Masha was walking in front of me—lumbering was more like it. She was quite like no other. She paused and glanced back at me with her doe eyes, wrinkling the residual mustache that paused in thin air above her top lip; I admired it as a miracle of nature. My Masha looked at me with tenderness as we walked almost side by side, although I trailed a bit behind to hash things out in my head. This was a bad plan. But I was susceptible to those; they couldn’t escape me, nor I them. They kind of just spun out in my head until a whirpool sucked me in feet first, screaming “woohoo.”

Woohoo.

The road was narrow, and we were hurdling down it in our separate universes, weighing the pros and the cons of the situation. The sun was scorching my bald head, which I had never before found so encumbering. I resigned to grow as much hair as I could muster as soon as the damn thing was over. Masha’s hand probed mine for reassurance. When she spoke, the words gurgled out in perhaps the most endearing manner, and it was in this strange, mutated voice that she asked me what our next step was. I told her that I wanted to grow my hair, that someday I wanted to go to culinary school, go skydiving. She could go on a tropical vacation. Maybe we’d meet back in Leningrad some years from now. In fact, it would be preferable that we both left the country, you know, considering the pigs were flying after us as we meandered that very second.

She looked lost, like I’d left her on the tracks of an unknown railroad, and she was wandering down them, looking for me. “What is wrong, Mashenka?” I inquired as politely as I could, even though I knew. I knew I had asked the wrong question and pretty soon, crocodile tears were flowing down her cheeks. “I’m scared, Boris. I’m afraid for us,” she whispered. Her mustache rustled. It was enough to break your heart, my friend.

We were so close to the border. I was trying to think of a way to get past the guards, but Masha wasn’t exactly inconspicuous, and I hadn’t ran in years. My thighs chafed when I was little boy. My mother and I, we walked to school together in the morning. I complained that I wanted to be carried, but it didn’t help that I was two pounds short of one hundred by the time I was a ruddy third grader. “Borya, you are my little gazelle,” she used to tell me. I still have no idea why.

“Masha, where would you go if you could haul ass right now?” She looked confused. This poor soul didn’t know the world at all. She didn’t know that tomorrow I’d be leaving her in all her testosterone-filled glory to fend the Russian Feds off all by herself. It’s not easy. They are worse than the black bears when they come after us. And for what? A little robbery?

Ask yourself this: Has a little robbery ever hurt anybody?

Some money laundering. No killing, of course. Masha and I shook on it the first day we met. It was in a jail in Skolka. The snow was falling, and she looked at it through the bars with precious tears in her eyes and her entire body clenched into one giant, tight bicep curl. I pitied this mannish creature. I was no less nostalgic about the condensation. Snow is the Russian people. I don’t know why the Inuit have so many words for snow. It should be us—we have Siberia. It is our prized jewel, our baby. That’s why the convicts go there. They can keep it safe. Believe me, no one can take Siberia from the Russian criminals. Anyway, I digress.

We didn’t so much fall in love in that jail cell. It was more like going in for a hug and your arms are all over the place and you pick one up and put the other down, and then both up, and both down, until you look like a windmill, and you still haven’t gotten anywhere. Imagine my little Masha and I, encircling each other in a poignant embrace, snowflakes covering the cold, hard pavement of Skolka in Novsnograd.

I was beginning to feel guilty. Maybe not so much guilty, as antsy. I wanted this to be over. I didn’t kill anybody; I swear. Except for that guy who tried to wrest the money from me. I told him he’d have to pry it from my cold, dead hands, and then I shot him square in his big, red nose. I’m sure his wife hated him anyway. Let’s just slide that under the rug. I’m not a murderer and neither was Masha. We were good people on the run, with about three billion rubles of the government’s savings. Those days, we were filled with puerility. The fresh air and the smell of money invigorated us. We were saturated with hopes and dreams.

Alas, the sirens had reached my ears too late. We were surrounded. We could not outrun their engines with my chafing thighs and Masha’s ogre-like disposition. She convulsed into roaring sobs, her mustache changing shapes with her facial expressions. It was a Don Juan, then a handlebar, then at once it squelched itself into a tiny Hitler-esque dot above her lip. I was horrified by its deft capabilities. We were being trapped like lions in the wild; Masha was roaring, I stomped my feet and shook my head wishing I had the chance to grow a bushy mop before they locked me up for good. We caused quite the commotion, letting loose like that. At some point, they started shooting. They missed a couple because the Feds, they aren’t good shots. Poor funding doesn’t allow them to be trained too thoroughly, but the bullets began to shower us. Masha looked more like a tigress to me now, on all fours, fighting for every breath of life. I just lay down on the ground and looked up at the sun— the blazing Russian sun, and all was still.