A Place of Hiding

He waited only for a tractor to lumber through the intersection at the end of Prince Albert Road. After that, he made good time to Fort George, skimming through its thick stone archway just as the sun struck the picture windows of the sprawling houses inside the fort. This place had long since been used for any military purpose, despite its name, but unlike other of the fortresses on the island—from Doyle to le Crocq— this was also no ruin of granite and brick. Its proximity to St. Peter Port as well as its views of Soldiers’ Bay had made it a prime location for exiles from Her Majesty’s revenue collectors to build their sumptuous homes. So they had done so: behind tall hedges of box and yew, behind wrought iron fences with electric gates, set back on lawns next to which stood Mercedes-Benzes and Jaguars.

A car like Frank’s would have been looked upon with suspicion had he chosen to drive it anywhere within the fort other than directly to the cemetery, which was situated, as luck and irony would have it, on the most scenically advantageous part of the entire area. It occupied an east-facing slope at the southern end of the old military grounds. Its entrance was marked by a war memorial in the shape of an enormous granite cross in which a sword—embedded in the stone—duplicated the grey cruciform into which it had been placed. The irony might have been intentional. It probably was. The cemetery thrived on irony.

Frank parked in the gravel just beneath the memorial and crossed the lane to the cemetery’s entrance. From there he could see the smaller islands of both Herm and Jethou rising in the mist across a placid stretch of water. From there, also, a concrete ramp—ridged against the possibility of a mourner falling in inclement weather—sloped down to the graveyard which comprised a set of terraces that had been carved out of the hillside. Set at a right angle to these terraces, a retaining wall of Rocquaine Blue held a bronze bas relief of people in profile, perhaps citizens or soldiers or victims of war. Frank could not tell. But an inscription in the relief —Lifelives beyond the grave— suggested that those bronze figures represented the souls of the departed laid to rest in this place, and the carving itself had been fashioned into a door that, when opened, revealed the actual names of the interred.

He did not read them. He merely stopped, placed the cardboard box of his father’s ashes on the ground, and opened it to remove the plastic bag. He descended the steps to the first of the terraces. Here were buried the brave men of the island who had given their lives in World War I. They lay beneath old elms in precise lines that were marked by holly and pyracantha. Frank passed them by and continued downward. He knew the point in the graveyard at which he would begin his solitary ceremony. The headstones there marked graves more recent than World War I, each of them identical to the other. They were simple white stone with the single decoration of a cross whose shape would have identified them unmistakably had not the names carved into them done so. Frank descended to this group of graves. There were one hundred and eleven of them, so one hundred and eleven times would he dip his hand into the bag of ashes and one hundred and eleven times would he let what remained of his father drift through his fingers and settle on the final resting places of those German men who had come to occupy—and who had died upon—the island of Guernsey.

He began the process. At first it was hideous to him: his living flesh coming into contact with his father’s incinerated remains. When the first bone fragment grazed against his palm, he shuddered and felt his stomach heave. He paused then and steeled his nerves to the rest of it. He read each name, the dates of birth and of death, as he consigned his father to the company of those he’d chosen as comrades.

He saw that some of them had been mere boys, nineteen-and twentyyear-olds who may well have been away from their homes for the very first time. He wondered how they’d experienced this small place that was Guernsey after the large land from which they’d come. Had it seemed like an outposting to another planet? Or had it been a blessed rescue from bloody combat on the front lines? How must it have felt to them to have had such power and to have been simultaneously so utterly despised?

But not by all, of course. That was the tragedy of that place and that time. Not everyone had seen them as an enemy to be scorned. Frank moved mechanically among the graves, descending tier after tier until he had emptied the plastic sack entirely. When he was done, he walked to the marker at the bottom of the cemetery and he stood for a moment, looking back up the hill at the rows of graves, at the way he had come.

He saw that, although he’d left a small handful of his father’s ashes on every German soldier’s resting place, no sign of them remained. The ashes had settled into the ivy, the holly, and the creeper that grew in patches upon the graves, and there transformed into mere dust, a thin skin lying like an ephemeral mist that would not survive the first gust of wind. That wind would come. It would bring with it rain. This would swell the streams which would gush from the hillsides down into the valleys and from there to the sea. Some of the dust that was his father would join it. The rest would remain, part of the earth that covered the dead. Part of the earth that gave succour to the living.





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