The pandemic prompts a question: How much space do people need?

Shortly after my parents purchased their first television set in the mid-1950s, I watched a show that unnerved me. I use “unnerved” deliberately. Horror movies featuring Godzilla and Dracula scared me, but I knew the monster and the fiend were fictional. Adolphe Menjou’s dramatization of Leo Tolstoy’s story “How Much Land Does a Man Need?” also was fiction, but fiction with a theme that could crossover into the real world.

The story, filmed for “Your Favorite Show,” takes place in 19th-century Russia. On television, it required no set beyond flat farmland, without even a house, and a handful of actors following a simple script.

An ambitious young Russian peasant dreams of owning a large farm. The economics and hierarchical society of the town in which he lives guarantee he can never realize his dream. He has to leave, and does so, making for the steppes to the east. After traveling some days, he comes to open land — all the land a man could want. The young man prepares to stake a homestead, but he soon learns he must obtain the approval of the local head man, the leader of the people indigenous to the region.

He finds the head man and is told, more or less, ‘meet me in the morning near here, and you can stake as much land as you want between sunrise and sunset.’ At sunrise, the peasant is off while the headman and his small entourage await his return. The man plans to walk a square, arriving where he started late in the day. He makes good progress in the cool of the morning, but the afternoon is warm, then hot, and soon the man is perspiring heavily, his breathing labored. He also is anxious. Will he complete the walk by sunset? As the sun is starting to disappear, he sees the headman on the horizon and begins to run. He reaches the headman and his group just as the sun disappears — panting, disheveled, delirious. He collapses, dead, at the finish line.

How much land does a man need? Six feet.

I have thought about the story many times in the pandemic. I don't have the peasant's ambitions. But like him, when the curtain closes, I will need only six feet of land. Perhaps you have seen film footage of the Brazilian gravediggers preparing hundreds of graves, row upon row of them in the red earth. Their future occupants are alive today. But the coronavirus never sleeps and knows no mercy. The graves will be occupied soon.

I don’t go out much, usually only shopping for groceries or to the post office. Sometimes, approaching the supermarket, I will look at the cars in the parking lot and wonder “Which one of these cars has a virus driver?” This seems morbid, but I imagine people do wonder, “Is this day I run into the grim reaper while shopping for broccoli?” After reading the 1,000 names of the COVID-19 dead in the New York Times, I don’t think, “This can’t happen to me.”

Actually, most shoppers I see wear masks, practice distancing, pursue their shopping respectful of the store rules. But as they say in the military, “There is always 10% who don’t get the word.” I also encounter families, parents and children all ages, unmasked, indifferent to distancing — unconscious. Sleepwalking shoppers.

Then there are the homeless — most recently, the young man following me around the store, asking me for money in front of the Rice Chex, the burgers and the bananas. He was of medium height, thin, hollow-eyed, ragged, wet. I wondered if he had spent the night crouched in a culvert. He was pure elemental need, and elemental need does not take no for an answer. Was he the reaper’s unmasked representative? Whether he was or was not, how did the admonition “I am my brother’s keeper” fit in here? I suppose I could have played social worker and advised him on pandemic etiquette. I made for the checkout stand.

Philip Roth’s novel, “American Pastoral,” is a modern masterpiece. The story of a happy New Jersey family undone gets into the reader’s soul, and the reader feels a compulsion to read on, ignoring his or her waiting responsibilities. One lengthy scene, which at first seems a bit juvenile, explores the primary character’s affection for Johnny Appleseed. Johnny, in Swede Levov’s mind, isn’t a Catholic, Protestant or Jew burdened by the obligations of religion and identity politics. Johnny is a healthy, hearty, energetic American without education, without creed, who loves his country and walks the American roads spreading apple seeds — spreading goodness with every seed. He’s an American fertility god, and Swede Levov, walking miles along a Jersey country road on a weekend morning, fantasizes he is Johnny.

Six feet is all that a dead man needs. But the living need space for the human imagination to flourish. This is true even in a pandemic.

Michael Carey is an Anchorage Daily News columnist. He can be reached at mcarey@adn.com.

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