Love and Other Ways of Dying

by Michael Paterniti

  In the days and weeks after I’d read the article, the giant came back to me as I stood in the kitchen making dinner (did he use an oversized spatula to make oversized pancakes?) and while bathing my kids (how did he bathe if he couldn’t fit in a shower or tub?). He returned to me in the lulls, while I was brushing my teeth or driving among a trance of red taillights. Maybe I cracked an egg when he did, and maybe I didn’t and just believed I had.

  Fall arrived. The leaves changed. I didn’t forget about the giant; no, he’d only become more insistent. He was out there, and stuck inside me, too. Why? It made no sense, really. It was almost irresponsible. I was a father of two, and we had another on the way. I loved my wife, even more as her belly grew, as the cells split inside, but a part of me—my old self or soul or me-ness—had been subsumed by this new family of ours. I’d wanted it to happen, of course, invited it with eager if naïve willingness, but then there were moments when, perhaps like all parents, I found myself sunk down, overwhelmed, uncertain. Having children was its own kind of proliferation. You suddenly found yourself at the center of something that was growing wildly around you, all kudzu and blossom. Extra hands and feet and voices getting louder, a world of spoon-fed mush, babbling ditties, and dirty diapers telescoping into flung chicken legs, the all-purpose use of the word No!, and creative wiping. Sometimes I felt unable to form an adult sentence. Except this one:

  It was time to see the giant.

  I broke the idea gently to my wife, Sara, expecting the worst. Some guys take their getaways at a ballgame or Las Vegas. In my line of work, you can enable some of your most mysterious urges if only an editor says yes—and mine already had.

  “Okay,” she said. I could sense her mind whirring. A political profile in D.C.? Sure. A story about some interesting person in Europe? Why not. A giant in Ukraine—why? And yet she was disconcertingly zen. Maybe she was already imagining some future day with friends, a hotel stay with room service and in-house salt glows, what the Romans called quid pro quo and others call me-time.

  So I packed a bag, said my goodbyes to the children—it never hurts any less—and made a beeline for the airport. There I strode straight up to the counter like a black-market arms dealer and bought a ticket to Kiev, the old-fashioned way. It may rank as one of the most pleasing things I’ve ever done. Maybe I was already imagining a fable in which some essential truth is revealed. Or maybe, under the guise of work, I was just hoping to escape, for a moment, what I was growing into and return to who I’d been. Either way, hadn’t I earned a little me-time with a Ukrainian giant?

  There was only one road leading to the giant—a ribbon of battered, unlined pavement wide enough for exactly two and a half cars. Landing in Kiev, I was able to pick up a translator and a driver whose beat-up black Audi smelled like the inside of a gas tank. Before leaving the city, we stopped and bought a cake. Somehow cake seemed like the right sort of gift for a giant, lest, as giants sometimes did in fairy tales, he mistook me for a delectable morsel.

  We drove west toward Poland and Slovakia, through all the small villages inhabited by all the small and average-sized human beings of the country. The people here—the babushkas and the hunched old men—looked as if they might have been out meandering on this same road three hundred years ago. Ancient and ruddy-faced, they wore old wool hats and sat on the hard benches of their carts, driving their horses, hauling their beets to market, payloads of what looked to be purple hearts.

  We followed the Teterev River, winding westward through flatlands, and knew we were close when we came upon a town called Chudnive, or “Miracle.” The giant allegedly lived nearby, in Podoliantsi, a tiny backwater of four hundred people, which sat on a vein of blue granite. We drifted off the highway near a rail yard, came over the tracks, which were lit by a string of indigo lights leading to Minsk, then skirted the edge of an endless field, finally turning right on a dirt road.

  There was no WELCOME TO PODOLIANTSI sign, just a bunch of hens running loose and the smell of woodsmoke. It was dusk, without much light left in the sky, though the sun had come down under the gloom and momentarily lit the land crosswise, throwing long, spindly shadows, catching a nearby cloud, making it glow orange over the village until the last beams of light tipped higher into space as the sun fell beneath the horizon line, like a spotlight suddenly diverted.

  We asked directions to the giant’s house from a woman at a well drawing water, and without a word she blushed and pointed ahead to another dirt lane. We turned and stopped before a stone one-story with a blue-painted gate. Apple trees loomed everywhere over the house. When we got out of the car, my eyes were slow to adjust to the shadows. There was mostly silence, some wind blowing quietly out across the fields rustling some faraway trees, until a hinge squeaked loudly, which caused the air to exhale from my lungs and my heart to skim seven or eight beats. I could feel a thudding reverberation emanating up into my body from the earth. What was I doing here again? Suddenly, a voice sounded in the dark: It had its own special reverberation, too.

  “Dobryi den,” the giant said from behind the gate, among the trees. He didn’t boom it out in some fee-fi-fo-fum, but said it almost delicately, politely, so as not to startle anyone. He was behind the trees, and among them. Slowly, I could make out the low, interleaving branches and then some higher branches, with silver apples trembling there, on a level with the gutter of his stone house. And just above them, breaching, came the giant’s head. It was enormous, and he ducked down to come to our level.

  “Dobryi den,” he said again. Good day. As if he’d been waiting. He was smiling as he undid the gate, teeth like mah-jongg tiles. He was tall. The top of my head reached only to his elbows. And he was wide. On his own, he was a walking family of four. My hand instinctively shot out, and he hesitated, then took it. Hand in hand, mine vanished in his like a small goldfish. He seemed to measure its weight a moment, considered its smallness, then squeezed. Yes, ouch—without realizing it, trying to be gentle—very hard! His palm was too wide to clasp fingers around. Meanwhile, he was crushing certain fine bones I didn’t realize I had. But I was doing what you do when you meet a real giant in a strange, faraway land: I was smiling like hell, nervously gesturing toward the cake in my other hand.

  “Dobryi den,” I said. And these two small words were a spell cast over everything. Holding my hand, he ceased to be a giant at all. Rather, in his world now, I became the dwarf.

  His name was Leonid Stadnik. He had a thicket of chestnut-colored hair trimmed neatly over the ears and hazel eyes that squinted ever so slightly. His feet were shod in black leather shoes, size 26, so large that later, when I tried to lift one, I needed two hands. When he walked, he did so heavily, with knock-knees and a precipitous forward lean, his legs trying to keep pace with the momentum of his upper body. He led me into the house, ducking and squeezing through doorways as he went, doorways through which I passed with an easy foot of clearance. His head brushed the ceiling that I couldn’t reach without leaping.

  We entered a cluttered foyer into the kitchen, where there was a small refrigerator, a woodstove, and various religious icons on the wall, including Saint Mary and, as he put it, “Saint Jesus.” Leonid took me into a living room off the kitchen. Spanning almost its entire length was a bed—not a normal bed but one at least ten feet long, extra wide, covered with a green blanket of synthetic fur and, up near the pillows, three stuffed bunnies. There were heavy rugs hung on the wall, cheaply made Orientals, and several Soviet-era wardrobes along the near wall, spilling over with unruly swatches of fabric: exceptionally long shirtsleeves or stray pant legs, the world’s largest gray suit, a bright sweater with enough wool to make a half-dozen sweaters. It brought to mind parachutes and gift-wrapping the Reichstag.

  He offered me a chair and sat on the bed, reclining with his back against the wall. In the light, he was good-looking and boyish. He was perfectly proportional to himself, if no one else. If his growth surge had been the result of a surgeon’s errant knife, he didn’t tech
nically suffer from gigantism, which is almost always caused by tumors on the pituitary gland. And he didn’t look like other giants, with their heavy foreheads, prognathic jaws, abundant body hair, joints and limbs gnarled and misshapen. Also, unlike other giants about whom I’d read, his skin wasn’t coarse or oily, and he was not odoriferous in the least. I don’t know that he smelled at all, because the only detectable scent was that of the house, the land, the air here—of Ukraine—a strong, earthy, manure-laced, rotting-apple odor that suffused everything. It was the smell of agriculture, of human beings living partially submerged in the earth, in the mud and muck from which they originally came, and it wasn’t at all unpleasant.

  In the days leading up to my visit, I’d done some research. Being big—the kind of big that happened in the one foot of stratosphere above the seven-foot-six Yao Mings of the world and was the province of only an elite group of giants—was both physically and psychologically traumatic. Problems ranged from crippling arthritis to lost vision, severe headaches to sleep apnea, tumors to impotence. Many giants simply couldn’t be supported by their enlarged hearts. To find one alive past fifty was a rarity; forty was an accomplishment. And many ended up living alone, on the margins of society, their only claim to fame being their height. There were websites devoted to tracking these people the way stocks are tracked: Hussain Bisad, a man from Somalia, was reported to be seven feet nine inches tall. Ring Kuot, a fifteen-year-old Sudanese boy, was rumored to be eight feet three. And until Leonid’s emergence at eight feet four inches last spring, people generally assumed that Radhouane Charbib of Tunisia, at seven feet nine, was the tallest documented man in the world. Which was fine with Leonid, because he didn’t want the title. To have it meant that it was only a matter of time before his body betrayed him. It meant an early death. It might be next year, it might be ten years from now, but the clocks were echoing.

  Seated in the giant’s house, I wanted to know everything. We began with the easy stuff. Leonid talked about his favorite foods, which included a dish of rice and ground meat wrapped in cabbage leaves called holubtsi. “I like sweet things, too—cakes and candies,” he said. “I adore ice cream, like a child. Pancakes with jam. But I’m not demanding. We grow all that we use: potatoes, cucumbers, carrots, tomatoes, pumpkins, apples, pears, grapes, plums, cherries …”

  The list continued, and he cut himself short, saying it would take another fifteen minutes to name everything they cultivated in their fields and garden and then differentiate between the categories of apples and cherries, the ten kinds of grapes and squashes. “You know, when I was in Germany, I could not understand why they live so well,” he said. He’d traveled to Germany the prior spring, and not only was it the epic event of his life, but it remained a constant point of reference. “They have very bad land,” he continued, “and we have great land. We have natural resources and the Germans don’t, but they have a better life.”

  That first night, he talked while I marveled, as one marvels in the presence of seemingly impossible creations, whether they be exalted paintings or Thoroughbred horses. He sat hugging himself, in a red-plaid shirt and heavy brown slacks. When he raised a finger to make a point, it was dramatic, huge, as if he were waving a nightstick. He had a twitch in his left eye and a way of dreamily staring into space as he spoke that suggested he saw something there or was merely trying to see something through the opacity of his life.

  Every once in a while, Leonid’s sister, Larisa, appeared. She was elfin, under five feet tall, and looked more like a boy than a woman in her early forties. Her only nod to femininity was a hustina, the traditional Ukrainian scarf, that she wore over her head. At one point, she ferried plates of brown bread, fish, tomatoes, teacups, vodka glasses, cheese, and cold uncooked pig fat called salo to the table, as well as an unlabeled bottle of vodka. She didn’t try to communicate with us, just nodded once and disappeared again. By this time it was very dark—and cold—and Leonid said she was going out to bring in the cows, which had been grazing somewhere at the edge of the village.

  From another room came the sound of a television and the intermittent voice of Leonid’s mama, Halyna. She was even shorter than Larisa, wrapped in crocheted blankets in the rounded, robust shape of a sixty-something babushka, her leg heavily bandaged. The family had suffered a shock in July when, while lugging a large milk jug up the front step, she had stumbled and fallen, the jug crushing one of her legs. “Mama tried to save the milk,” said Leonid.

  Not owning a car—not having the money to buy one and not being able to fit in anything smaller than a microbus—Leonid and his sister had driven their horse and cart miles to visit their mother in the hospital. This is how he’d been traveling for over a decade, and how people had been traveling here since before the birth of Christ. It was an investment the family made because Leonid couldn’t bear the traumas of riding the bus—where he became a target of derision—and after his weight had destroyed several bikes. “My sister stayed near the horse, and I went to see Mama in her room,” he said. “Then we shifted, and I stayed with the horse and my sister visited Mama. That’s the problem with a horse and cart: Someone always has to stay with the horse.”

  After her release, Leonid’s mama had returned home to her bed, where she’d been for months ever since. But if there was any doubt, she was still very much in charge, barking orders, overhearing snippets of conversation, and shouting spirited rejoinders.

  “Yes, Mama,” Leonid called back.

  “I know, Mama,” he said.

  “Okay, Mama.”

  We drank, all of us except Leonid, who claimed never to have had a drop of alcohol in his life. The vodka was very good, homemade from potatoes. I asked him how he could avoid drinking when his family made vodka this good. “It’s a matter of principle. It’s not that I don’t drink. I do drink. Water, juice—cherry juice especially—but I don’t drink alcohol. I have a motto: Try to do without the things that you can. Look at me. I’ve been broken by my height. Probably I would become a drunk if I started drinking.”

  He wasn’t looking at anyone when he said it, but gazed out the dark window again—at something, or nothing. If people throw off vibrations, if certain people move molecules because of their words or actions or presence, Leonid sat in the room like a herd of buffaloes about to thunder. “In my life, I’ve done my best to become a normal person,” he said, “to reach something. But because of my unusual body, I will never have a family or wealth or a future. I’m telling you, I’ve done my best. Everything that depended on me, I’ve done.”

  He was silent again, but his whole disposition had suddenly changed. “There’s a saying here in Ukraine,” he said. “ ‘God punishes the ones he loves most.’ ”

  I returned early the next morning. Leonid didn’t seem to mind my presence or my questions, he just took me on as his little-man apprentice. He’d risen sometime after five, as he always did, and started by milking the cows. It was as dark outside as when I’d left him the night before—the air wrapped close around the morning bodies in cloaks of purple and black—and it was just as cold.

  He put on his shoes at the door and walked across the flat granite patio of the inner yard, past two chained dogs rolling in their own feces, through the muddy passage between the small barn and the granary and the outhouse, past towering piles of stacked wood, and entered a room where LaSonya and Bunny, the cows, stood munching hay. Imagining him simply as a form moving through the predawn, one could say he was, physically speaking, a true behemoth. His back was several tectonic plates; his head was more rectangular than round—his nose was a straight, emphatic line; his chin, a mesa—but he didn’t give the impression of being sharp-edged, willful, or stressed by these geometries. He was just 150 percent as big as the world in which he lived, and had figured out long ago that the only way to live in it at all was to remain absolutely calm—and to make himself as small and invisible as possible. Here, at home, was the only place where he was still Leonid the boy.

  He to
wered over those cows as they chewed cud, and though he professed that they could be unmanageable, they grew still in his presence. The evening before, he’d said that one of his loves, one of his gifts, was the way he communed with animals, the way they fell under his sway. This was evident with the cat, called Striped One, who constantly sought him out, like a persistent lover, to have his ears scratched. But when it came to the cows and horses, the animals seemed to sense that, in this one case, they were in the company of a much larger being. So they became followers.

  When milking, he used only his forefinger and thumb, because that’s all that fit down there, squeezing out the teats, streams of white liquid clinking in a metal bucket. He sat on a stool, and because of his size, he had to reach down so far to the udder that he rested his head on top of the cows’ haunches. I kept having an image of him, after he’d finished, hoisting the cow up over his shoulder just because he could.

  Having once worked at the local collective as a vet, Leonid knew his way around a farm. He loved digging, the feel of the earth in his hands. But unlike others in the village, he was fairly well educated, having attended a local institute, graduating with honors. And yet his height had defined everything. At fifteen, he was closing in on seven feet, growing several inches a year. By the time he went to college, he was a full-fledged giant. He needed new clothes every four to six months, and finding them was nearly impossible. After he’d outgrown store-bought clothes, he turned to a local dressmaker. “Sometimes she was successful, and sometimes she was not,” he said. His eyesight became poor, and his legs began to fail. He slipped on the ice and broke his leg. He got frostbite commuting the three miles to work and finally quit his job. By then, he’d long ago let go of his friends; he’d become afraid of crowds, afraid of anyone who might point a finger and laugh.