The bear no longer haunts our sleep

MOSCOW -- The 10-year-old boy, rail-thin, is propped on the living room couch. The Admiral television is in front him, mahogany doors spread open. His mother tries to fatten him with a raw egg in chocolate milk.

On the tiny screen, the poet Robert Frost, wild-haired, as ancient to a 10-year-old as the pharaohs, is at an outdoor lectern, reading aloud from pages that are escaping gaily in a winter wind. Confused and squinting, he recites from memory:

"The land was ours before we were the land's . . . "

It is Jan. 20, 1961. The Grade 6 boy is sick but it doesn't matter. School is closed anyway. Brooklyn is snowed under. Washington, D.C., also is buried; he can see that on the Admiral. It is so cold at the Capitol that President Dwight Eisenhower is wearing a top hat. But he will be president only for another few minutes.

Young John Fitzgerald Kennedy is being inaugurated. The ceremony is being shown on all six stations. There is no need to get off the couch to change the channel.

"Ask not what your country can do for you," the new president pleads.

Fifty years later, I am trying to reconstruct the day without YouTube or Wikipedia. The Internet has rendered human memory so primitive and provably fallible that it is almost sinister for a writer to try to evade its truths. It might have been Kennedy who wore the top hat. Was Robert Frost really there? Maybe the television was a Zenith.

Embedded beyond erasure in me and my generation are the events of the Kennedy years. The toddlers Caroline and John-John crawling around the Oval Office. Jackie's breathy whisper; her televised tour of the White House. Touch football with Bobby and Ted.

Paramount was the fear of Russia and its boorishly confident commissar, Nikita Khrushchev. From the Bay of Pigs to the Berlin Wall to the Cuban Missile Crisis, the cataclysmically rhythmical rivalry of Khrushchev and Kennedy darkened our childhood days, just as, I am sure, it haunted their nights.

In 1961, the Grade 6 boy was designated to pull down the window shades at the flash of light that would show that Khrushchev's megaton warheads have melted Manhattan.

There was a brighter side. I still own a long-playing record called The First Family on which actors impersonate the world leaders of the day. At a lunch counter, Fidel Castro demands "a cheekon sandwich wit' a libe cheekon." The chancellor of the Bundesrepublik orders a western.

We hear the sound of a shoe being pounded on the table.

"If Adenauer has a western sandwich," Nikita Khrushchev thunders, "then I'll have an eastern sandwich!"

Kennedy: "Uh, there is no eastern sandwich."

Khrushchev: "Then I'll have the eastern portion of his western sandwich!"

In 2011, as fate would have it, the Grade 6 boy is in Moscow, working on some magazine projects and staying with his ex-Communist mother and father-in-law. They ply him with borscht, sausages, cabbage and buckwheat, but at least they cook their eggs.

(The menacing bear no longer haunts our sleep. If we think of Russia at all, it is as a fount of hockey stars and spying hotties. The threat of Armageddon has been replaced by the chest of Anna Chapman.)

To mark the 50th anniversary of the Kennedy-Khrushchev years, I set out to find the grave of the man who once pledged to the West: "We will bury you."

At the fairy-tale Novodevichy Monastery, with its golden domes and lofty turrets, is the necropolis of the prolific and the powerful of the Soviet and post-Soviet ages: Shostakovich, Eisenstein, Stanislavski, Prokofiev, Molotov, Mrs. Gorbachev, Mrs. Stalin, Boris Yeltsin.

And here is a bald, body-less, bronze head of Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev resting on a tower of black and white stone. Why is he smiling?

"Poor Khrushchev," I hear a woman say behind me. She has just finished clearing the snow from the red marble monument to her uncle, a man named Pleshakov ---- army general, Hero of Socialist Labour, winner of the Lenin Prize and Minister of Radio Broadcasting -- who died in 1987.

"What do you remember about those days?" I ask the woman, who gives her name as Ludmila Vasilievna. She is about my age.

"Green corn," she replies. "We were living in Odessa, in Ukraine. I remember hunger, standing in line for hours to buy bread made from green corn, and coming home and finding that the bread was so disgusting that we could not eat it. And we were sitting there, crying from hunger and from anger."

"Yet we thought you would destroy us," I softly say.

In the snow are some wilted white roses. Ludmila lends me her shovel and, for a few delicious moments, while she sweeps the chips away with a broom, the son of the Cold War hacks at the ice on Nikita Khrushchev's grave.

No one else is near. "Who will bury whom?" I ask the sculpture in the snow.

Allen Abel is a Brooklyn-born Canadian journalist based in Washington, D.C.