The Rebel and the Thief Read online

  ALSO BY JAN-PHILIPP SENDKER

  The Art of Hearing Heartbeats

  A Well-Tempered Heart

  The Heart Remembers

  The Long Path to Wisdom: Tales from Burma

  Copyright © 2021 by Jan-Philipp Sendker

  Copyright © 2021 by Karl Blessing Verlag

  Originally published in German as Die Rebellin und der Dieb in 2021 by Karl Blessing Verlag, a division of Penguin Random House Verlagsgruppe GmbH, Munich, Germany

  Translation copyright © 2022 by Other Press

  Production editor: Yvonne E. Cárdenas

  Text Designer: Jennifer Daddio

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from Other Press LLC, except in the case of brief quotations in reviews for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast. For information write to Other Press LLC, 267 Fifth Avenue, 6th Floor, New York, NY 10016. Or visit our Web site: www.otherpress.com.

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

  Names: Sendker, Jan-Philipp, author. | Taylor, Imogen, translator.

  Title: The rebel and the thief / Jan-Philipp Sendker; translated from the German by Imogen Taylor.

  Other titles: Rebellin und der Dieb. English

  Description: New York : Other Press, [2022] | “Originally published in German as Die Rebellin und der Dieb in 2021 by Karl Blessing Verlag, München”

  Identifiers: LCCN 2022010799 (print) | LCCN 2022010800 (ebook) | ISBN 9781635423044 (paperback) | ISBN 9781635423051 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCGFT: Romance fiction. | Novels.

  Classification: LCC PT2721.E54 R4313 2022 (print) | LCC PT2721.E54 (ebook) | DDC 833/.92-dc23/eng/20220311

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022010799

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022010800

  Ebook ISBN 9781635423051

  Publisher’s Note

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

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  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Jan-Philipp Sendker

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Authors

  TO

  Anna, Florentine, Theresa, and Jonathan

  AND IN MEMORY OF

  Kyal Sin

  (2002–2021)

  ONE

  I don’t have much time to tell my story. It’s only a matter of hours till they find us—maybe a day if we’re lucky.

  How did this happen? How did someone as quiet and obedient as me end up being a thief on the run? How do any of us end up where we do?

  The truth is, I don’t know. I crossed a line to help my sister—a line I hadn’t thought I’d ever even get close to.

  I was helpless and decided to do something about it. Then one thing led to another. Not because I had any particular plan, but because life never stands still; it’s not a film you can pause or rewind.

  It was never a dream of mine to be a hero. A lot of people see me that way because of what I’ve done, but that was a question of circumstances, and those circumstances were out of my control.

  Did I have a choice? Looking back, maybe I did. But at the time I was making the decisions, it didn’t feel like it.

  I was in trouble, and I took the liberty of not dwelling on the consequences of my acts. I never believed I could save the world. The most I had hoped for was to save a few people from sickness, hunger, and death.

  * * *

  —

  It all started with my little sister crying in her sleep.

  It wasn’t even proper crying—more like a faint whimper broken by the occasional cough. Despite the heat, she had slid close to me and flung an arm over my belly; I could feel her warm breath on my skin. A sob wracked her body. I didn’t know what to do.

  But maybe that wasn’t the beginning. Maybe it all started much earlier, when someone bought a bat or a pangolin at an animal market in China and was infected with a virus—or when negligence in a laboratory led to the escape of a deadly disease that traveled around the world, killing millions in its wake, including, probably, my auntie Bora.

  It may even have started earlier still, when my parents decided to leave their country to seek their fortune—or at least escape their misfortune.

  Who can tell when and where a story begins and ends? Life, my father says, is a circle. We’re born, we die, we’re born again…There’s no point looking for beginnings and ends.

  * * *

  —

  My sister was trembling, as if she were cold.

  I was sweating.

  It had been over a hundred degrees that day, and the heat built up in our shack like water at a dam. The nights brought little relief. Hungry mosquitoes whined around our heads; a spider crawled up my leg. I didn’t even try to shake it off—I was afraid of waking my sister. We were lying on our raffia mats, and it must have been after midnight because the evening voices had died down. The old drunk next door had settled in for the night. The cantankerous couple opposite us seemed to have dropped asleep in exhaustion. Even the shanty belonging to the widow with six children and as many lovers was quiet at last.

  Our parents were asleep beside us; I could tell from my father’s snoring and my mother’s heavy breathing, broken by bouts of coughing. She was sick too. Maybe she’d caught what her sister had. Whatever it was, she had a cough and a temperature and was getting weaker by the day. It might be malaria, pneumonia, TB. Or it might be the new virus. We’d never find out, just as we’d never know for certain what Auntie Bora died of.

  Yesterday, with my help, my mother had made it to the bathroom. Today she hadn’t got up at all. Every breath she took sounded painful and labored.

  I’m not especially sensitive to sounds. The gnawing of rats at my ear, the buzz of insects, the shouts of people arguing in the shack next door, the low moans of lovers and indigents—I heard them and at the same time I didn’t. They went right through me without leaving a trace. My sister’s sobbing was different. It gave me an almost physical pain. It reminded me too much of my other little sister, Mayari, who had died three years before. She had whimpered like that too, in the nights before she fell asleep and never woke up
.

  “Thida,” I whispered, “what’s wrong?” It was a stupid question. I knew quite well she was hungry.

  I wondered whether there was anything left to eat. I’d had a little packet of cookies hidden between the boards, but she’d had them the day before. The bananas were long gone. There were no leftovers from dinner, because there hadn’t been any dinner. Or lunch for that matter. The only meal of the day had been a bowl of rice and a mango that we’d split between the three of us. It was a mystery to me where my father had found that mango. Chewing gum sometimes helped the hunger, but I’d swapped my last piece for half a cup of rice a couple of days back.

  I stroked Thida’s sweaty hair out of her face, and she looked at me with half-open eyes. Her lips moved, but there was no need for words. My belly was empty too. A hole in my gut. If you’ve never been hungry, you don’t know what it feels like. I’d had cramps all day. But I’m eighteen, I can take it. Thida is five.

  A rat scuttled across the room, stopping halfway to stand on its hind legs and sniff the air. I threw a flip-flop at it. Not even a rat would find anything to eat in here, and I was afraid it might get it into its head to bite Thida.

  * * *

  —

  Not long since, we hadn’t known what hunger was. My father had worked as Mr. Benz’s security guard for fifteen years, and we’d been pretty well-off. Mr. Benz wasn’t his real name, but when we first knew him—before he started building shopping malls and converting paddy fields into housing plots—he had had a Benz dealership, and I can’t remember ever calling him anything else.

  My father had started out as an assistant gardener and quickly worked his way up to security guard. Most of his days were spent on a stool in a little hut next to the gate, dressed in his gray-blue uniform and meticulously polished black boots. Every morning when Mr. Benz left the house with his chauffeur, he would jump to his feet, slide the heavy, black-barred gate open, and then stand to attention and watch the car drive away, not moving until it had disappeared into the traffic. This scene was repeated every evening when Mr. Benz returned home, or when Mrs. Benz or the children went out. Other than this, my father’s job as a security guard demanded little of him. The grounds were surrounded by a high wall topped with shards of broken glass and three rows of barbed wire. For a time, there were also surveillance cameras connected to a monitor in my father’s hut. He used to spend hours switching from one camera to the next and staring at the identical black-and-white images. I sometimes kept him company when I was a kid, but nothing ever happened, and I would soon tire of it. Not so my father—or at least he never let it show if he did. Then the cameras stopped working and no one bothered to replace them.

  My mother cooked for the family, and Auntie Bora did the shopping and helped out in the kitchen. In our last year there, I was put in charge of the big gardens and the tennis court after the previous gardener was fired for taking secret photos of the grounds on his phone.

  I was also responsible for looking after the spirit house. There was a big old banyan tree in the garden, inhabited by a spirit who watched over the villa and its grounds. Long ago, a small house had been built for this spirit, and every day I would leave offerings in it on behalf of the Benz family: a vase of fresh flowers, a small glass of water—things like that. The Benzes were Christian, but Mrs. Benz was very superstitious and went to the spirit house several times a week to make sure it was clean and the flowers fresh. I often saw her lay large pomelos or mangos in front of the altar, and ask the spirit for a favor or protection. In the months after her daughter’s accident, she was there every day.

  * * *

  —

  My parents, aunt, sister, and I lived together in a bungalow next to the gate. “Bungalow” is perhaps too grand a word for our little house, but my parents called it that, and from what they said, it was by far the biggest and nicest they had ever lived in. It had two rooms. In one of them, we unrolled our five sleeping mats every night; in the other was a table, a television, our altar, and two shelves. At the back of the house was a bathroom with a shower and toilet. The walls and floors were concrete; the roof was corrugated iron. During the monsoon, the pelting rain made such a racket that we couldn’t hear ourselves think. Our greatest luxury was the air-conditioning—even on the hottest, most humid nights we never had to sweat.

  We ate in the main house, in a little servants’ room off the kitchen. We wanted for nothing. We had it good. So good, that hardly a day went by when my mother didn’t give a deep sigh and ask what we’d done to deserve such good fortune.

  All that changed overnight.

  First, Auntie Bora came down with a temperature. She had a cough, a sore throat, and a headache. We supposed she had caught a cold at the market, and thought nothing of it. Colds, even bad ones, came and went.

  But the fever continued to climb.

  And then came the virus. Or rather, the news of a virus. Or perhaps only the fear of a virus—back then, it was hard to know.

  The government appealed to all citizens on Facebook, asking them to wash their hands regularly with soap, cough into their elbows, wear masks, stay at home if they had a temperature, and keep their distance from each other. All borders to neighboring countries were closed.

  Mrs. Benz had asthma, and the family was worried for her. My mother was the only one of us still permitted to enter the house. As well as a mask, she had to wear disposable gloves, a protective gown, and plastic overshoes. She was only allowed to leave the grounds to go shopping, and the rest of us weren’t allowed out at all. The Benzes asked if we were all healthy; unsuspectingly, we told them about Auntie Bora’s fever and cough. That was perhaps a mistake, but something tells me they’d have found out sooner or later.

  Mr. Benz gave us half an hour. My mother cried; my sister cried. Auntie Bora didn’t cry. I expect she was too weak by then.

  My father and I began to get ready. It didn’t take long; our few belongings could be packed in a matter of minutes. My T-shirts, underwear, two pairs of pants, two longyis—it all fitted easily into one of the plastic bags that Mrs. Benz had kindly asked the chauffeur to leave on our doorstep. Precisely twenty-nine minutes later—my father is a stickler for punctuality—we were outside the gate, leaving behind us the only home my sister and I had ever known. No one came to say goodbye—but then we hadn’t expected them to.

  I took charge of the bags with our belongings. My mother carried our altar in one hand; with the other she kept a firm hold on Thida, who had her stuffed elephant tucked under her arm. My father pushed the moped, with the small television and our raffia mats strapped to its luggage rack. Auntie Bora was so feverish she could barely keep on her feet and had to cling to my father for support.

  Our biggest problem was that we had no idea where we were going. We had no relatives in town. We were all the family there was.

  My parents came to this country twenty years ago looking for work, and my sisters and I were born here. My father started out taking whatever employment he could get. He worked as a builder, a dishwasher, and a gardener; he polished cars at a car wash, swept streets, collected garbage, and worked as a night watchman at a parking lot. Meanwhile my mother minded other people’s kids, massaged other people’s feet, and washed other people’s laundry. They never made much money, but it was enough to keep us from starving and give us a roof over our heads. They were proud of that. Then someone recommended them to the Benzes and they started working there.

  What we didn’t have were official papers. No work permits, no visas, no ID, no passports—not even birth certificates. Nothing. We were “illegals.” We didn’t officially exist. This meant that I couldn’t attend a normal public school when I was a kid, but had to be taught by monks in a nearby monastery, together with other “illegal” kids. It meant that we couldn’t take my sister to a hospital when she fell sick. It meant that my father didn’t go to the police when his first moped was stolen, and that my mother didn’t pr
ess charges when a man did things to her that she only just managed to confess to her husband.

  Going back to my parents’ country wasn’t an option. The borders were closed, and in any case, our family belonged to the Koo minority. Even in their own country, the Koos were only tolerated; they’d had no rights for centuries. It was complicated.

  * * *

  —

  We made our way down the road; Thida kept asking where we were going.

  We spent the first night under a bridge, the second in a subway entrance, and the third at a disused building site. Auntie Bora coughed a lot, wheezing and gasping as though she might choke to death at any moment. My father and I took turns carrying her on our backs, and it made me sad to feel how sick and exhausted she was. She’d grown so thin she felt like a bag of bones.

  There were some workmen living on the building site. Their job was to make sure that no one stole any tools or building material, though things went missing all the same—sacks of concrete, boxes of nails, spools of cable. At first, these men tried to send us on our way, but my father’s entreaties—and Auntie Bora’s cellphone—changed their minds. When Auntie Bora died two days later, they helped us dig her a grave at the edge of the site.

  My father spent the days looking for a job. He set off soon after sunrise, confident that with his credentials as security guard, gardener, car washer, and street sweeper, he would soon find something. Every evening he returned disappointed. No one had work for him; everyone was afraid. Despite the long years of working for the Benzes, we had no savings. My father was a Buddhist; he wasn’t interested in personal property. At the end of every month he had taken what was left of our wages and delivered it in person to the local monastery. Their need was greater than ours, he always said.

  * * *

  —

  The day after Auntie Bora died, the workmen told us that the police were starting to patrol the disused building sites and arrest any illegals they found. We decided it was too risky to hang around any longer—we might get separated or thrown into jail. And so we packed our things and moved on.