Love and Other Ways of Dying (12 page)

“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 technically 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 towered 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.

“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!”