CHAPTER 2. THE CITY AND FIRST AMBITIONS
The city welcomed Alex with a roar and a dazzling kaleidoscope. Towering high-rises draped in advertising banners, their glass facades gleaming, seemed to him like towers from some futuristic fantasy. A thin haze of exhaust and a never-ending stream of cars made his head spin. Stepping onto the station platform, he clutched his backpack and felt a strange mixture of excitement and anxiety, as if the entire world had suddenly revealed all its mad diversity.
How many years had passed since the time he was a nine-year-old boy wandering around the village yard, pondering the mystery of those “two crowns” his grandfather had so vaguely mentioned? Now, older and already enrolled in one of the city’s top universities, Alex still remembered his grandfather
