Ajo Kawir and Iteung’s reconciliation transforms an old separation into a mutual declaration of love and a decision to marry. Its decisive turn is not a cure for Ajo Kawir’s erectile dysfunction, but Iteung’s refusal to treat it as a barrier: he tells her plainly that he cannot get hard, and she answers that she still loves him and will marry him. Their reunion gives Ajo Kawir a happiness he had thought impossible, while leaving him caught between this new future and the masculine code that forbids him to withdraw from a challenge he has already made.

Separation, desire, and risk

Ajo Kawir’s inability to get an erection has shaped how he understands himself and his prospects with Iteung. He privately addresses his penis as the Bird and tries to wake it, but it remains asleep; the private ritual makes his condition feel both intimate and beyond his control. Iwan Angsa, one of the few people who knows, links that condition to fearlessness in a saying about men who cannot get hard fighting without fear of death. Ajo Kawir’s own reasoning makes the connection personal: as he faces the danger of killing the Tiger, he imagines that death would end his unfinished business with Iteung and spare him further suffering over his body.

The threat of the fight makes reconciliation more urgent without becoming its cause in any simple sense. Gecko warns that the worst outcome would not only be the Tiger killing Ajo Kawir, but someone else killing him for announcing his intention to kill the Tiger. Ajo Kawir is therefore contemplating both physical danger and the possibility of escaping the pain attached to his desire for Iteung. The reunion later alters what he stands to lose: he no longer faces the challenge as a man with nothing to look forward to.

The return to Iteung

After a fight, Ajo Kawir calls Iteung’s name and tells her he loves her. The moment is uncertain: he cannot tell whether she has heard him, and she stops as she walks away, but he loses sight of her before he can know what her response will be. The confession nevertheless makes explicit what had remained unresolved between them, and gives the subsequent search its emotional direction.

Ajo Kawir goes to Iteung’s home with Gecko and asks to see her. A middle-aged woman there recognizes him by name and says Iteung talks about him often. She does not know what happened between them, because Iteung has never explained it, but reports that Iteung calls his name in her sleep and has been sad. The account supplies evidence of Iteung’s continuing attachment without pretending that Ajo Kawir knows her feelings in advance.

Iteung is not at home. The woman directs Ajo Kawir to Mister Lebe’s fishpond, where Iteung has asked her father to take her and where she sits in the grass. Ajo Kawir decides to go there alone, telling Gecko that his friend need not accompany him. The movement from the household, where Iteung’s feelings are reported by another person, to the fishpond, where the two can speak directly, brings the reconciliation out of hearsay and into a shared encounter.

A condition named, love returned

At the fishpond, Ajo Kawir rests with his head in Iteung’s lap. She holds him, wipes the blood from his nose, caresses him, and kisses his head; he returns her caress and wipes away her tears. Their gestures establish tenderness before their conversation makes the terms of their reunion explicit. The scene’s emotional movement is reciprocal: neither person is only an observer or a recipient of the other’s care.

Ajo Kawir names the condition that has helped keep him apart from Iteung: he cannot get hard. Iteung answers that she does not care and still loves him. When he asks what she will do with a man who cannot get hard, she says she will marry him. The exchange does not present marriage as evidence that his erectile dysfunction has disappeared. Instead, Iteung’s answer refuses the assumption that sexual capacity must determine whether he can be loved or become her husband.

The proposal’s force comes from its directness and from the order of the exchange. Ajo Kawir does not conceal his condition or wait for it to change before asking whether there can be a future. Iteung’s response joins two commitments—love and marriage—without qualification in the evidence. Their reconciliation is thus a decision made with the known difficulty still present, not a promise dependent on its cure.

Happiness and the challenge to the Tiger

After finding Iteung, Ajo Kawir recognizes that he has reached the threshold of happiness and is planning to marry the woman he loves. He also recognizes that he need not fight the Tiger: he could return the advance money taken from Uncle Bunny and avoid risking their shared future in a pointless duel. The possibility of withdrawal makes the change in his circumstances concrete. Before the reunion, death could seem like an escape from longing and shame; now, a fight could deprive him of a life he wants.

Yet happiness does not immediately dissolve the code by which Ajo Kawir measures manhood. He tells Gecko that a man cannot back out after challenging someone to fight. He had challenged the Tiger in the Tiger’s hometown, and the advance money further ties the boast to an obligation. Ajo Kawir imagines the humiliating alternative of withdrawing and running, describing himself as a loser; his words show how strongly public honor and masculine identity constrain the choice to preserve his new happiness.

The reconciliation therefore changes the stakes without resolving the conflict. Iteung’s acceptance offers Ajo Kawir an intimate future beyond his bodily condition, but his challenge remains an opposing claim on that future. The event joins love to the novel’s wider examination of masculinity: the man who associates fearlessness with impotence can now imagine a life worth protecting, even as the honor code he has invoked makes retreat feel like a failure.