The Jam Fruit Tree

by Carl Muller

  Carl Muller

  The Jam Fruit Tree

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Contents

  About the Author

  Dedication

  Part One—The Flowering

  Part Two—The Berrying

  Part Three—Bearing Fruit

  Part Four—The Ripening

  Copyright

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  THE JAM FRUIT TREE

  Carl Muller completed his education from the Royal College, Colombo, and has served in the Royal Ceylon Navy and Ceylon Army. In 1959 he entered the Colombo Port Commission and subsequently worked in advertising and travel firms. Muller took up journalism and writing in the early Sixties and has worked in leading newspapers in Sri Lanka and the Middle East. His published works include, Sri Lanka—A Lyric, Father Saman and the Devil and a link language reader for students, Ranjit Discovers Where Kandy Began.

  At present he is working on his third novel. He lives in Kandy with his wife and four children.

  To Professor ASHLEY HALPE, Dean, Faculty of Arts, University of Peradeniya, Sri Lanka and his wife, BRIDGET—my dearest friends and my greatest inspiration

  Part One

  The Flowering

  The sky was as blue as an Eskimo’s nose on the morning that Sonnaboy cycled sedately to work. A large man with big fists, grey eyes set wide in a broad, brown face, a largish nose that swept down from between bushy eyebrows to just short of a rather petulant mouth and a chin that kept saying ‘to hell with you’ in a language all its own, Sonnaboy was pushing thirty-five and, in his home in suburban Dehiwela and in the Ceylon Government Railway Running Shed in Dematagoda, was a force to reckon with.

  Cecilprins von Bloss had a principle he firmly abided by. Keep the wife in the family way. Women, he maintained, stay out of mischief when they are ‘carrying’. Siring a string of children was, to the old reprobate, child’s play. In those fine old days a meal of rice and curry, a cup of tea and a cigarette cost a mere nine cents—and the best samba rice with beef, two vegetables, sambol (a relish made of ground coconut, chillie, lime, salt, chopped onions, tomato and peppercorns, eaten with meals), a pappadam and mallung (chopped leaves, basted with grated coconut and seasoning) at that—and an assistant postmaster’s job was ‘public service’ with all manner of perks and pensionable to boot. All a husband could wish for was to come home from office, drink great quantities of tea, consider his fat wife who sprawled on the lounger fingering her rosary and check the time. Cecilprins was a creature of habit. Leave the General Post Office at four, take the 4.18 train to Dehiwela, reach home at five. Sometimes Maudiegirl had a bun on his plate with his tea. After a bath at the well, carry his sagging rattan chair to the porch where he would sit, watch the road and waggle a hand at passers-by. Neighbours would pop heads over walls to say ‘how’ and ‘do you know what?’ and Cecilprins would say he knew and nod and slap at his ankles as the early mosquitoes swizzed around.

  Boteju Lane, Dehiwela, had a fair wedge of assorted citizenry. Old Simmons who hated dogs, and the Bennett woman with one big filaria leg, and the Fernandos who moved away one night after the Rodrigo boy fucked their daughter. Cecilprins enjoyed his porch evenings. He got, he knew, respect. He was an assistant postmaster and always wore high, white, starched collars and a cravat as large as a table napkin. And such a man, too. Thirteen children. Must be the Dutch blood in him. Or was it German? One couldn’t be specific.

  When the mosquitoes became too demanding, Cecilprins would go indoors and take the little key he kept on the altar where an old Palm Sunday coconut-frond cross lay propped between two sputtering oil lamps and a frayed St. Anthony’s scapular. Over the little altar was a quite spectacular picture of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, all scarlet and butter-yellow with a heart that was crowned with tongues of flame—thirteen points of flame, Cecilprins noted one day and remarked on and the whole family counted and solemnly agreed that Papa was right and thirteen had to mean something. Maudiegirl clutched at her rosary and called on the Blessed Virgin to witness. ‘See, will you, how Jesus is telling to me. Thirteen fires in His heart like thirteen fires in my stomach, no? Thirteen children I give and every one of you make me suffer.’

  Cecilprins would take the key from the altar, open his special cupboard, pour himself four fingers of whisky, top that with water and say ‘Cheers’ and take a deep swig. Maudiegirl would watch and sniff. ‘Small sip is good for my rheumatics, no?’ and a carefully measured tot is dispensed, which the old lady would dispatch in a twinkling.

  Dinner was a humdrum affair, usually. The children would straggle in at odd times. Terry was in Singapore. He had gone into rubber, and the broker-house he worked for had sent him to their Malayan office. He wrote long letters about tiger shooting and his bungalow and Malay servants with their red caps and the enormous snakes he encountered. Sonnaboy would snort and smack a fist into a palm and stalk off to the well. He liked coming home before dark. Stripped to his jocks he would make quite a hullaballoo drawing and dashing water on himself while the servant-girl next door would creep up to peer through the thatch. Sonnaboy would take out his cock and waggle it at her. He was proud of his penis. It was, he knew, bigger and stood stiffer than Dunnyboy’s or Totoboy’s. He made an elaborate show of soaping it as the servant girl crept closer to watch, and he thought of Elaine and how they would be married soon. Thin girl, Elaine, not much flesh on her thighs, boyishly undeveloped, small breasts, tight little bum. Yes, Elaine was just right. Like a boy. And Sonnaboy liked boys.

  Elsie, his sister, would come to the well. ‘Chee! What you are doing! Wait, I’ll tell Mama.’ But she would go to the store-room where the rice and flour was kept and rub and rub until her bloomers were wet between her legs and would then emerge panting and run to the bedroom to say a feverish Hail Mary.

  Yes, a nice, ordinary family. Terry and Dunnyboy, Leah and Elsie, Totoboy and Anna, Viva and Patty, Ruthie and Vinto, Fritzy and Marla and Sonnaboy who was the youngest and quite the strongest in a clutch of eight strong sons. Three died, however, before reaching their teens. Patty and Vinto succumbed to pneumonia and Fritzy fell off the neighbour’s roof where he had perched to steal guavas. Of all the family, Dunnyboy was near inconsolable at their passing. He was the eldest and the strangest. Routed from school in disgrace, he never found work. Strong as an ox, too, and not a man to tangle with, with a twelve-year-old mind in his strapping, adult body. Viva was lean, whip-strong and calculating. Totoboy a gregarious, sunny fellow with pianist’s fingers and a great talker.

  The girls were all big-buttocked and round-thighed, each promising to be fat and fifty like their mother. The fat clung to their bottoms even as teenagers and they bustled invitingly as they walked and Dunnyboy would squeeze them gently over their knees and rub against their behinds and couldn’t stop the trembling in his fingers. The small Boteju Lane house had two and a half rooms, actually, and the boys would lump in one and the girls in another and there were no doors to shut between any of them—not even when Cecilprins would cover Maudiegirl at eleven each night and she would wheeze complainingly as he jerked over her and the girls would listen and shiver deliciously and Sonnaboy would crawl softly on hands and knees to peer into the darkness and discover what being married was all about.

  ‘They’re doing, no?’ Marla would hiss when he crawled past their mats.

  Sonnaboy would nod and Leah would sigh softly and go to the chamberpot to raise her nightdress and squat and do pippy. It was Dunnyboy who would want to play papa with them and crawl over to meddle with them and rub his cock against their legs. But that was the night and everything was all right at daybreak when they rose, stacked their pillows, rolled up their mats and emptied the chamberpot in the lavatory and dressed for Mass. St. Mary’s Chu
rch was a few blocks away. They would check their Missals and the Saint’s day and mark the epistle and gospel with holy pictures. The girls wore veils and the boys snapped loops of elastic under their stocking-hose to keep them in place below the knee. And so, each morning, Cecilprins von Bloss and his family would go to church and Sonnaboy would go to the vestry to put on a red cassock and white surplice and serve at the altar. Father Romiel would beam on them and wish them a blessed morning and they would say hullo to old Mr Capper and Mrs Vanderputt and the Rozairos with their three straw-haired daughters.

  ‘Come go,’ Maudiegirl would urge, ‘told, no, the hopper boy to come by seven.’ And sure enough the hopper boy would come with his basket and Maudiegirl would count a quantity of hoppers (a type of thin griddle cake made of flour and fermented coconut water) for breakfast and tip the packet of sambol into a tin plate and note the account in a little book. The boy would whistle and show yellow teeth and pick at a sore on his hand. And it was another day. Cecilprins to the G.P.O.; Totoboy to the liquor merchant’s where he counted stock and wrote all manner of squiggles in ledgers; Leah to a florist’s where she arranged posies and bouquets and smiled at vinegary customers; Anna to a pharmacy where she spent long hours cooing with a Sinhalese gentleman who was something in the radio station, a Buddhist, and who rode a Raleigh bicycle. He was a fastidious little person, scrawny and a regular fusspot. He was the only one Anna knew who wore bicycle clips at the bottom of his trousers. All the others, she said, including Sonnaboy, just shoved the bottom of their trousers into their socks. Sonnaboy would grin. Mostly, he wore short trousers to work anyway. Viva was a salesman. He would wait at the top of the lane for the company van and make a great show of checking stocks of milkfood before setting off each morning. And Sonnaboy would wear a grimy cap, khaki shirt and shorts and climb on his bicycle to take the long road to Dematagoda. He said he was the only labourer in the family. A cleaner in the railway. A grease monkey. For eight hours a day he cleaned and greased huge steam locomotives, tenders, the couplings of carriages, frothy wads of cotton waste tucked in his pockets, gunk on his overalls, tarry oil on his neck and elbows, coal dust in his hair and grime under every fingernail. He carried nine cents for lunch and cigarettes and a snapshot of Elaine in his wallet. He was doing okay. Seventy-nine cents a day was a good 1930s salary for a man. Because the British nabobs favoured the ‘educated’ Burghers, he knew that someday he would become a locomotive apprentice and actually ride the rails. One day he would be an engine driver but in the meantime he would marry Elaine and spend all his off-time in bed with her.

  Oh, all in all a robust, brawny, bawdy family, praising the Lord, church-going, singing their Aves with the same gusto as they would eat, drink and fornicate. Ruthie and Marla went around with sailors. They took to smoking cigarettes in long holders and were the first in the neighbourhood to wobble forth on the new high heels. Maudiegirl was suitably shocked. When Marla painted her lips it was the last straw.

  ‘Jezebel,’ Maudiegirl panted, ‘go and wash your mouth!’

  Marla glowered and minced away.

  Ruthie went off first. She had married a sailor, she wrote, and Cecilprins went to the British Admiralty office in Galle Buck and was told that the sailor in question was a Goanese cook.

  ‘What is this? Goanese?’

  ‘An Indian, sir. From Goa.’

  ‘Goa. That is in Italy?’

  The writer petty officer was amused. ‘Goa is in India, sir. No need to worry, is there? Your daughter is over twenty-one.’

  ‘But she is a bloody fool, no? You don’t know what her poor mother is saying.’

  Sympathetic noises did not help, but that was all the Royal Navy could offer. Cecilprins came home boiling mad. He waylaid Marla, sailing out with lipstick liberally daubed across her wide mouth. ‘You also!’ he stormed, ‘Bringing all these sailors home. Goas. That’s what they are. You think I want Goas in this family. Heads together putting . . . vulgar talks talking. Can’t be like decent people and listen even to gramophone. And smoking cigarettes. Go inside and change!’

  Marla wailed and tried to escape. The old man grabbed at her, tore the sleeve of her dress. Her screams brought the neighbours tumbling to the gate. Sensing that now was the time for a father’s outraged dignity, Cecilprins raised a hand like a latter-day Moses. ‘Go!’ he thundered, ‘You are not my child. Go to where the devil is waiting for you. Go!’

  Maudiegirl charged out like a hippopotamus delivering an urgent telegram. ‘My little girl,’ she screeched. ‘From here you came,’ she bleated, smiting her abdomen, then turning to her husband, ‘How you can drive her away like this? She who I carried and brought forth. I gave her name from Bible, no? My baby. You come, babba, and I make nice cup of tea.’

  Outside, a sea of faces watched the drama keenly. Old Simmons urged Cecilprins to forgive and forget. Village women from the tenements broke into a babble of Sinhala. Cecilprins grew grand in purpose and intent. ‘You disgrace my name,’ he bawled. ‘Stay if you want, but you are not my child. If you go now, don’t come back, do you hear?’

  Marla stood, bent in shame under the jam fruit tree. All of Boteju Lane was now jammed against the gate. Slowly, she crept past her glowering father and ran indoors where she broke into a storm of weeping. When Sonnaboy came home and heard of the day’s shenanigans he did what brothers do. He seized Marla by her hair and cuffed her across the face, once, twice. Early next morning Marla was gone. And she never was heard of again. She seemed to have walked off the face of the earth.

  And so, at the time this chronicle begins we have father and mother von Bloss, sons Terry, Dunnyboy, Totoboy, Viva and Sonnaboy and daughters Elsie, Anna and Leah. Eight lives to consider in all the pages ahead. Eight lives and the lives they begat and the changing times and fortunes in a changing country. Today, in this year of grace, one thousand nine hundred and ninety-one, none of them are alive. They are all, doubtless in some great, cloudy boudoir in the sky. But let me hark back to that blue morning when Sonnaboy pedalled to work. Life held few complications for him. He had his nine cents, his picture of Elaine, he had pumped air into his tyres and the Galle Road had few cars and charabancs to bother him with their exploding exhausts and chug-a-chug engines.

  Rickshawmen scudded along, carrying ladies with gaudy parasols. He free-wheeled past the Holy Family Convent at Bambalapitiya and saw, as he claimed, a vision. Actually a roly-poly schoolgirl, fresh, round-cheeked, with a white pith hat on her head of dark hair. Dark eyes looked impudently into his and she turned into a lane leading to the sea. Sonnaboy was entranced. And glad to realize that true femininity could arouse him. He had always liked boys, to touch them, stroke them, feel them grow hard under his fingers. This was what had drawn him to Elaine. Her thin page-boy hair and figure was more male than female. Braking, he watched the girl walk down the lane, enter a house. He followed, noted nameboard and number. Through the curtains fifteen-year-old Beryl saw him turn around at the gate. Such a big, husky man. Her heart fluttered and she ran to the kitchen where Florrie da Brea saw her daughter’s flaming face and immediately grabbed an ear. ‘What are you up to?’ she demanded.

  ‘Aiyo, nothing, anney (a Sinhala expression used loosely in conversation to express pain, dismay loss or grief). Let go, Mummee, it’s hurting.’

  Florrie was not satisfied. She had had her share of shame and her children were a trial ever since Clarence had died. She sighed, pushed her youngest away and poured out a cup of tea. ‘You want tea?’

  Beryl was feeling her ear. ‘You hurt it,’ she complained.

  ‘Good. Don’t think I don’t know you, miss. You’re up to something. Can tell by just looking. So what you are up to now?’

  ‘Nothing, anney. Fine thing, no? Just coming from school and getting scolded. Can I cut some bread?’

  ‘You leave the bread, will you. If eating now won’t have enough for dinner. Here, drink your tea and go and change. Are your knickers dirty? You know very well can’t give those things to th
e dhoby woman. If dirty put in the tub to wash.’

  ‘Chee, as if I will wear dirty knickers. You must see Elva’s. They’re filthy’, Beryl giggled and nearly choked on her tea.

  ‘Never mind Elva,’ said Florrie severely, ‘You mind how you talk about your elders, miss.’

  ‘But it’s true, Mama.’

  Florrie cuffed her daughter almost absent-mindedly. It had been hard since Clarence died, God rest his soul. What was to be done? Every All Souls Day she would go to the cemetery and grumble at his grave. ‘Eight daughters you gave, do you hear, and three sons and the two who died. So I gave you thirteen children and you stay to bury two and then leave me. Fine thing, no? Eleven to see to and everyday something to put fire on my head. How to go on like this? You tell me how. But what do you care? You are dead and you think the pension and the Widows and Orphans is enough? Thank God five girls married. Useless buggers, I know, but what to do? Now only Millie and Elva and Beryl. And Elva is worst. You must see how doing the la-di-da with the boys on the road. How to control, anney? And Millie working in the NAAFI and going in the night to Sailors Institute to dance. Now Beryl also fifteen and got breasts and have to tie cloth on those days. You sleep. What do you care? Just because I come on your birthday and Christmas and say a decade, and light a candle you must be thinking we are all right. What to all right? Only the boys are all right. But that Henry is drinking and drinking and Charlie has married that Hazel somebody and she thinks she fell from the sky. Fine thing, no? to come and tell all this to your grave. That Beryl is in bad age now. Yesterday she catch the dog and slowly putting her finger inside and feeling. Servantwoman saw and shouted and came and told me baby is putting finger in dog’s hole. I gave her tight. Whole trouble is that next door dog came last week and do the job to our dog. Then Beryl see them stuck and asking Soma, and Soma telling her God knows what. I think that Soma telling her too much unnecessary things. Whole time Beryl talking with her in kitchen. Aiyo (Sinhala expression used in much the same way as ‘anney’), I don’t know, Clarence. Why you die and give me all this trouble I don’t know. Now must go. Our father, who art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name . . . .’