Iteung

Iteung is Ajo Kawir’s first great love and a formidable fighter whose actions repeatedly unsettle the rules by which men in the novel measure toughness. She meets him while guarding Mister Lebe, defeats him when he comes to attack the fishpond businessman, and falls in love with him. Their bond makes room for Ajo Kawir’s impotence without treating it as a reason to abandon intimacy, while Iteung’s later acts of protection and revenge show that her own strength is neither ornamental nor confined to the role of a bodyguard.

Identity and First Encounter

When Ajo Kawir is nineteen, Iteung falls in love with him. Their meeting takes place at Mister Lebe’s fishpond, where Ajo Kawir has gone intending to ambush the businessman. Iteung intercepts him on the path and tells him he will have to get past her before he can reach her employer. Her position is clear: she is not a passive bystander but the young woman assigned to stand between a would-be attacker and the man she guards.

Ajo Kawir has never hit a woman and initially shoves her aside rather than striking her. Iteung answers by pinning his arm behind his back and throwing him down. He gets up, surprised, and the two prepare to fight. His knowledge is improvised—punching, kicking, dodging, and retaliating—while Iteung’s confidence and technique immediately reverse the apparent advantage of his reputation as a tough boy. Their first encounter begins as a clash, but it establishes a form of equality: she can defeat him, and he must meet her as an opponent rather than assume that his strength will prevail.

Courtship and Marriage

After the encounter, Iteung and Ajo Kawir begin sending one another short messages over the radio, morning, noon, and night. Ajo Kawir spends hours listening and dedicating songs to her; Gecko notices how profoundly this courtship changes his friend, whose face now carries a smile. After dozens, perhaps more than a hundred, songs have passed between them, the pair meet at a restaurant and go to the City Festival, held every August. They examine one another’s scars and laugh together. The ease of that meeting contrasts with their first bout: physical marks that might have signaled toughness or damage become something they can share without hostility.

Iteung also tells Ajo Kawir that Mister Lebe has entrusted his business to a family member and disappeared after his wife threw him out. She herself sometimes works as a guard for the Empty Hand, although the group accepts only men and she is not a member. A former classmate from her martial-arts academy connects her to occasional guarding jobs when the group’s men are busy. The distinction matters: Iteung can be hired to do the work, but the organization’s membership rules still exclude her.

Their relationship confronts Ajo Kawir’s inability to get an erection directly. He tells Iteung he cannot get hard; she replies that she loves him anyway. With his head resting in her lap, she holds and kisses him, wipes blood from his nose, and receives his answer to her tenderness as he wipes tears from her cheeks. When he asks what she will do with a man who cannot get hard, she says she will marry him. Her decision rejects the assumption that sexual potency is a prerequisite for love or marriage, and it turns a source of Ajo Kawir’s shame into a condition they can face together.

Ajo Kawir nevertheless feels bound by the challenge he has made to the Tiger. Though he has found love and is considering a life with Iteung, he says that a man cannot withdraw after challenging someone to fight. His dilemma exposes the pressure of a masculine honor code even at the point when he has something more valuable to lose. Iteung’s love does not erase the danger of that code; it gives the stakes a personal shape.

Violence, Care, and Retaliation

Iteung’s capacity for violence is matched by practical care. After Ajo Kawir is left badly beaten by men from the Empty Hand, she and Gecko go to Good Budi’s house a few days later. Good Budi is there with four other members of the group. Iteung confronts them alongside Gecko and quickly subdues Good Budi; together, the two friends make the men answer for what was done to Ajo Kawir. The matter is settled without leaving the men in the gutter, but the confrontation makes plain that Iteung will not leave her partner’s injuries unanswered.

The wedding later brings a different consequence. Good Budi attends, offers a gift, embraces Ajo Kawir, and asks forgiveness for what he did. Ajo Kawir accepts the apology and returns the embrace. Iteung’s earlier intervention thus belongs to more than a cycle of retaliation: it helps make a later scene of acknowledgment and reconciliation possible. The same man who had been confronted for his violence is welcomed at the wedding, where the narrative places forgiveness alongside the memory of harm.

Ajo Kawir’s impotence also changes the meaning of their intimacy without ending it. He imagines his fingers taking the place of the sleeping Bird, a private recognition that pleasure and closeness need not depend on his body meeting the conventional measure of masculine sexual function. Later he reflects that the genitals can move people with a force like a second mind, more influential than the brain. These observations are Ajo Kawir’s, not Iteung’s, but they frame the partnership she has chosen: a relationship in which his bodily limitation remains present without defining the whole of their shared life.

Childhood, Abuse, and Self-Defense

A separate strand of Iteung’s history reveals what lies behind her determination to learn to fight. She remembers being the last pupil to leave school because Mr. Toto, her teacher, regularly asked her to stay for small administrative tasks. On Tuesdays and Thursdays she might sort homework books, check attendance, or total the students’ savings. In the deserted classroom, these ordinary requests gave Mr. Toto an opportunity to touch her inappropriately. His conduct was an abuse of the trust and authority attached to his position as her teacher.

When her father asks what kind of class she wants, Iteung says she wants to learn how to fight. The choice is set against a wider world in which organized violence and male protection are closely entangled. The founder of the Kalimasada Silat Academy, Kyai Abdul Kadir, had been a commander in the twelve-year civil war between republican forces and Islamic rebels. After the rebels surrendered, some former fighters were executed or jailed; others returned to a changed world without work or a place to live and became robbers, thieves, or petty extortionists. Many had ties to the soldiers who had captured them, and those soldiers supplied armed protection. Iteung’s desire for training emerges within this history of violence becoming an everyday means of power and survival.

Years later, Iteung returns to Mr. Toto and uses the appearance of willingness to draw him close. Before he can assault her, she strikes him and leaves him unconscious. She gathers her clothes and his, then burns his garments in a trash drum by the school gate before leaving. The act is deliberate rather than a sudden encounter: she comes prepared to confront the man who had abused her as a child, and she leaves without waiting for him to recover. The episode completes a line from the quiet classroom where a teacher exploited routine and authority to the school gate where Iteung acts on her own terms.

Later Life and Narrative Significance

Iteung’s later life remains marked by difficult choices rather than a simple promise of safety. When she is about to leave prison, another woman tells her that the prison is not the place for her and expresses gladness that she will be released the next day. Iteung smiles, but does not know what awaits her outside; happiness is not yet something she can foresee, and further hardship seems more likely. The uncertainty tempers the consolations of romance and release: neither marriage nor freedom erases the conditions under which she has had to live.

At a later reunion, Iteung tells Ajo Kawir that she has killed the two policemen who had once been his friends. The disclosure brings the past into the couple’s shared present as a grave act whose consequences cannot be folded away by affection. Ajo Kawir reacts with alarm. The account then turns to his awakening the next morning: Iteung is absent from the space beside him, and he discovers that he has an erection for the first time. The juxtaposition links the disclosure of her killing and her absence with the return of his Bird, but does not establish that her action caused his bodily change.

Iteung’s narrative importance lies in the way she exposes the narrowness of the novel’s codes of toughness. Ajo Kawir’s friends associate fearlessness with his inability to get an erection, and he struggles to withdraw from a challenge because he believes a man must not retreat. Iteung, meanwhile, learns to fight, works in a role that excludes her from formal membership, chooses a partner without demanding conventional sexual performance, and answers abuse with self-directed action. She is at once lover, protector, and avenger; her story does not resolve violence into a simple triumph, but repeatedly makes visible who is permitted to wield it, who is harmed by it, and what survival can require.