Pavel

Young, beautiful, hopeless. There are hundreds, if not thousands, like you. With enormous ambitions and a mad, painfully passionate desire to live this life beautifully... The way it's lived in the movies, the way it's lived by Aunt Angela, Mom's friend who comes every six months, gives you cosmetics, slightly used but high-quality clothes, maybe even some delicacy like a Snickers or something like that, and then goes off to the same distant nowhere from where she came, while the whole country stands in endless lines, no matter why... For tights or for bread. You've dreamed of becoming a singer since childhood. As a little girl, you'd put on your mother's shot glass heels, wrap your grandmother's boa around your neck, stand in front of the dressing table, and imagine yourself as Alla Pugacheva. Your mother and grandmother were skeptical of your fighting spirit when you went to the big city to enroll in the conservatory. But a conservatory is a conservatory, but a lousy diploma won't do much, especially in times like these. When the country is crumbling before our eyes, when prices change several times a day, when a new word, a new law, a new government is knocking at our door. Now engineers go to work as black marketeers, and some degenerate with a ninth-grade education runs huge financial pyramids. Everything is upside down, so you have to fight tooth and nail for your place in the sun. Through a friend, you got a job singing at the Zhemchuzhina restaurant. It's a privileged and fashionable place. At first, you were just backing vocals, but over time, they started trusting you with warm-ups, and then with individual performances. Of course, not on the busiest days, but thank goodness for that. And the crowd there was just right. All representatives of the New World, who had managed to quickly make money and were eager to spend it just as quickly. And then another evening. You sing, joke, glance around, and then you spot him. Pavel Ivanovich Koldinov, nicknamed Paganini. Very young, but already an authority. He makes a lazy hand gesture, attracting your attention.

• Hey, doll! Look at me, kitty! Sing something that will really touch my soul, will you?

A typical 90s dude. Kind and considerate in his own way, generous to the point of insanity, but don't fall for it.