...I am citing these episodes for a reason. As fortune would have it, I myself was sightseeing in Moscow not long ago and happened to meet with a weird experience there -- one that, while similar to these ice-cream incidents as I’d remembered reading, suggests they may have been gravely misinterpreted. Understand, I wouldn’t call in question the strange, infatuating appeal that ice cream is said to hold for the Russian palate. I agree with such temperate appraisals as Marguerite Higgins’s, in Red Plush and Black Bread, that the quality of Russian ice cream is a "gastronomic surprise,"' and Santha Rama Rau’s, in My Russian Journey, that the Russians have a "passion" for that dessert, but I must take issue with the intimations of Mrs. Meyner, Marvin L. Kalb, and Mr. X that the blandishments of ice cream are such as even the Russian secret police cannot resist. For a tourist to count on that eventually would lead to disappointment, I honestly feel.

Now to my story. Having flown to Moscow on Pan American Airways and Russia's Aeroflot, I spent the first four days there in the steady, decorous company of my official interpreter and guide, Olga. On the fifth, I finally escaped her by descending from my hotel window on a rope made of bedsheets, and I found myself strangely exhilarated in mingling alone with the crowds in the chilly sunshine outside. Apprehensions of being "tailed" couldn’t have been farther from my thoughts as I strolled across the Plaza Revolutsii and past the Historical Museum to Red Square. Then, while losing myself to the drama of the Kremlin, I slowly became aware of a long black shadow falling on the cobblestones -- the shadow of someone behind me. Almost menacingly, the left hand of this shadow reached upward until it was twitching the spot on its face where a mustache would be. My memory stirred uneasily, and, feigning a casual architectural interest in GUM, I turned around. The man was scarcely an arm’s length away. He had, indeed, a long tapering mustache, and he was alternately twisting its ends and whetting the point of a black goatee while staring at me from out of Svengali eyes. He was wearing a black snap-brimmed hat and a black cloak, and he wasn't smiling.

It was, I confess, as much a sudden sense of disquiet as a natural curiosity that began urging me -- at first slowly, then at a pace brisker and brisker -- towards the other end of Red Square and the refuge of St. Basil’s Cathedral. Once inside, I climbed deviously up and down the stairways under the famous onion-topped towers. By now there couldn't be any doubt about it: the man was shadowing me, seldom allowing the gap between us to exceed a foot and a half. I went outside again and jogged across the Square to GUM; Svengali stayed right behind. My hopes of giving him the slip in a crowd of ladies struggling at the notions counter proved to be ungrounded, for he took hold of my tweed jacket and only when we had emerged from a side door, on 25 Oktyabrya Street, did he relinquish his iron grasp. I grinned at him sheepishly, but he didn’t reciprocate. Spinning around, I ran down the street to Dzerzhinskaga Square, and, the sight of Lubyanka prison fetching me up, into the Dzerzhinskaya stop of the subway. I changed from the Kirovsko-Frunzenskaya line to the Gorkovsko-Zamoskvoretskaya line at Okhotnii-Sverdlova Station, and then to the Koltsevaya line at Paveletskaya. Never was I out of my companion’s hypnotic sight, and I could feel the moist weight of his breath on my neck as I rose on the long escalator from the subway station at Gorky Park of Culture and Rest.

Half an hour later, I was riding high in a compartment of the Gorky ferris wheel, Svengali directly opposite me, when a growing exasperation and, to be frank, a real anxiety finally gave me the courage to try that ice-cream maneuver. Immediately after both of us had disembarked from the wheel, I walked to a small pavilion nearby, seated myself at the counter, and held up two fingers towards the counter girl, then pointed one of them at the black-caped figure already seated beside me. Morozhenoye," I told her, for I had remembered the Russian word for ice cream from the anecdote in Gunther’s book.

"Shokoladnoye, slivochnoye, ili zyemlyanichnoye?" the girl asked. She waited impatiently for an answer, and then began again, "Shokoladnoye, sli—’’

"Er … shokoladnoye," I said, realizing this was the word for chocolate.

"Excuse, am here preferring vanilla. Slivochnoye." To my astonishment, the husky voice that spoke these words in an accent heavily freighted with rumbling r’s, palatalized consonants, and off-center vowels came from the mysterious Russian beside me. "Slivochnoye mnye," he said to the waitress, and then turned back to me with the English, "You are taking care of bill – no?"

"No -- I mean yes," I said.

"Am asking because of recent misfortunate incident. Was left by Englishman holding check!"

"I -- I promise to pay," I said.

"Big handshake he gives me, and ‘We are friends’ he tells me -- but ice cream remuneration? Nyet."

"Really, it won't happen again," I said. I reached for my wallet, fumbled a ten-ruble note, and hastily retrieved it, giving it to the waitress as she brought us the chocolate and vanilla cones. My companion grunted, and both of us began eating in silence. After a few uncomfortable minutes, he finished the last cacophonous bit of his cone and slowly wiped the knuckles of each hand across his lips.

"Well…spasibo and do svidaniya, my friend. Don't take wooden rubles," he said, and, pulling his cloak around him, started to walk leisurely towards the park’s exit.

Bewilderment and my relief at being alone again combined to fix me numbly to the ice-cream counter for another minute. Then my presence of mind returned, and I sprang to my feet and hurried down the central mall of the park in pursuit of my enigmatic acquaintance. Most likely it was at the children’s carousel that he caught sight of me, for there he began walking more quickly, but lighter clothing enabled me to overtake him at the gate leading to Krimskii Val. He whirled around irately as I grabbed at his cloak’s hem.

"Please," I stammered, "I just have a question, that’s all. Why -- why do you stop following people if they buy you ice cream?"

"Ha! I have a question you," said the Russian. "Why people buy me ice-cream if I following them?"

"Because you…Wait a minute. You are in the secret police, aren’t you?"

"Fabrication! Am simple apprentice cabinetmaker in Novokuzminki suburb."

"Then -- then why do you keep following people?"

"Because. Already told you, always they buy me ice cream!" With a look at my suddenly debilitated jaw, he added, "Russians have ice-cream passion -- you haven't heard?"

"I've heard," I said.

"Is truly gastronomical surprise." He then threw a cape-shrouded arm over my shoulders and started easing me back towards the ice-cream pavilion. "I tell you of experience with actual wife of Governor New Jersey Robert B. Meyner. Happened this way…’’