangers and tame snakes and know the location of household items in houses they’ve never seen before, are very popular. She retells these stories with the passion of a true believer, describing in artful detail even the unpublished parts of the accounts. She explains to her neighbors that most of us forget the secrets we knew at birth. Education and parents insist that we forget.
    But determined children remember. Without having been taught, they can speak strange dialects from other parts of the country. They beg to visit certain men and women who live thousands of miles away. On meeting, theyrecognize these strangers as their parents or friends of the past. Even friendly animals are considered to be reincarnations of recently deceased people.
    Having grown up on a diet of these accounts, Teza believed in them wholeheartedly until he