The Fountain in the Forest

by Tony White

  He may have been a peasant baker, but Monsieur Juneau was not a fool. It had not entirely escaped his attention that, of these unfortunates, the French contingent at least had been eyeing him up as if he rather than the Conforti MkI were the prize. Something about the oversolicitousness of the invitation and the fleeting sideways glance that had preceded it, perhaps, or a barely perceptible chameleon-like lick of the lips, betrayed them, told Juneau that, if he went to look, he’d just as likely be shivved or coshed on the back of the head for the contents of his wallet, then dumped in the sea. And who would notice another body in the current chaos? No, that would not do. And yet, drunk as they were, he knew that he could not outrun them.

  ‘What are you playing?’ Juneau enquired, far more quick-wittedly than the average day-tripping villager might manage in such straits, before sitting down and to all intents and purposes offering them a face-saving opportunity to rob him fair and square without the need for violence. The smooth-talking tramp and the chief engineer were not to know that Juneau was no ordinary bumpkin. They could not believe their luck, and readily joined him, although before long he had given them a lesson in poker that they would not quickly forget. He took his time, playing into the game slowly, concealing his skill behind some corny old feints that he was sure they would see through and could scarcely believe they fell for, in which he appeared to lose a couple of hundred francs. In fact it was money well spent and, watching the Italian engineer gratefully pocketing the notes, he preferred to think of this bribe, for that is what it was, as a gift: a ticket back to Porta Palio, offered in a spirit of fraternal exchange that reflected – as the sparkling waters outside reflected the sun – the altogether grander ethos of Oreste Bonomi’s original vision for the Esposizione.

  The day was far exceeding Juneau’s expectations. In less than two hours, he found himself the owner of the Conforti MkI, although he managed to play-act every bit as outraged as if they had swindled him out of his life’s savings, convincing them that their prize had been to be rid of it! As if they were having the last laugh by landing him with this ‘Greek gift’, this Trojan Horse; such a beauty and yet such an enormous and fatally compromising liability. He played the part well too, as if his life had depended upon it, which in a way it had.

  ‘And what do you expect me to do with this white elephant?’ he screamed, to the drunk Italians’ backs. ‘Hoy! Come back! I want my money, you swindlers!’

  Once the coast was clear, and with the various requisite Italian transit papers and bills of lading safely in his pocket, Anselm Juneau found a small officers’ cafe off the Promenade – well, the Conforti MkI wasn’t going anywhere – where he ate a cheap lunch of duck’s liver and plain macaroni, which, seasoned by victory in those days of rationing, and in as far as it made a change from the baker’s usual staple, seemed like an epicurean feast.

  With André’s help, Juneau cooked up a plan. It was clear that, with the Conforti MkI up and running, he would be able to increase production considerably, perhaps by as much as several hundred per cent. Of this, in addition to paying André a one-off tax, Juneau agreed to supply the Resistance a certain percentage – two sacks? – as well as to increase the protection money that he paid to André each week, while in return they would run a line to connect him to the local power supply. It was a good deal all round, and had Oreste Bonomi known of this, or indeed of the myriad other exchanges – trades and barters, inventiveness of all kinds – that he had unwittingly set in train among the ruins of his ill-fated Esposizione, the Italian Minister for Trade and Foreign Currency himself might even have learned something.

  Juneau and André shook on it, and early the next morning a team of mechanics descended upon the Palais to help the one remaining Italian – Juneau had insisted upon this – to carefully dismantle and crate up the great oven.

  André pulled some strings with the stationmaster at Colomars – with whom he enjoyed a rental arrangement for some disused coal cellars that were occasionally needed for his illicit distribution networks – and had the crates loaded on to an empty wagon that was then hitched to the back of an evening passenger train. An unscheduled stop was made to unhitch the wagon in the siding between the viaducts in the scrubby and rock-strewn pastures at Pascaressa, where the various constituent parts of the great Conforti MkI were quickly unloaded in order to be transported by donkey, piece by piece, up and down, time and again, to heehaw and scuff their way up that scented track, past fragrant thyme and sage, past prickly pear, and up and through the arch and into the village of La Fontaine-lès-Vence and thence on to the smaller village of La Fontaine-en-Forêt. By late morning it was done, and the work of knocking out the ancient oven and installing the immense prototipo in Monsieur Juneau’s tiny bakehouse could begin.

  Job done and spending Monsieur Juneau’s money in Vence on their way back down the mountain several days later, André’s men laughed at this funny peasant baker with his hundred-year-old mechanical dough-mixer and his grand ideas; at the huge modern oven that was now crammed into his tiny village bakehouse. And if they had indeed looked twice at the mezuzah that had been fixed to the bakehouse doorjamb, they didn’t show it or let on.

  For his part, with a crowbar in his hand and Sylvie by his side, and having spent two or three days hacking through the brambles to finally prise the ancient padlock from its hasp and open the door of the abandoned bakery for the first time since it had been locked up those forty-odd years earlier, JJ didn’t notice the tiny plaque. And even if he had, he wouldn’t have known what it meant.

  But maybe Monsieur Juneau should have been more careful with whom he made friends, for less than a month later, in September 1943, after the Italian surrender to the Allies and the German invasion of the former Italian zone of occupation that followed, two of André’s men were stopped at Cagnes-sur-Mer railway station by SS officers from Hauptsturmführer Alois Brunner’s notorious Department of Jewish Affairs who had commandeered the Hotel Excelsior on Avenue Durante, perhaps more for its convenient location near Nice railway station than for its splendid nineteenth-century architecture and decor. Whether to save their own skins, or simply seeking to ingratiate themselves, to parlay one life for the greater good of the Resistance and of France, they told the Nazis about the baker who lived up in the mountains. And that is how Monsieur Anselm Juneau – his grandparents were Polish Jews who had Gallicised their name from Janowsky – of the Boulangerie Juno in the village of La Fontaine-en-Forêt found himself suddenly bruised and penniless, under arrest, and travelling first by rail to the internment camp at Drancy near Paris, and then, within days, from there to a certain death in – or en route to – an unknown extermination camp in the east, most likely Auschwitz.

  And if it may not have happened exactly like that, there was more truth in this story than in the myth of the romantic suicide of a baker who had abandoned his oven because he refused to feed Nazis but was too old to be a Resistance fighter, a story that JJ had heard from Sylvie, Sylvie from Victor, and which Victor had heard from Monsieur Houlette, who had heard it in turn from who knew where, but which had grown up in the intervening years like the brambles in the bakehouse yard. For here, after all, beyond incongruity in the tiny rustic interior that could barely contain it, was the prototipo Conforti MkI, which swam into focus as JJ’s eyes adjusted to the darkness of the interior. Its great marble-effect enamel flanks and sleek art-deco styling dwarfing the other pieces of equipment, the stone kneading block and— Was that really a clockwork mixer?

  Running his hands along the oven’s enamel panelling, JJ wondered how on earth anyone could have managed to squeeze such an enormous oven into so small a space, and how such a beautiful machine could have lain here unused for so long. But he was already excited. He could see that the chrome might polish up nicely.

  * ‘We just had a telegram from the chief telling us to stay put. Although, to be honest, I wouldn’t mind getting out of here!’

  † ‘They have been told to stay in Nice, but he want
s to go home.’

  21: ASPERGES (ASPARAGUS)

  ‘Wow,’ said Élise, admiring the newly revealed yard. Then, as Pea-tag ceremonially opened the double doors – splitting the old ‘Kilroy’ graffito in half as he did so – and she peered into the gloom, ‘My God! What is that?’

  The contrast was extraordinary. It was as if the room were part hovel and part art-deco spaceship. Yes, that was it. As if the great oven was bigger than the building. As if a gleaming spaceship had somehow dropped through the roof and forced itself – propelled itself – into the very fabric of the tiny building, or a streamlined locomotive had been driven cleanly through the walls.

  It had been a tough few days’ work to clear the bakehouse yard of brambles. Pea-tag and JJ had taken turns at cutting and scything, digging out roots where they could, then pitchforking the vicious briars over the precipice into the gorge. Deep in one of the thickets, in a nest made of newspaper and an old knitted woollen hat, they had found a writhing nest of tiny, pink rat pups, which Pea-tag pushed on to his shovel with the side of his boot, then unsentimentally drowned in a bucket of water from the fountain. There was no sign of the parents.

  Sluicing down the yard with bucketfuls of water and brooms, they noted its gentle slope and cleared the outflow that led out on to La Petite Rue, whilst taking care not to further dislodge or move any of the cobbles that had already been displaced by bramble roots, but which could relatively simply be reinstated.

  They had chatted while they’d worked, about records, mostly, or comparing notes on favourite gigs they’d been to; discovering, for example, a shared interest in the output and politics of the band Crass. Pea-tag had been into them from the beginning, he had said, because his friend Simon (he pronounced it more like the name Seymour) worked in a record-pressing plant near Paris and had sent him a copy of the ‘Reality Asylum’ 7" that the band had been forced to produce in France back in 1978, a pattern that continued as pressing plants in the UK and Ireland rejected their politically controversial or blasphemous content. When Pea-tag talked about Crass as revolutionary outsiders, operating as they did from an isolated farmhouse commune in Essex, practising what they preached – a non-hierarchical, communal and oppositional life of self-sufficiency, apart from society – it had been obvious to JJ that he was drawing a comparison with their own lives here in the abandoned village of La Fontaine-en-Forêt.

  And what Élise had explained when she’d joined them in the middle of this conversation – bringing a bottle of cold wine and three glasses so they could toast their handiwork – was that this also drew on a tradition of les primitifs: experiments in art and in radical living that went back hundreds of years.

  ‘David’s pupil,’ she said – pronouncing it ‘Dah-veed’ – ‘you know, the painter David? His pupil, they would dress up as ancient Grecs and speak out for simplicity in art and life!’

  ‘Really? They’d have liked it here,’ said JJ, gesturing at their surroundings.

  With its roughly whitewashed unfaced stone walls, flagstone floor below and age- and smoke-blackened beams supporting its roof above, the bakehouse was certainly simple, and typical of the rustic architecture of the region. Fairly typical, that was, apart from the massive technological anachronism that practically filled it. The other equipment – if that wasn’t too grand a term for the collection of artefacts that still stood exactly as they had been left – appeared simple and functional, and of random design; a hodgepodge. Apart from the extraordinary oven, the bakehouse could have been a sparsely and disparately fitted reconstruction in some impoverished ‘museum of rural life’. A few shelves were cluttered with this and that – a mortar and pestle; thermometers, perhaps; bowls, vessels and utensils of one kind or another – while built into a recess at one end of the room was a stone trough, somewhere between a church’s baptismal font and something that cattle might drink from. Above it was a spigot and a smaller, similarly recessed stone sink in which was placed a large galvanised metal – steel or zinc – measuring jug.

  ‘Either this was the animal shed before it was a bakery, or perhaps this would be for mixing the dough by ’and, oui?’ said Pea-tag, running his hand along the crudely rounded rim.

  Next to it stood a strange three-legged wrought-iron machine – almost chair-like, but with a large, wood-staved, zinc-lined bowl or half-barrel for its seat – which appeared to be part-hinged so that its prongs, for want of a better word, and their accompanying array of geared cogs and cranks, could either be raised – the position it was left in – or lowered into the bowl. Pea-tag took the handle and made as if to heft it from this resting position, but then thought better of it. It was not clockwork, JJ realised, but hand-cranked, and following the pattern of cast-iron cogs and wheels he could see that cranking the handle not only turned the prongs, but rotated the bowl as well. There was a kind of mangle, and some shelving; some pleated cloths. Nozzles, knives and spatulas of various kinds were hung from hooks over the stone sink. None of it was here by accident. All had something to do with the baking of bread, but quite how this ramshackle assortment of machinery and implements might actually be brought into service to that end remained a mystery.

  In the centre of the room was a large rectangular block of stone, hip-high and altar-like, almost big enough that the whole place could have been built around it – ‘For kneading the dough?’ JJ asked, leaning over the stone as if to push at an invisible pillow – while in the other corner was a small dusty pile that looked like the tattered remnants of cloth and paper sacks. If so, they had been shredded, reminiscent of the way Milo would pick the labels off a bottle of beer. JJ scuffed then prodded at the dusty pile with his toe, then stepped back in alarm when this action uncovered the fossil-like remains of a mummified rat, still curled in its death throes as if it had been suffocated long ago by the contents of one of the sacks that had once been piled there. Any grain or flour that might have remained was of course long gone. Pea-tag was not squeamish. He picked the petrified creature up and took it outside; put it on top of the stone gatepost. Turning back, he suddenly stooped to look at something growing at the base of the sunlit wall, poking and stroking it with his finger.

  ‘There is asperges: wild asparagus,’ he announced, returning to the bakehouse. ‘I never notice it.’

  Élise was standing in the doorway, face flushed and with tears in her eyes, running her finger up and down the jamb. She had seen the mezuzah. ‘It is tragic, you know. Look! That is why this place has been locked up, because of shame!’

  She stepped back to lean against the baker’s stone, and looking through the doorway she gestured at the yard and the world of light and life beyond it. ‘Whoever he was, all of that beauty must have seemed like the past; so ugly and primitive,’ she said, using anger to suppress her tears. Then, turning to look at the oven: ‘And this way – this! – this was the future? Or it must have seemed. An oven, of all things—’ Her sentence ended in a kind of strangled sob.

  Unseen against a blackened beam in the roof above the doorway was the papery accretion of an abandoned wasp nest. Beneath it, the three of them stood in silence, looking at the oven.

  ‘Les primitifs,’ said Élise later, standing in the gateway, ‘were looking for a more lyrical way of life that expressed self-evident and timeless truths – equality, for example – at all times, here and now, rather than wanting those things in the future, or even registering the difference between past and present.

  ‘After the Revolution,’ she went on, ‘there was a great popularity in France for a way of living that emulated the Pythagorean sects of antiquity. As if by simply dressing up as Pythagore they could achieve what the Revolution had failed to by politics and terror alone.’

  JJ was trying to follow, but had no idea what she was talking about. Fair enough, he knew which revolution she meant, but not much more than that. Hang on: the what sex?

  ‘Pee-tah-gore,’ she seemed to be saying. ‘The Pee-tah-gorian sect.’

  He shook his head. ‘Quo
i?’

  ‘The ancient Grec?’ she said. ‘You must ’ave ’eard of ’im: Pee-tah-gore!’

  JJ shrugged helplessly.

  ‘Peh,’ Élise said, spelling it out. ‘Ee-grecque, teh, ahsh, ah, jheh, oh, err, euh: Pee-tah-gore!’

  It sounded to JJ like the Dada nonsense poem that was used for the lyric in the Talking Heads song ‘I Zimbra’.

  It wasn’t until Élise took a stick and spelled it out in the dust – P-Y-T-H-A-G-O-R-E – that he understood.

  ‘Oh! We say “Pythagoras”!’ he said, pronouncing it ‘Pie-thaggerus’. It had finally clicked, but all that JJ knew about Pythagoras was from doing maths CSE at school. It had not been his strongest subject.

  By now Élise and Pea-tag were laughing their heads off, but JJ still didn’t understand what right-angled triangles or the square of the hypotenuse had to do with anything, let alone the Revolution.

  ‘Because the Pythagoreans cut themself off from society,’ said Pea-tag. ‘They dress up and they give up their possession to live the simple life in the small group.’ He looked around at his two friends as if he was indeed surveying some self-evident and eternal truth: ‘It is like the punks, oui? Like us?’

  Well, this much JJ could understand.

  ‘Why else did you think,’ said Élise at last, through tears of laughter, as she took her turn to point out the obvious, ‘that my brother here is called Pythag?’

  22: TULIPE (TULIP)

  It was amazing, JJ reflected, as he watched Monsieur Previn dextrously manipulating the unproven dough into shape, what you could do with a limp rag folded into pleats, some yeast and some flour. Milo sometimes did deliveries for Monsieur Previn, the baker in La Fontaine-lès-Vence, so he had asked if JJ could come and help out, and thereby learn the ropes or at least pick up a few bread-making tips, promising faithfully that he would not get in the way. So for the last few days – or nights – that is what he had been doing: acting as a skivvy and doing exactly what Monsieur Previn told him to. One minute he might be using the flat wooden peel or paddle to slide the flûtes and pains de campagne out of the oven and into the wire baskets that were used to ferry them between bakehouse and shop, the next pouring a splash of milk into the croissant dough, or beating the sugar, butter and egg mix ready for Monsieur Previn to fold in the almond flour for a frangipane.