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"FacebookPinterest\n\nONE DAY WHILE LOITERING AT MY DESK, I HAPPENED UPON A NEWSWIRE STORY ABOUT A GIANT.\n\nThe story was of the variety that appears from time to time, offering a brief snapshot of the oldest/smallest/fattest person on earth, a genre in which I take a keen interest. But there was something else about this one. The giant was reported to be 33 years old, residing in a small village with no plumbing in a very poor region of the Ukraine. He lived with his mother and sister, who happened to be tiny. How he'd gotten so huge wasn't entirely known, because the giant wasn't interested in seeing doctors anymore. Something inside of him had been broken or left open, like a faucet, pulsing out hormones as if his body presumed that it still belonged to that of a proliferating pubescent boy. This apparently was the result of an operation he'd had as a child. Under the knife that saved him from a blood clot in his brain, his pituitary gland had been nicked. Now he was over eight feet tall\u2014and still growing.\n\nIn the article, the giant was pictured sitting at his small dining-room table, reaching up to change a lightbulb at a height that a normal-size person couldn't have reached standing. Another picture captured the giant in an unguarded moment, staring in astonishment at his hand, as if he'd just picked an exotic, oversize starfish from a coral reef. Near the end of the article, he said something that killed me. He said that his happiest hours were spent in his garden because only the apples and beets don't care what size you are.\n\nBeyond my admittedly voyeuristic interest in the facts of the giant's life\u2014his huge hands, his constant search for clothes that fit, the way he traveled by horse and cart\u2014that one comment brought with it the intimation of something heartbreaking and holy. It began a story: Once upon a time, there was a giant who kept growing.... And yet this was a real life. And what kind of life was it when you had to find solace among fruits and vegetables? Maybe he was an angel. Turned out of heaven, or thrown down to save the world. What other explanation could there be?\n\nIn 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 oversize spatula?) 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.\n\nFall 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 of me, too. Why? It made no sense, really. It was almost irresponsible. I had two great kids and a pregnant wife whom I loved, but a part of me\u2014my old self or soul or me-ness\u2014had been subsumed by fatherhood. I'd let it happen, of course, but then there were still moments when I found myself going a bit haywire. Having children was its own kind of proliferation. You suddenly found yourself at the center of something that was growing wildly around you. Extra hands and feet and voices getting louder, a world of sippy cups, dirty diapers, and sleepless nights stretching from here to 2020. I felt as if I were lost in a kid world, unable to form an adult sentence. Except this one:\n\nIt was time to see the giant.\n\nI broke the idea gently to my wife, Sara, expecting the worst.\n\n\"Okay,\" she said calmly. In her mind, maybe she was already imagining the days she was going to cash out in return, the eighty-miles-per-hour drive with a friend to the nearest hotel that offered room service and in-house salt glows, what the Romans called quid pro quo and others call \"me-time.\" I know that most guys spend theirs on rounds of golf or buddy weekends at a casino, but that's never quite worked for me.\n\nSo I packed a bag, said my good-byes to the children\u2014it never hurts any less\u2014and made a beeline for the airport. There, I strode straight up to the Northwest Airlines counter like a black-market-arms dealer and bought a ticket to Kiev. It may rank as one of the most pleasing, impulsive things I've ever done. Maybe I was already imagining a fable in which some essential truth is revealed. Or maybe 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?\n\nThere was only one road leading to the giant\u2014a 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 he confuse his hunger, as giants sometimes did in fairy tales, for a normal person like me.\n\nWe drove west toward Poland and Slovakia, through all the small villages inhabited by all the small and average-size human beings of the country. The people here\u2014the babushkas and the hunched old men\u2014looked as if they might have been out meandering on this same road 300 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.\n\nWe 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 400 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 that seemed to stretch all the way to Minsk, then skirted the edge of an endless field, nally turning right on a dirt road.\n\nThere 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. That's when panic rose in my throat, a stifled upchuck.\n\nWhat in the name of bullcrap was I doing here?\n\nWe 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 little 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. Suddenly, a voice passed through the dark: It had its own special reverberation, too.\n\n\"Dobryi den,\" the giant said from behind the gate, among the trees. He didn't boom it out in some Fee-fi-fo-fum, he 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.\n\n\"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, maybe five. 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\u2014without realizing it, trying to be gentle\u2014very 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.\n\n\"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.\n\nHis name was Leonid Stadnik. He had a thicket of chestnut-colored hair cut 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 knocked 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.\n\nWe entered a cluttered foyer into the kitchen, where there was a small refrigerator, a wood stove, and various religious icons on the wall, including Saint Mary and, as he put it, \"Saint Jesus.\" Leonid took me into a little living room off the kitchen. Spanning almost its entire length stood a bed\u2014not a normal bed but one that was 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 from 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.\n\nHe 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\u2014of the Ukraine\u2014a 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.\n\nIn the days leading up to my visit, I'd done some research. Being big\u2014the 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\u2014was both physically and psychologically traumatic. Problems ranged from crippling arthritis to lost vision, severe headaches to sleep apnea, tumors to impotence. Many giants simply could not be supported by their enlarged hearts. To find one alive past 50 was a rarity; 40 was an accomplishment. And many ended up living alone, on the margins of society, their only claim to fame being their height. There were Web sites 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 15-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 in the house were echoing.\n\nWe 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\u2014cakes 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...\"\n\nThe 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 last 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.\"\n\nThat first night, he talked while I marveled, as one marvels in the presence of seemingly impossible creations, whether they be exalted paintings or unusual 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.\n\nEvery 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\u2014and cold\u2014and Leonid said she was going out to bring in the cows, who'd been grazing somewhere at the edge of the village.\n\nFrom 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 classic rounded, robust shape of a sixtysomething 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.\n\nNot owning a car\u2014not having the money to buy one and not being able to fit in anything smaller than a microbus\u2014Leonid 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 after Leonid couldn't bear the traumas of riding the bus\u2014where he became a target of derision\u2014and after his weight had destroyed several bikes. \"My sister stayed near the horse, and I went to see Mama in the hospital,\" 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.\"\n\nAfter 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.\n\n\"Yes, Mama,\" Leonid called back.\n\n\"I know, Mama,\" he said.\n\n\"Okay, Mama.\"\n\nWe 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 their family made vodka this good. \"It's a matter of principle. It's not that I don't drink. I do drink. Water, juice\u2014cherry juice especially\u2014but 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.\"\n\nHe wasn't looking at anyone when he said it, but gazed out the dark window again\u2014at 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.\"\n\nHe was silent again, but his whole disposition had suddenly changed, as if he'd been thrown down on dungeon stones. \"There's a saying here in the Ukraine,\" he said. \"God punishes the ones he loves most.'\"\n\nI 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 had 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\u2014the air wrapped close around the morning bodies in cloaks of purple and black\u2014and it was just as cold.\n\nHe 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. Following him and 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\u2014his nose was a straight, emphatic line; his chin, a mesa\u2014but 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 long ago that the only way to live in it at all was to remain absolutely calm\u2014and to make himself as small and invisible as possible. Here, at home, was the only place where he was still Leonid, the boy.\n\nHe 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.\n\nWhen 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, which left him lowly placed, 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.\n\nHaving 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 defined everything. At 15, 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 seven kilometers 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.\n\n\"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.\"\n\nWhen 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.\"\n\nAfter 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.\n\n\"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.\"\n\nAh, 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 had a special bus to pick him up 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 the 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.\n\nIf they were looking at him, Leonid was looking back. He shared their sense of awe, even if the source of his were the amazing little 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 the Ukraine there was great movement and in Poland a slight movement, and when we were driving in Germany there was no movement at all!\"\n\nHe 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.\n\n\"The ornaments on the wall were different,\" he said.\n\nAt the end of each day with Leonid, I went back to Kiev, where, for me, the ornaments on the wall were different\u2014as 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 of something growing out of control. Not just his body but the effect his body had on the world around him. Shy and sensitive, 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.\n\nHe was a full-time giant now, waiting. But for what?\n\nI 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, by not being able to touch them\u2014wrestling around with my son, Leo, or getting power hugs from my daughter, May\u2014I felt more lost. They were growing, changing, proliferating, and I wasn't there. I was here, halfway around the world, trying to find some glimmer of what I thought I'd lost.\n\nOver 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!\"\n\nWe 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.\n\nLarisa 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\u2014even muttering single words like \"carrots\" or \"cows\" to signify the task at hand\u2014while 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.\"\n\nSo 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.\"\n\nAbout 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.\n\nBut somehow he did. He kept surviving.\n\nAnd 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 good-byes and made preparations for his burial\u2014and he came back. When he was 12, 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 good-bye once more. But whatever saved him that day doomed him to be a giant forever.\n\nRealizing 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 would 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.\n\nGod 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.\n\n\"Do you talk to God and ask him?\" I said.\n\n\"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. But secretly, I think those that suffer here will suffer in heaven, too.\"\n\n\"But why did God choose you for this?\" I asked.\n\n\"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.\"\n\nAlmost on cue, Larisa appeared again, muttering the word \"apples.\" Her appearance was perfectly timed. This time 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.\n\nleonid was a prankster\u2014and 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!\"\n\nWatching 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.\n\nAnd 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\u2014a picture that hung in a frame over his mama's bed, of a towheaded 3-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.\n\nLooking 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.\n\n\"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.\n\n\"He was so nice when he was small,\" she said, with a touch of longing. \"At least he has a suit for his funeral.\"\n\nSo 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\u2014but 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.\n\nMaybe 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.\n\nGod 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.\n\nGod was that moment when Leonid went out to pick apples and I followed. He used a little 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.\n\nThe 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.\n\nI 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.\n\nmy time with leonid was coming to an end. I'd gotten fleas\u2014or something\u2014from my hotel bed and was itching like a possessed maniac. When I'd filled the tub to wash, 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.\n\nHere 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.\n\nUntil 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 good-bye among the apple trees, where he'd first said hello, crushing my hand again, turning the colors of the leaves as we drove away.\n\nBut I remember him most vividly in a moment just before leaving. I went for a little 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 there. He just breathed it all in. There was a presence behind his eyes\u2014not just his enormous brain and eardrums, but him, his himness or soul or whatever. It was a moment where he just was. Contented.\n\nHe 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.\n\n\"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.\n\nit 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.\n\nOn the flight to Boston, I looked down on the world for all 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.\n\nSoon 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\u2014fall here, too, flat land with its own forest flaring\u2014and 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.\n\nHis hand lay in mine, and I felt its weight: the little bones and the smooth, scarless skin so soft it didn't seem real. Mine dwarfed his, but still I held his hand up and inspected his fingers for a moment. He thought I was being funny, and he laughed, a little-boy giggle. His breath smelled like cookies. Yes, his fingers were bigger, and I was not frightened. Maybe the betrayals lay out before us somewhere in our murky future. Maybe we were all growing until someday nothing would work for us anymore. But I was not frightened. I was filled with joy.\n\nIt read four o'clock on the wall\u2014on the east coast of the United States of America\u2014and at that very moment, somewhere, the giant was sleeping on his oversize bed. His huge shoes lay empty near the doorway, his pants thrown over the chair. His enormous suit hung in the closet, waiting.\n\nSoon he would rise to milk the cows, feed the pigs, pick the rest of the apples. In the dirt lane before his house, carts would come and go, bearing payloads of huge purple hearts. And there he would be, the giant, alone up in the apple tree, gently picking fruit, humming the notes again.\n\nAt the bus station, my children began singing."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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