Iteung’s revenge against the two police officers turns Uncle Bunny’s proposed cure for Ajo Kawir into an act Ajo himself has refused to commit. Uncle Bunny believes that only Ajo can exact the revenge connected to his lost potency; Iteung instead kills the officers on her husband’s behalf. When she finally returns to Ajo and their daughter, she tells him what she has done. The killings restore neither Ajo’s former appetite for violence nor a simple moral order, but the following morning he discovers that his Bird has awakened.

Causes and Background

The revenge is rooted in an earlier chain of events that Uncle Bunny presents as his responsibility. He argues that if he had protected Agus Cornpipe, Agus would not have died; Scarlet Blush would not have lost her sanity; the two police officers would not have assaulted her; and Ajo and Gecko would not have been at her house that night. In Uncle Bunny’s account, that night is connected to Ajo’s erectile dysfunction. Ajo rejects the chain as coincidence and disputes the idea that the event can be assigned a single cause. Their disagreement leaves the past unresolved: Uncle Bunny treats the officers’ deaths as a possible answer to Ajo’s injury, while Ajo no longer wants to kill or fight.

Uncle Bunny has found the two officers and gives Iteung their photographs. He tells her that Ajo knows of the discovery but has changed through prison and the influence of the Bird: he does not want to kill the men, or anyone else. Uncle Bunny could arrange for someone else to kill them, but says that would miss the point. In his view, Ajo himself must take revenge, and that act might make his Bird rise again. Even while admitting uncertainty about the promised physical result, Uncle Bunny presents revenge as necessary for Ajo’s happiness and for his own peace of mind.

The Choice to Act

Iteung asks Uncle Bunny why he will not kill the officers himself. He answers that he could have them killed, but insists that Ajo is the person who should hold the grudge and carry out the act. He therefore asks Iteung to convince her husband. She replies that Ajo has chosen a peaceful path, identifying the obstacle plainly: Uncle Bunny’s plan depends on restoring a past version of Ajo, whereas the man she knows now refuses that role.

The account does not show Iteung persuading Ajo or receiving his consent. Instead, after the story has established his refusal, it moves to her own action. This distinction matters: Uncle Bunny frames the killings as a remedy for Ajo, but Iteung becomes the agent of the revenge, making the decision that Ajo has declined to make. Her choice answers Uncle Bunny’s request in one sense while bypassing its central demand that Ajo personally kill the men.

The Killings

The account connects Iteung’s actions to the officers’ earlier assault on Scarlet Blush. One of the men, Scarface, recognizes too late that the woman confronting him knows about his past. Iteung tells him that she must kill him for her husband’s sake, then explains that Ajo ought to take revenge but will not dirty his hands with the man’s blood, so she is taking revenge for him. The passage presents her motive directly: this is retaliation undertaken in Ajo’s name, not an action attributed to Ajo himself.

Iteung kills Scarface, and the Clove Smoker is also found dead, his death attributed to her. A gardener reports seeing a woman enter and hearing her say that she has just been released from prison for killing someone and does not mind returning for killing him. The report makes the risk of her choice explicit: she knows that another killing could send her back to prison, yet does not treat that possibility as a reason to stop. The two deaths complete the revenge, but the available account does not show Ajo carrying it out or approving it beforehand.

Return and Consequences

After the killings, Ajo and Iteung are together again, sitting cross-legged on a bed and facing one another. Iteung weeps and says that he has come back; he confirms that he has. The reunion is tender, but it does not conceal what has happened. When they realize that the police are at the door, their daughter begs her mother not to leave again. Iteung tells the child to be patient because her father is now there with her. Asked what happened, she tells Ajo that she killed the two police officers, whom she describes as his old friends. His angry response makes clear that the revelation is not presented as an uncomplicated shared victory.

The next morning, Ajo wakes to the empty space beside him, where Iteung should be, and realizes that he has an erection. He looks at the Bird in wonder, then touches it and finds it growing hard. The sequence places this return of function immediately after Iteung’s confession, but it does not establish that her killings medically caused it or that Ajo’s refusal has ended. Uncle Bunny had predicted that revenge might awaken the Bird; the narrative gives the reader the awakening while preserving the difference between his theory and the events it follows.

Significance

The episode turns revenge into a contested act of substitution. Uncle Bunny treats violence as an instrument that might repair Ajo’s happiness, and Iteung performs the violence he believes Ajo must perform. Yet Ajo’s return to his family and his stated choice of peace prevent the killings from reading simply as his own recovery or triumph. Iteung’s decision has its own cost and agency: she acts for her husband, but the story does not erase that she, rather than he, chooses to kill.

The ending binds bodily change to a moral and relational complication rather than to a neat resolution. Ajo’s Bird awakens after the deaths, echoing Uncle Bunny’s hope, but the act that precedes that change is not Ajo’s revenge. He has returned to Iteung and their child; she has returned having killed the officers and facing the possibility of renewed imprisonment. The event therefore leaves peace and violence in the same household, with the physical consequence arriving only after Ajo’s refusal has been overridden by someone acting in his name.