Immigrants Bring Their Tradition Of Grave Portraits -- Headstones Etched With Familiar Faces

PORTLAND - Their dark eyes silently stare from the black granite. Their portraits line up one after the other on the rows of tombstones. Some speak of lives stopped at the beginning of the stream, others of lives halted exactly when curiosity blows breath into dreams and still others of lives that ended when bodies could not bend through another step.

A gallery of monuments - headstones like none ever planted there before - has sprouted at Portland's old Lone Fir Cemetery. They carry strikingly real portraits of the recent immigrants buried beneath them.

A new culture is filtering into Oregon, bringing with it new ways of living . . . and dying. Russians, Ukrainians and other Eastern Europeans have settled into local life. They've taken root. Now they're making the ultimate statement of permanence - burying their dead in Oregon soil.

But they're doing it in their own way.

The half a hundred new graves in Lone Fir, clustered in three areas of the old Southeast Portland cemetery, reflect a significant influx of new culture. Between 7,000 and 9,000 refugees from the former Soviet Union, many of them Pentecostal Christians who were persecuted under the old Soviet regime, now live in the Portland metropolitan area.

The rituals of death loom large in their culture. Wakes may stretch over two evenings, with an open casket. Funerals and burials, also with open caskets, go on for six hours or more. Male family members wield shovels and fill graves themselves and relatives plant flowers directly on fresh graves.

The black headstones, identical to the kind in Russian cemeteries, always carry portraits of the dead. They stand in sharp contrast to the fading monuments that fill Lone Fir, the weathered stones laid by Oregon's first wave of European pioneers.

Alexey Pavlenko cuts the sod away with his shovel, exposing bare dirt. He is making a clearing for his wife's favorite flowers.

Just a week earlier, he had installed the black-granite stone in Lone Fir Cemetery. Now he has come with his daughter, Irina Kovalev, and her son, Alex. They've brought two bags of soil, cartons of flowers and bags of bulbs.

Antonina Pavlenko once had her own garden. Now her family will recreate that garden here in Lone Fir. Daffodils, tulips, hyacinth. Every week since Antonina Pavlenko's death in early spring, Irina has plucked those flowers from her mother's garden and brought them to the cemetery.

Now, with the traditional monument in place, the carved eyes of Antonina Pavlenko are fixed on Irina as she places hyacinth bulbs in the soil. "Her eyes," Irina Kovalev says, "remind me that she is still alive."

Eight-year-old Alex looks back and sees a blue canopy.

Softly, he retreats and whispers, "Somebody died."

A face for evermore

A small crane supports a 200-pound slab of black granite. A light tapping sound clicks through Anatoliy Shkurinskiy's garage workshop in North Portland. Fluorescent tubes of light brighten Shkurinskiy's sallow skin and provide a clear path for his sharp, blue eyes. He perches on a stool and leans over the black stone.

His 38-year-old shoulders slump as if he carries death itself. With the hand tools he brought from the Ukraine, Anatoliy etches a portrait into the granite. In the old country, he carved portraits to memorialize the dead. He has brought the traditional Eastern European monument to Oregon.

The crease between his eyes deepens as he engraves more detail. His eyes float between a sepia-toned photograph and the slab. He uses an electric tool to inscribe the harder lines of a traditional Russian babushka, worn by Meshalkina Vladimirovna and the hand tools to envelop the soft, dignified lines of her mouth.

He bites his lower lip as he presses the tool to form her chin. He brings light to her eyes when he gently makes the darkness white.

Etching the past

Thousands of times he will tap, etching life into the portrait. Many times he aches, knowing of their past. Meshalkena Vlademerovna spent years in a Russian prison for her belief in God. Shkurinskiy stares into the concrete floor of his workshop. He is, he says, "very close to people's pain."

Anatoliy Shkurinskiy crunches over the leaves to the center of the cemetery. He passes the Victorian tombstones to where Antonina Pavlenko's family has recently installed her monument. "When I make monument," he says, "I always think how short is life."

Shkurinskiy is surrounded by a colony of Russian monuments.

Through their faces he knows their fate. His head bowing to the fading grass, he follows his footsteps as they graze over pioneers' graves. "I like cemetery because all people equal here."

He rubs the faces of stone with paper towels and denatured alcohol. His own face is mirrored in the stoic image of Viktor Strelnikov. They would be the same age, but Viktor died in an industrial accident.

Next to Viktor, mother and son are joined on the same stone.

The Ukrainian stone artist clicks his tongue in pity. "Big tragedy it was." Valentina Kernazhitskiy, 40, and her son, Vitaliy, 19, died during a Christmas-morning house fire. They had moved to Portland from Belarus only three years earlier, hoping to escape prejudice against their Pentecostal religion.

Sergey Kernazhitskiy, 18, one of the seven family members who lived through the fire, wanted his mother's and brother's faces inscribed on the stone so the surviving family members could remember them after years passed. So 2-year-old Oksana will know the quiet smile of her mother and the strong cheekbones of her brother. Their faces rewind the tape for Leonid Kernazhitskiy, the husband and father. They bring him back to when they were alive.

The sunlight filters through 59-year-old Lyuda Stefanskiy's babushka. She and about 150 others have come with the Russian Church Emmanuel to honor Anna Privedenyuk, who died at age 89. But her eyes wander to the nearby stone that carries the image of her son, Vyacheslav Stefanskiy. She can't move. Tears melt down her soft pink cheeks into a white hankie. She is transfixed by the lifelike image of her son's face. His heart-shaped lips. A tie knotted at his Adam's apple. His dimpled chin.

Vyacheslav Stefanskiy died of cancer at 25. But nothing will erase his eager face from his mother's heart. His image in the black granite also will keep it before the rest of his community, too.