“I’d look in the mirror, look myself in the eye, hit my opposite hand with a fist, and say I can, I must, I will.”
He paused.
“And shave every morning.”
The old resistance fighter wandered into my head this afternoon on the long drive home from Richmond. I hadn’t thought of him in ages, but there he was, as I rolled through traffic, then less, then out to pines and cornfields. News of the world, the burning desire to make a difference with erudite statements, balanced with thoughts just laughing…
(I once had an editor send me an article back for revisions. Beside an especially clumsy paragraph, she left her notes to a simple “?”)
The point is, what can I do? I suspect it’s something, but I don’t know what. But something must be done.
So I’ll tell, and possibly retell, the time I met “Erik.”
It was a long time ago, back in Solomon’s Island, Maryland.
His wife or daughter or something was a local artist, showing in a tiny show that my mom was in. Awards were given, snacks were growing stale, and I stood in the corner, awkward as my hair was long. An old man with khaki pants and a dusty navy blazer struck up a conversation. (This is the uniform of the dull or the dazzling, and there’s no way to know until you’re five minutes into a chat.)
I didn’t know that yet.
“I saw my first dead when I was eleven. I felt strangely unmoved.”
This Norwegian man started to talk of his life, his deeds, his ache to join the resistance.
“Oh, I caused so much trouble right away. I must have been only twelve. I set up at a fork in the road. Along came a platoon of Nazis, towing a huge flack gun to put on a bluff. ‘Which way, kid?’”
“Left. Head right down that road and you’ll be fine.”
Erik paused, leaning in.
“I steered ‘em straight into a swamp. Took days to get the gun out. I took off, and they never found me. My next task was to get a gun.”
The commandeered jail in town housed a pile of pistols and rifles in a cell. Erik got a job cleaning the floors.
“I mopped and mopped…every day, just mopping, gradually working my way down the hall. One day, the guards weren’t looking. I used my mop to reach under the cell grate, and hook a pair of pistols. Dragging them back to my bucket, I dropped them under the water. I had the cutest girlfriend. She’d bicycle around all the time, and everyone was used to her. That day, by arrangement, I took my mop bucket with the underwater pistols, and tossed it over the wall. She pedaled up, popped them in her basket, and gave them to me later. That’s how I got my weapons.”
I remembered to close my mouth about this time. A lady cleared tables. Erik continued.
“I’d look in the mirror, look myself in the eye, hit my opposite hand with a fist, and say I can, I must, I will.”
***
I’m certain he’s gone by now. I don’t even remember his name, googling “Norwegian boy names” as a stand in. But I remember how he stood there in the hall after the show, taking one hand, suddenly not seeming so frail, and slamming it into the other.
I can. I must. I will.