The Jam Fruit Tree

by Carl Muller

  Then, having kissed the top of Opel’s head he would climb in and go away, beetling around the mountains, browbeating shopkeepers to stock more milkfood and distributing samples in tea estate homes and telling everyone he encountered about God and stopping to harangue estate workers and tea pluckers and urge them to magnify the name of the Lord and dwell forever in His mercy. His sales itinerary took him far afield, and while husbands would groan and say, ‘Omigod! here comes that bloody lunatic with his Bible!’ wives gave him welcome, and old ladies would pray with him and collect large tears in handkerchiefs, and Viva would urge them to take their sins to the Lord.

  He would insist that they ‘testify’, which was usually done in company, and old Mrs Ludekens would stand up to say in a quavering voice that she had almost become a secret drinker, having found that her husband’s whisky was just the ticket for the cold nights and now she knew how wrong she had been after brother Viva brought her the message of Jesus. Listeners would tremble deliciously and sing-song ‘Amen, amen’ and Viva would cry: ‘God will keep you warm henceforth, sister! How great is the power of the Lord, Alleluia!’ and Mrs Ludekens would raise her eyes to glory and declare, ‘But now I leave Jimmy’s whisky alone and I tell that he must not drink also, because whisky drinking is the work of the devil.’ Jimmy, of course, had told her to go to the devil because he did not fancy going on the wagon to please anyone, but Mrs Ludekens wisely made no mention of this. Then Viva would place a hand on her head and ask for a special blessing and declare that he would pray for poor Jimmy who was surely in Satan’s coils and would urge everyone to also pray for the poor sinner.

  Opel meanwhile would mooch around the home and scratch her head and wonder what to do with herself. At times she would step out to walk the tiny town and buy glass bangles for her wrists and blush each time the booking clerk in the railway station winked at her. She knew that Viva would never approve of the bangles. The trouble with these Pentecosts, she thought, was that they never approved of anything. Even going to bed with her man was tiresome. He had to first kneel and carry on a long conversation with God and then get under the covers to tell her all about the sanctity of marriage and the good angels who did sentry-go at the head of the bed and all sorts of other nonsense until she would say in exasperation: ‘You want to do the job or just talk the whole night? Not enough whole day you’re talking?’

  This would dampen whatever ardour Viva had and he would sulk and protest that children of God required a divine stamp of approval and Opel would bang a fist into her pillow, turn away and pretend to sleep, making sure that her back was arched enough to press her big buttocks firmly against him. This would bring Viva to the realization that the world and the flesh could not be denied and he would spring up with a glad shout: ‘Behold, the handmaid of the Lord!’ and mount her. Opel was not happy with these performances. She felt, as she later confided to the railway station booking clerk: ‘Like God fucking, men, not Vivi,’ and the clerk, a strong, black-haired fellow named Morrell, would laugh and tumble her in bed and show that when it came to sex, he could give God a handicap any day, any time.

  Opel had found Morrell good company when she occasionally strolled around town. The booking clerk, a strapping twenty-year-old had considered her aimless to’s and fro’s, and determined that here was a young woman who could use some diversion. True, she had scarcely the looks that evoked passionate ecstacy but, as a punter would study form, he was satisfied that ‘this was a nice hunk of flesh’. Opel, with no friends in Bandarawela was flattered at the way the booking clerk would wink and smile and say, ‘How are you,’ and observe that she must be new in town. Opel would go home humming and when Morrell came to the gate one day (‘just passing, men, didn’t know you lived so close’) she hummed even louder and invited him in for tea and confirmed that she was alone most of the day and was very glad to know somebody ‘from hereabout’.

  It is believed that while Viva prayed, Morrell got to first base, although this had never been established, and Opel declared that she was in the family way, giving Viva occassion to assail God all night in delirious thanksgiving.

  And so, Patricia Naomi was born—a third granddaughter for Cecilprins, who, when informed of the blessed event by Papa Ludwick, was fit to be tied. ‘What! A girl? What the hell is this, men? Everytime girl, girl, girl!’ Papa Ludwick tried to preach, of course, and was crisply invited to go to hell. Cecilprins was inconsolable. He had three granddaughters now. It wasn’t fair!

  Iris, finding it increasingly difficult to sit at her sewing-machine as her stomach began to balloon, told her mother: ‘You wait and see. Another drunkard for sure.’ Mrs Holdenbottle, who went around Dehiwela with an expression of permanent shock, was indignant. ‘How you can talk like that of innocent infant, I don’t know. One thing, you girls nowadays are too much!’

  Iris sniffed. ‘Everyday coming drunk, no? Must see the state when coming to bed.’

  Totoboy, like most happily inebriated husbands, imagined that the wife waited in breathless anticipation, and all he had to do was get the buttons of his trousers undone. To Totoboy in his cups, this was as complicated as a Rubick’s cube. Iris complained of getting dizzy just watching him.

  But in good time she too was taken to the lying-in home and was delivered of a bonny baby girl. Totoboy passed out and had to be wheeled away on a ward trolley to the waiting area where he lay on a couch and snored and went ‘snnrrrkk’ until Cecilprins trotted in and swatted him across the head. Iris said: ‘Lucky to get a girl,’ and promptly decided to name the baby Fortune Ira. Cecilprins went home crestfallen. Only a month ago Terry had cabled the happy news that wife Bertha had had a girl and the baby had been named Bubsy. It was a conspiracy! ‘If that Beryl also putting girl,’ he told neighbour Simmons darkly, ‘that is last straw. Last straw! That’s what!’

  The old man was finding it quite wearying maintaining the Boteju Lane home. Anna, with no babies anywhere on the horizon, was the only regular visitor, and he was lonely. He thought long and hard and decided to go visiting. There were the von Blosses of Kotahena who would be happy to see him, even have him. Indeed, they were, although Constance Koelmeyer, who had married his brother and considered herself too up-market to hob-nob with her in-laws, was in two minds about receiving Cecilprins as a house guest.

  The chronicler has avoided mention of this branch of the family since it is felt that things have got complicated enough as it is. Cecilprins had twelve brothers and seven sisters. Maudiegirl had nine brothers and four sisters. To keep track of them all would require a well-staffed and equipped Department of Home Affairs! They had created little enclaves of Gerryns and Koelmeyers and Plunketts and Beckmeyers and Lisks in Kotahena and Modera, Kelaniya and Jambugasmulla, Nawinna and Battaramulla and even as far away as Badulla and Nawalapitiya.

  There was an old reprobate whom the Boteju Lane von Blosses knew as ‘Uncle Boy’ who would suddenly turn up, requisition the lounger and go to sleep. He insisted on bread and butter and Bovril for breakfast and pork chops for dinner. Once in the lounger it took a couple of weeks to dislodge him.

  There was also Aunty Nellie who was as thin as a garden lizard and had a face like a badly-dented saucepan. Her arrival would set off a storm of giggles for Cecilprins would smack his head and say: ‘My God! Look, will you, who’s coming. Aunty Nellie! Take to the back veranda and give that old chair to sit.’

  The girls would run to the gate to welcome Nellie and slyly pinch each other and titter and say, ‘How, Aunty Nellie, after a long time, no?’ Nellie would shake her umbrella at them and say, ‘Where’s your Papa? Tell to give rickshaw-man ten cents. Head is turning coming in this sun.’

  Cecilprins, affecting pleasure, would come to the step. ‘Hullo, hullo, what brought you?’

  ‘Why? Now must tell why I coming also? See to that rickshaw-man, where is Maudiegirl? In the backside, I suppose,’ and stalk in to accost Maudiegirl and complain that it was impossible to come earlier. ‘What, child, chillie grinding, back wa
shing, such a lot to do, no? before can think of getting out.’

  Maudiegirl would wave her to a chair. Nellie would tuck up the back of her skirt, sit and say: ‘Hot, men, what sort of sun this is I don’t know. So how are you? Cooking, cooking, with all these devils to feed, no? Don’t know why you went and had so many.’

  She accepts the cup of tea and naturally stays for a meal, shredding the air with her criticisms. The children enjoy her visit hugely. Nellie has much to say about her ‘good-for-nothing Hiram’ who is drinking himself to his grave. Hiram’s exploits are legion. ‘Just imagine, child, sleeping on the Lord Nelson Hotel steps. Police had to carry to the station and put in the lock up and coming home in the morning to tell to come and take.’

  But the real fun began when she had picked up her umbrella and trotted off with a bag in which she had asked and received a bottle of seeni-sambol (a hot relish of onions, Maldive fish, chillie, garlic and tamarind, fried and sweetened to taste), a tin of condensed milk, a loaf of bread, some yellow thread and a small tin of cheese. Cecilprins would wrinkle his nose. ‘Put that chair in the garden and pour some boiling water. Bloody woman has no shame. Going all over the place without her knickers.’

  It was an established fact, vouched for by everyone in the family. Nellie never wore knickers, and she would pull up the back of her dress quite unashamedly wherever she sat and to blazes with present company. This was not because of some peculiar quirk of character. Nellie, all the family knew, had a notoriously weak bladder. She had only to laugh, or grimace, or register any sort of emotion and the faucet started to drip. Which was why the poor woman never wore knickers and which also explained the need to get her skirts out of the way wherever she sat. It was a family ritual to wash chairs and mop floors and sprinkle Jeyes Fluid after Nellie had been and gone. As Cecilprins was wont to say, with relations like this who needed friends or enemies? Many were best off in the closet, but they insisted on circulating.

  Yet, there was no question of ostracizing even the worst of the litter. There has always been an amazing tolerance among the Burghers which has been their strongest survival factor. Even as these words are written in this year 1991, the Burghers in Sri Lanka could number a mere 0.8 per cent of total population. But their overabiding sense of ‘living together’ has made then merge and meld with the fabric of the island in a manner that is wondrously enlightening to know and behold. One could well say that the Sri Lankan Burgher is as native as the most strident Sinhala native. They may still be, in the main, the ‘eat, drink and be merry’ men of their particular Sherwood Forest, but they are all Sinhala-educated today, mix with enthusiasm, intermarry with almost boisterious abandon and remain an object lesson of how a tiny minority can live in absolute freedom and security and be accepted by the majority without bais, envy, malice, of any of those other miserable attitudes that are the harbingers of ethnic rivalry, intolerance and strife. This is why, wherever the Burghers live in Sri Lanka, one could well hear them say with pride: ‘What the hell, men, if I can live in this country and work and support my family and educate my children and be reasonably comfortable, what’s wrong with these other guys who are going around throwing bombs and demanding separate states? We are Sri Lankans, no?’

  This, in the chronicler’s mind, is what has made the Burghers unique. They knew how to fit in, to belong. They accepted, centuries ago, that Sri Lanka was their land. There was never any thought that they could, if things got bad, pack and hie back to Holland or to wherever they could trace back to. They were at home, and where else could they ‘put a party’ and enjoy life as much as at home?

  Later in this book the chronicler will need to record a diaspora of sorts. The Burghers did leave to find new homes in Australia, England, Canada in the main. Let us, however, come to that distressing situation twenty years hence. We will instead learn how Cecilprins, having struck a deal with his brother Claude, gave up a lifetime of living in Boteju Lane, Dehiwela, and moved to Kotahena where he found life of a singularly even tenor and, diplomatically, stayed out of the way of sister-in-law Constance as much as he could.

  Naturally, the children didn’t like it. Kotahena was too far away and they never did like their Aunty Constance who wore her hair in a bun and seemed to have been born with a fierce frown which her husband, in lighter moments, said was because of the doctor’s forceps.

  Anna was pained. ‘But why you want to go there? Can come and stay with us, no?’ And Cecilprins in his wisdom would shake his head. ‘You want your husband’s people to say that I am now living on him? And why I must burden—that’s right, burden, my children when having so many brothers and sisters? And another thing, Kotahena close to even go for the pension.’

  So Cecilprins moved to Kotahena and made the best of all worlds, descending on Leah, Anna, Elsie whenever he had a mind to and staying for a week or two when the charms of Kotahena palled. Thus, the von Bloss family quit Dehiwela and thus, too, was Cecilprins quite unaware of how far Joe Werkmeister had progressed in his efforts to extract a pound of flesh from the errant Sonnaboy. Elaine was made to give a signed deposition, outlining as best as she could, what Sonnaboy had done and not done to her on the pretended promise of marriage. Lawyer Bumpy Juriansz was in his element. ‘Sha!’ he said, ‘Cut and dried case. Not only can we hold him to his letter but can drag his name in the mud in court. All this will influence the verdict, you wait and see. I will ask for the maximum. Two thousand five hundred rupees. Judge is sure to award,’

  ‘So he will get summons?’

  ‘Oh yes. Let him find a lawyer to defend. But we have him nicely. He doesn’t have a leg to stand on.’

  Werkmeister was pleased. He would have been more pleased if Sonnaboy really hadn’t a leg to stand on and was pained to think that Eustace and Merril had not broken Sonnaboy’s legs. He had lost considerable faith in his sons who spent all of that fateful wedding day moaning and groaning and then making several visits to the Municipal Dispensary to have their bruises, contusions, bumps and lumps medicated. They were a pathetic sight indeed, and even Werkmeister failed to understand how two hulking men could have been pounded so thoroughly by one man—and in a wedding suit at that.

  Meanwhile Sonnaboy and Beryl went to Kadugannawa where the pregnant Beryl found the little bungalow a nightmare of sorts. It was small, and built slap between two sets of railway tracks, about one hundred yards west of the station. The track that ran past the front door and the tiny, box-like veranda was the main Colombo-Kandy line and the trains would roar past, an engine in front and another at the rear pulling and pushing up the steep Kadugannawa incline. The track behind the house was a shunt line and all manner of locomotives and carriages and wagons and what is generally termed railway rolling stock kept shuttling to and fro at the most ungodly hours. As Sonnaboy told Beryl, ‘Good thing we not sleeping too much in the night anyway,’ for the roar of the railroad traffic could not be stilled.

  And then the summons came and the Transportation Superintendent was displeased. ‘Leave, leave, leave,’ he said despairingly, ‘That’s all you buggers come for. And what, pray, is this summons? Going to courts for what?’

  ‘Breach of promise,’ Sonnaboy said.

  ‘What? But you are newly-married, no? And your wife, young thing, no? and already getting a bundy. Only yesterday my wife was saying damn sin to marry so young. Should be in school instead of washing your overalls and cooking and getting pregnant. Anyway, that’s not our business. What is all this breach of promise business?’

  Sonnaboy explained and the Trans was fascinated. ‘You’re a bloody fool, men. Sure to sue for a big amount and how are you going to pay? And if you don’t pay you may be arrested and sent to jail. And what about your wife then? You young fellows must think a little. After this station you could get an increment and promotion also, and now everything will get fucked up if you have to serve time. If you have money to pay up and come away then the railway will not worry, but if you get into jail you’re in big trouble. Get the sack also.
’ He scribbled approval on the leave chit, ‘Here, you go to Colombo and do something. Try to borrow some money and what about a lawyer? You have a lawyer?’

  Sonnaboy shook his head.

  ‘Get a lawyer. Judge will not like if you have no lawyer. My God, your poor wife. What a time for her to have all this worry. I’ll tell my wife to keep an eye on her. You go to Colombo and do something. My best advice is to find some money and try to settle out of court. Your family can help, no?’

  The family tried, but all that could be scraped together was a thousand rupees which, in 1935, was a small fortune. Totoboy, as a funding source, was a total loss. Anna wrung her hands and said Colontota would never unbend and Leah said much the same. Didn’t Sonnaboy remember how he had beaten up their respective husbands? They were not going to give him money with cries of gladness. Cecilprins said that he had nothing. He was giving the bulk of his pension to Constance who waited for him on pension day with her hand outstretched.

  So, with a thousand rupees in his pocket, Sonnaboy went to court and declared that he had no lawyer to plead his defence and that he was married with a wife who was expecting a first child in October, and put himself at the mercy of the bench, having denied vigorously that he had any carnal knowledge of Elaine who sat like a statue of the Virgin of the Seven Dolors while Bumpy Juriansz painted him black and blue and said he was a monster of infidelity and avarice who had blighted the life of his poor, trusting, innocent client, plighting his troth to her while arranging to marry another woman.