Dada 52

Then he asked me if I thought she`d been cheating on him and I said that yes, it seemed so to me. Then if I thought she should be punished and what I would do if I were him. I told him that you could never know for sure, but I could understand that he wanted to punish her. People are always punishing others, look at my Dada but I didn’t tell Iskra that. I drank some more water . Iskra lit a cigarette and told me his plan. He wanted to write her a letter, one that would “hit her hard but at the same time say things that would make her sorry and miss him.” Then, after she came back to him, he’d sleep with her and as soon as he`d finished, he`d spit in her face and throw her out. I told him I thought that would really be a way to punish her.

 But he  said he did not think he would be able to write the kind of letter he needed, so he thought to asking me to do it. When I didn’t reply, he asked me if I would mind doing it right then and there. I agreed. He drank another glass of wine and stood up. He pushed aside our plates and the last of the kidney’s.  He carefully cleaned the tablecloth for any crumbs. He got a sheet of lined paper out of the drawer of his bedside table, along with a yellow envelope, a little penholder made of red wood and a square inkwell filled with purple ink.

Iskra told me the women’s name. I realized straight away she was Indo from one of the eastern districts of Kalimantan, probably the north. It was poorest there and they were always burning wood to keep themselves warm and make the land even cheaper. You could smell it across all of Sarawak when the wind was in the West. I wrote the letter. I more or less improvised, but I tried to write it in a way that would make Iskra happy because I had no reason not to make him happy.

Then I read it out. Iskra  smoked a cigarette as he listened; nodding his head, and then asked me to read it again. He was really pleased with it.

“I can tell you understood life;” he said warmly.