Free The Lizard Cage by Karen Connelly Page B

went to university, where he was informed that his mother was superstitious, old-fashioned. He gravitated toward those students who talked about doing away with superstitions and embracing whatever scraps of audacious modernity the world smuggled through Burma’s closed borders. That included rejecting the popular stories of reincarnation. But now, with reality shrunk to the dimensions of his cell and his mind, believing has taken on a new power.
    Omens, dreams, the power of the sacred places, the secret messages of the cheroots themselves: these have become crucial. Everything his mother and his grandfather told him about Buddhism, the nats, and any kind of magic has been pulled out of the well of his memory and used to slake his thirst for meaning.
    That’s why these tiny pieces of paper are so important. Pressing the palms of his hands together, the singer chooses another filter. The words are runes. Each piece of paper has a story, whether a sad romance from the literary section or a boring government announcement or a funeral notice. Whispering under his breath, Teza fills in the missing text.
    After the story he searches for the secret, the message encoded on every bit of paper. The torn-edged missives seem anonymous, but Teza knows the world has sent them. The scraps emerge from the vastness of his country, across the rivers and fields, given by the hands of strangers. They pass through walls, gates, bars, enormous doors. They move across compounds, through cells in the halls Teza has never seen, down corridors filled with the very particular smell of imprisoned men.
    beyond a doubt
triumphant
prove
    He knows this ceremony of words and their secret messages brings illumination.
    mother
trust
love
wish
escape
hell
    Sometimes the messages are not secret. The meanings are miraculously evident. The scraps of paper reveal Burma’s true history.
    thousands killed
easy violence
decaying Burma
    The tiny clippings are laid out before him. He picks his favorite one and places it in his opposite hand like a piece of jewelry.
    loved
despite everything
rain
understood
    Teza reads the small shred of paper again, and again. Part of the discipline of the cheroot ceremony involves sitting as though in meditation, not allowing himself to wander into memory and fantasy. He will keep this filter paper, and the one about reincarnation, instead of shredding them up with the others and dropping the pieces into his shit pail.
    Until three years ago he kept all the scraps, using and reusing them, trying and sometimes succeeding in fitting bits of an article together from the same brand of cheroot. Then his cell was raided.
    The warders found his little cheroot documents wrapped up in hisspare shirt. He had made a kind of daily crossword game out of the bits, and the Chief Warden said they were political messages, so the warders had to beat him and threaten him with the dog cells. They used to keep dogs in them, but during a prison riot the prisoners killed and ate most of the hounds. After that, the Chief Warden decided the cages would become punishment cells. Men live in them now, exposed to the elements and trapped for months at a time with the accumulation of their own urine and feces. Teza wasn’t sent to a dog cell because he would have had too much contact with other politicals. He was just given a good thrashing.
    He doesn’t know how that particular session ended. The beatings melt into one another because they’re so similar. You have to assume a certain position—it’s in the regulations. Half squat on your toes with your legs farther apart than your shoulders. Hold your hands at the back of the neck with elbows in the air. It’s like stopping in the middle of a deep knee bend. Now you are ready, fully exposed: your genitals, your abdomen, your back, your face, your armpits. Your feet are bare and you are as terrified for them as you are for your balls. When the blows begin to fall, you must not move your hands from the back