Love and Other Ways of Dying

by Michael Paterniti

  “I don’t like to look at myself from the outside,” he said. “I don’t like the way I walk. I don’t like the way I move. When I became tall, I felt shy and separated from my friends. A friend is a person with whom you can share your happiness and unhappiness. My best and most loyal friend is my mother.”

  When he spoke in his deep baritone, the trivial things he said felt metaphoric: “Lilies that don’t work are more beautiful than any other flower in the world. But this is controversial.” Or: “I wouldn’t say I like to fish, but I like to look at people who like to fish.” Or: “Everything depends on pigs and how fast they grow.”

  After milking, he took the buckets and emptied them into large jugs and then went out to meet the milkman. It was nearly ten before he made himself some rice and ground beef and rested for a while, reading the Bible.

  “Here you’re so busy,” said Leonid, seated on his bed again. “You work until you see the moon in the sky, and that means it’s evening. When I was in Germany, there were days when we didn’t have to do anything; we had no special plans. So we could not wait for the end of the day, because there was nothing we had to do and nothing to do. Here every day seems very short.”

  Ah, Germany. He explained how a Ukrainian expat named Volodymyr, now living in Germany, had read an article and contacted him. It turned out that the two were distant relatives, and Volodymyr invited Leonid to visit Germany, all expenses paid. He arrived with a special bus and then drove him all the way through the western Ukraine and Poland to southern Germany, a two-day trip. At each stop along the way, the giant of Podoliantsi emerged from the bus as a great spectacle, to the awe of people who wanted his picture, his autograph, a few words. “You’re a movie star,” said Volodymyr. This was somehow different from the reaction he sometimes faced at home in Ukraine. In this case, the awe wasn’t mean or intrusive; it was “cultured,” as Leonid said. In one town where there was a festival that included carnival performers, he walked into a restaurant and sat down, drinking apple juice with Volodymyr. People assumed he was part of the carnival, too, and couldn’t help staring.

  If they were looking at him, Leonid was looking back. He shared their sense of awe, even if the source of his was the amazing things he saw around him. “There were so many bikes in the street,” he said. “And the roads! Compared to ours, there is no comparison. I had a small table in my bus where I could put my glass with tea, and in Ukraine there was great movement and in Poland a slight movement, and when we were driving in Germany there was no movement at all!”

  He wanted me to know, however, that German roads and prosperity did not make Germany a better place. “When we went to Germany, we crossed the border, and even looking around, we could see that it’s another country,” he said in professorial tones. “Germany is a specific country. It is a strict country. Even the color of their buildings is usually gray, brown, some pale colors.” He paused seriously, marshaling the full force of his memory. Surely few from Podoliantsi had ever been to Germany, and it was clear that some relatives, and maybe some of his mother’s friends, had sat rapt through these recollections before, wondering what secrets he had brought back from abroad.

  “The ornaments on the wall were different,” he said.

  At the end of each day with Leonid, I went back to Kiev, where, for me, the ornaments on the wall were different—as were my strange, empty hotel on Vozdvyzhenska Street and the late-night drunks lurching through the shadows. I thought about Leonid and how he seemed trapped inside something growing out of control. Not just his body but the effect his body had on the world around him. He was shy and sensitive, and his only defense had been to withdraw. In so many ways, he was still a child who’d missed so much of life: first love, friends, marriage, children of his own. He no longer had a profession, just a business card with a picture, one made up for him by Japanese businessmen who had come to visit, of Leonid towering over a seven-story building.

  He was a full-time giant now, waiting. But for what?

  I called home and spoke to my wife. I could hear the kids in the background. By being here, I hadn’t escaped them at all; in that hotel room, they seemed everywhere. And yet, because I wasn’t able to touch them—wrestling around with my son, Leo, or getting power hugs from my daughter, May—I felt myself floating in outer space. They were growing, changing, proliferating, and I wasn’t there. I was here, halfway around the world, trying to find some notion of what I thought I’d lost, feeling all the more lost.

  Over the days, the routine with Leonid was similar: I usually brought food and gifts. I gave Leonid’s mother a scented candle and she responded happily, tickled, saying, “I’ve smelled one of these before and will look forward to smelling it again!” Then she barked to Larisa, “Matches!”

  We spent many hours in the room with the big bed off the kitchen, chatting with Leonid, who sometimes brought a plate of walnuts to the table, crushing three or four at a time in his hand, then picking bits of meat from the serving tray of his palm. It was hard to say enough about his hands, to describe their power and enormousness. He was proud of them, the one thing he was unafraid to show the world. He also knew that if he ever hit someone with them, “that person would be dead,” as he succinctly put it.

  Larisa came and went, harried, rosy-cheeked. She regarded us openly, without expression, like an animal. A squirrel, to be exact. Sometimes she became impatient with Leonid’s loafing and stood for an extra moment glaring at him—even muttering single words like “carrots” or “cows” to signify the task at hand—while he spoke on, oblivious, staring out the window into space. “I don’t always have the will to pursue my goals,” he said. “I force myself to finish very dull work. But my sister, she is persistent. She never gives up. I can give up, but she can’t.”

  So that was her role, the sister of the giant of Podoliantsi. To work twice as hard while caring for her mother and brother. And that would be the role for the rest of her life, as both of them became more and more infirm. And Leonid’s role, for us at least, was to reflect on his life, to offer it like some gilded manuscript, one with missing pages, of the things he’d actually missed in life and the things that were too painful to recall. He wouldn’t discuss his operation at all, for instance, even when I pressed for details. “All you ask about is trifles and some negative moments in my life,” he said, almost angrily. “Ask me about something gay and something happy, though I have few moments like that.”

  About his height, he said it was something he couldn’t comprehend when he was young. He said everything seemed normal after the operation until one day, in ninth grade, the class was measured and the two-meter tape was too short for him. After that, he became acutely aware of people laughing out loud when there wasn’t a block of empty seats on the bus and, unable to stand on his legs, Leonid would squat, as if over a hole in the ground. “One in a million would have survived what I survived on that bus,” he said.

  But somehow he did. He kept surviving.

  And if God was punishing him, God had also kept him alive. Leonid had nearly died five times. In the first year of his life, he slipped into a coma and couldn’t breathe. His parents bid their last goodbyes and made preparations for his burial—and he came back. When he was twelve, the Lord was more emphatic, letting loose the blood clot in his brain. Leonid couldn’t move his hands or legs. To alleviate the paralysis, a risky procedure was performed inside the brain. Before he was put under, he remembered being wheeled through a ward of paralyzed children and then his parents saying goodbye once more. But whatever saved him that day doomed him to be a giant forever.

  Realizing his fate over time, suffering the unbearable loneliness of giants, he twice tried suicide by hanging. (“My angels were awake,” he said of those two attempts. “They did not want me to die. And my skeleton would not be broken.”) And then, in his cart a few years ago, being pulled by his horse Tulip, he hit a rut. The cart toppled, and all 480 pounds of him were suddenly in the air, then beneath the heavy cart. What wou
ld have killed anyone else, what would have cleanly snapped a spine or neck, did not kill him. He came up from under the cart and went chasing his horse.

  God had kept him alive. That’s what he believed, so that’s what the truth was. And he believed he’d been kept alive for a purpose. But what?

  “I ask him, but He doesn’t hear me,” Leonid said. “The Bible says that those who cry in this world will then be happy in heaven. I’m not sure it will be like this, but I want to believe it. Secretly, I think those that suffer here will suffer in heaven, too.”

  “But why did God choose you for this?” I asked.

  “I’m too tired to think about it,” he said, finding the last bit of meat from the walnuts. “I used to think about it all the time, and now I don’t want to think about it anymore. My future is only black.”

  Almost on cue, Larisa appeared again, muttering the word “apples.” Her appearance was perfectly timed. Leonid smiled broadly and said, “Come,” waving his hand for me to follow. “We’ll go pick some.” He forced himself to his feet and ducked through the first doorway, listing through the cramped house without so much as disturbing a spoon. He grabbed his coat and cap, squeezed through two more doorways, then went out into the day, which was still full of light.

  Leonid was a prankster—and a giggler. He had a sweet giggle, very boyish and innocent. At one point, seated on his bed, he reached into his pocket, as if suddenly remembering something important, and produced a mobile phone, which he seemed to check for missed messages. With his pointer finger, he somehow plinked out a number. To give him his privacy, the translator and I began chatting, until her phone engaged, too, and she formally excused herself to take the call. She answered, “Dobryi den,” and then Leonid answered back from three feet away, in his booming baritone, “DOBRYI DEN!”

  Watching the translator’s surprise, his eyes became slits, his cheeks rose, and there was an enormous uplift at the corners of his mouth. His face, which was wind-chapped from so many hours in the garden, became its own planet. His ears, the shape and size of a hefty split Idaho potato, wiggled; his prodigious chin raised to reveal a patch of whiskers he’d missed while shaving; his two eyes were ponds of hazel water, suddenly lit by a downpour of sun. All the features of his face were complementary and, taken together, offered no clue that he was a giant. It’s only when they were set against the rest of humanity that he became, in every way, more exaggerated … and, well, gigantic.

  And yet his happiness was such a feathery, redemptive force. He had the same smile in one of the only pictures that still existed from when he was a boy—a picture that hung in a frame over his mama’s bed, of a towheaded three-year-old with almond-shaped eyes. It had been taken on a special outing at the Kiev Zoo, one of the few times the family had been out of their village together, on a proper trip. It was sepia toned, as if taken a century ago.

  Looking up at that little-boy face in the picture and then looking at Leonid’s now was like watching the arc of an entire life being drawn between two points. More than anything, the primary experience of Leonid’s life had been his growing, though his primary desire had been to go back to that moment when he was simply a child again.

  “I was a little guy, and now I’m a big one,” Leonid said when he showed me the photograph, his mama sitting nearby, still bundled in blankets.

  “He was so nice when he was small,” she said, with a touch of longing. “At least he has a suit for his funeral.”

  So it came down to this: On the day his life was saved by doctors operating on his brain, Leonid lost the ability to determine his own fate. On that day, he became chosen, as he pointed out—but he also became powerless. No wonder he was so dedicated to the Bible, reciting certain parables to whoever would listen. Long ago, he had thrown his life over to God, with his Old Testament temper, because nothing could explain what was happening to him. God was his hands and his feet and his mah-jongg teeth.

  Maybe because of my size, mere mortal that I was, I had choices. And my god wasn’t his god. In fact, I wasn’t sure about who my god was. Maybe he was a feeling I got sometimes, a feeling that there could be a god. Or a glimmer I occasionally saw in the trees.

  God was in the apple trees and red oaks or a bend in the river that we’d come upon yesterday where leaves fell into the current and were borne to the Black Sea in gold trails. God was the cows chewing cud and Tulip the horse pulling the cart and the dogs rolling in their own shit. God was the vein of blue granite running beneath the ground here and the milk in the jugs that pinned Leonid’s mama, crushing her leg.

  God was that moment when Leonid went out to pick apples and I followed. He used a stool, and I took a crude metal ladder and leaned it against the house. We levitated way up in the top boughs of the trees, and the apples thudded as they were dropped in the buckets. We were up in the trees, Leonid and I, and he began singing, in his own tongue, gently twisting fruit from each branch. His voice, that sweet song, sounded as if it came from some deep underground river.

  The town of Miracle lay beyond him. Across the fields, a train sounded. God was the trees and the apples and the glowing clouds overhead. We were part of the same body, the earth as it was, as it had been created by some cosmic force. When I think of this, I still get that feeling, up there in that tree, that feeling of belonging to something sizeless.

  I get that feeling of being up in the trees with Leonid, and everything that really matters, everything worth it, is up there with us, too: my children, his mama. All of our giants and dwarves. The apples are sources of warmth on that cold day, as if heated from within. To touch them was divine.

  My time with Leonid was coming to an end. I’d gotten fleas—or something—from my hotel bed and was itching like a possessed maniac. When I’d filled the tub to wash, a flow of cold, smelly green water had eagerly obliged. Anyway, Halloween was approaching, and I would be returning to my kids, returning to watch them grow. And I was returning to one day set them free of this giant body, our family: to eventually put them on a bus somewhere so that they might come back and tell us of the ornaments they saw out there. I realized that once I left Leonid, I was really returning for good, that my next probable meeting with the giant would come some random afternoon at my desk, when I’d stumble across a newspaper item about his death, the tallest man in the world finally subsumed by his size.

  Here were the basic facts: He would die having grown to eight and a half, nine, nine and a half feet, perhaps as the tallest man that ever lived, a title he’d never wanted. He would die a virgin, without ever having had a lover. Without having close friends, for that matter. He would die without children, having made it to Germany once, but no farther. It would have been many years since he’d been able to run or swim. He might or might not have a suit to fit him when he was put in his casket and lowered by the village men, at least a dozen of them, into the earth of Podoliantsi.

  Until then, he clung to his otherworld, half made of dream and half made of manure. “I have no bad thoughts about the end,” he said. He ate ice cream, sucked down a dozen raw eggs at a time, chewed cold pig fat, sang, and slept with three stuffed bunnies. He fell into bitter moods, cursed his God, then contritely read his Bible. He received his pilgrims and told them the tale of his life, hugging himself, gazing out the window, while Larisa came and went, muttering words like “beets” and “melon.” He wasn’t an angel or a beast after all, just a man, forming his beliefs from the body he’d been given. He said goodbye among the apple trees, where he’d first said hello, crushing my hand again, his face turning the colors of the leaves as we drove away.

  But I remember him most vividly in a moment just before leaving. I went for a quick walk to see the cows. When I returned, I came upon him standing in the shadow of the apple trees, leaning against his gate, looking out from his stone house at the landscape, the red oaks on fire now, villagers using their wooden plows to turn the fields, the sun coming down just opposite him in the melancholic end of day. He had no idea I was t
here. He just breathed it all in. There was a presence behind his eyes—not just his enormous brain and eardrums, but him, his himness or soul or whatever. It was a moment where he just was. Contented.

  He stood against the fence, and a neighbor child drifted by. The neighbors had cherubic boys and girls, blond and fresh and smiling, like he once was. Maybe, in another life, one of them would have been his own, light enough to hold up in one hand. But now, hidden in the shadows beneath the apple tree, invisible, Leonid gently said, “Dobryi den,” which sent the boy skyward. He hadn’t seen the giant there at all, and that was before factoring in that the voice belonged to an actual giant who happened to be his neighbor.

  “Dobryi den,” the boy said in a startled whisper. He looked up into the branches, gazed upon Leonid’s face there, and stumbled. Then he put his head down and hurried on.

  It took two days to get home. In the lounge at the airport in Munich, still itching madly, I realized that something smelled. Did anyone bathe in Germany? Yes, they did. It was me: I smelled like Podoliantsi, and I could tell people were thinking twice about sitting near me. I got up and found a terminal shower that I could use and stood in warm, clear water for nearly a half hour, washing it all away.

  On the flight to Boston, I looked down on the world for any signs of life on land and sea, but from that height many of the fine details of the earth, including large houses and tankers, were simply erased. After landing at Logan, I waited in line, passed through customs, and again waited for my luggage to appear from behind rubber ribbons, trusting it would. The minute it did, I ran like a madman for the bus. I was so shot through with adrenaline, I was floating.

  Soon the bus cloverleafed onto the highway. Two hours north now, to home, fitting neatly in my seat. When I saw this familiar land outside the window—fall here, too, flat land with its own forest flaring—and when I saw my wife, her stomach rounded against her sweater, and my daughter in funny pigtails there at the station, waiting, and I could finally touch them again, and when I lifted and held my little boy, Leo, in my arms again and felt my heart beating hard enough to know that I wanted to live a very long time, I took his hand up against mine, just to check, just to see what had occurred in my absence.