Leaving Pablo behind, the narrative focuses on Andrew's life story since his childhood. It is revealed that he became an orphan at the age of nine. His parents were killed in a fatal traffic accident, whereupon he was taken in the custody of his aunt. In her family, stricken by poverty and her husband's alcoholism, Andrew suffered from loneliness and psychological abuse over years of his adolescence. In his school years, he chose medicine as his future occupation, though it was increasingly known that in the contemporary economic reality of Russia the vast majority of doctors were doomed to poverty — after the downfall of the Soviet Union and the ensuing collapse of national economy, ubiquitous corruption and embezzlements in industries that remained public, like healthcare, reduced salaries of most workers to pennies. When Andrew turned sixteen, he got the legal opportunity to move away from his aunt into the former apartment of his parents. At this moment, he successfully passes exams and gets into a major medical university on a full state-granted scholarship, starting a life on his own. His university years are challenging chiefly because of material hardships. It's impossible to subsist on the absurdly low living allowance of twenty dollars per month provided by the university, and the remainder of his parents' monetary legacy is small and melts down quickly. As a result, he lives in a pressing material need while the busy schedule of lectures and classes and strict tracking of attendance don't allow him to get employed even part-time. He starts working night shifts as a pharmacy clerk, but after a few of months he understands that constant sleep deprivation wears out his health and impairs his academic performance. He has to quit it and take up sporadic low-paid jobs, like translating medical articles and coding HTML pages, which he can do thanks to his knowledge of English and computer technology. The living Andrew ekes out this way remains way too small. He literally leads a hand-to-mouth existence, and yet he makes valedictorian and graduates summa cum laude. His excellent undergraduate record allows him to win a full residency scholarship at one of the surgical clinics affiliated with his university. Once in residency, watching the obvious signs of good material status of many doctors in there, Andrew gets a hope that with time and experience he will also start making money and will be able to drag himself out of poverty. He works hard, making his intellectual potential and diligence known to senior doctors and professors, chasing after the dream of becoming a medical researcher and a skilled practicing surgeon. However, already in residency, his enthusiasm and determination to serve people begin to smash against the corrupt realities of Russian healthcare. He can't stay blind to the fact that bribery and favoritism are ubiquitous — career growth of any young doctor is virtually impossible unless they have familial connections with the seniors or are willing to sleep or bribe their way up, regardless of their actual qualifications, commitment, and knowledge. In contrast to his hopes at the beginning of residency, he faces the truth that legal salaries are risible and surgeons can only make near-to-middle-class income by means of under-the-table cash payments from patients. He watches how senior surgeons avoid to train younger colleagues because usurping surgical practice gives them the privilege of getting the biggest cuts of bribes extorted from patients for officially state-insured treatment. The majority of doctors without connections like Andrew, who are not allowed into these privileged groups, can only count on voluntary gratuity payments from patients, which are so small that he calls them "tips". His disillusion is enormous, but upon graduating from residency he keeps believing that the situation in the industry will improve with time and that he will eventually achieve self-realization and middle-class material status. This belief makes him continue working in the same academic clinic after residency graduation.
A few months before graduation, his professional letdown is soothed by what he believes to be a positive change in his personal life. He meets Nathalie and gets attracted to her. The daughter of a rich man, a former 1990s mafiosi, now running an oil-exporting company and a real estate development company, she is pretty and charming. She has a crush on Andrew as well thanks to his handsomeness, and their flirting quickly grows into dating and then evolves into a relationship. Andrew doesn't understand that he desperately seeks for belonging after years of feeling lonely and unloved after his parents' death, so now he trades his authenticity for impressing and pretending. Trying to conceal his poverty, he starts spending the most of his scarce income on buying expensive outfits and taking Nathalie to high-end restaurants. With time, she learns about his meager material status, but at the moment she is attracted to him enough to not give a care about the glaring social class divide between them. Andrew, in turn, enjoys his success at impressing her and doesn't recognize her superficial personality.
In the meantime, Nathalie's father is nowhere near happy about their relationship. He does not accept the poor youngster as a would-be husband for his daughter. But Nathalie's physical attraction to Andrew is way too strong, and she is determined to marry him if he proposes, which he shortly does. A few months later, the married couple moves in together to the apartment that Nathalie's father purchases them, not bothering to hide his dislike of Andrew anyway.
Shortly after their wedding, as the mist of infatuation clears, fundamental differences in their values and characters start to emerge. While Andrew is kind and helpful towards others, committed to his vocation despite the material challenges it causes him, Nathalie shows up as arrogant, conceited, and self-indulgent, concerned with all things material in the first place. Her physical attraction for him subsides, and Andrew is hurt by their growing disengagement, even though he continues to love her with the same intensity. The dysfunction in their relationship deepens when right after graduation Nathalie gets a well-paid position at a real estate advertising agency thanks to her father's connections in the business. Andrew still ekes out the scarce "tip" living in his hospital, and his contribution to the family budget mainly consists of the rent he receives from leasing the apartment of his deceased parents, the one where he lived before marriage. Nathalie's salary is now ten times as high. Andrew tries to increase his earnings by taking night shifts in the hospital, attending more patients, and applying for a scientific degree (which, as he believes, will increase his tips and the cuts he sometimes receives from practicing surgeons' bribes when he attends their patients). Despite his efforts, as years go by, his earned income still doesn't remotely compare to his wife's. A woman raised in the lap of luxury, Nathalie continues to enjoys nightlife in her late twenties and squanders huge amounts of money on fashion events and shopping. Andrew doesn't share these activities with her. He wants a more health-oriented lifestyle and more meaningful ways of spending time with each other, but most times when he makes suggestions about them to Nathalie, she invariably refuses and remains in her world. Their interests in life, as Andrew realizes, are completely different.
Andrew's disappointment with his marriage is compounded by continuing disillusion with his career. Bumping into the glass ceiling of his attending physician's position, he faces a total lack of self-actualization prospects, the inability to have an adequate legal salary, the instability of his tip earnings, and the absence of real scientific research despite the abundance of fabricated papers. Contacting his university peers, he isn't happy to learn that the situation is more or less the same in other medical institutions as well, thus reflecting the plight of the industry as a whole rather than the crisis of his particular clinic. Meanwhile, in an attempt to restore the warmth of relationship with his wife, and at the same time in order to make his dream of being a father happen, Andrew offers Nathalie to have a baby. She is initially reluctant to consider pregnancy as she is anxious about her slender body image, but after Andrew uses certain tricks to cajole her, she agrees.
The news of his upcoming trip to Barcelona comes to Andrew out of the blue: the abstract of his scientific work, which he submitted to a European medical congress via e-mail just in case, unexpectedly gets accepted for a presentation. Andrew now cannot afford to travel to Spain at his own expense, but a pharmaceutical company agrees to fund his trip if he writes an article promoting their new product, and so he does. At that juncture, Nathalie is seven months pregnant and despite Andrew's objections she insists on going to Barcelona with him — her friends tell her that the city offers wonderful shopping opportunities, which she, as a fashion addict, just cannot miss. Andrew urges her to stay at home, but Nathalie steamrolls with her plans — as she always says, "she makes her own decisions", and Andrew "has to accept them" whether he likes them or not.
Aboard the plane to Barcelona, Andrew has a weird yet irresistible anticipation that a momentous event in his life is going to happen. Making his first step on the Spanish land, taking the first breath of the air imbued with the salty tang of the Mediterranean, seeing the bright sun in the cloudless sky of Barcelona, hearing the melodious sounds of the Spanish language — through all of this, he cannot help the feeling that he is coming back to his roots, like an exile coming back to his homeland after many years of separation. Irrational as it seems, this feeling deepens as he discovers Barcelona. Everything about the city astonishes him: the gorgeous architecture, the evergreen nature, the forest-covered mountains that all contrast so strikingly with the grey and joyless urban landscape of Moscow. The mild weather, the wide sand beaches, and the seafront avenues. The absence of crowds and traffic jams, cheaper living costs, efficiently maintained road and public transport infrastructure... Andrew sees that unlike in Moscow, where most people work all days long and then spend weekends rambling around box-shaped shopping malls, in Barcelona most shops are closed on weekends (to much chagrin of his wife), but instead there are scores of museums, theaters, art galleries, offering opportunities for meaningful kinds of leisure — all so scarce in his city. Numerous parks and sports grounds give citizens the chance to exercise outdoor almost all year round thanks to the climate. In a striking social contrast to Moscow, where there is a tremendous gap between the abject poverty of the majority of population and the incredible luxury of its minority, down here in Spain most people seem to belong to the middle class — the social class Andrew has always aspired to make his way into. As his mind observes obvious and subtle details of a different social reality, his senses also have a feast. It feels like his palate is enraptured with Spanish food as overwhelmingly as his highly aesthetic eye delights in the architecture of the city and as his ear rejoices in the sounds of the Spanish language. Cultural differences don't elude him either. He watches as people walk down the streets with smiles on their faces. He sees that most of them are friendly and talkative, even to him as a foreigner like him who barely speaks a couple of words in Spanish. He doesn't come across overt rudeness and estrangement, which over the years he has come to view as a norm of social behavior in his city. On top of it all, he definitely likes his unexpected acquaintance, this young handsome guy named Pablo, a soocer player who speaks fluent English and is so impressively smart. As Andrew realizes Pablo's quite extraordinary achievements at his young age, he is yet more impressed by his authenticity and humility controverting his stereotypes about celebrity athletes. Their rapport and the growing affection he feels for Pablo complete the picture of a perfect reality in Barcelona. A few days he spends there make him realize that he actually belongs there. He only imagined a city like that in his dreams before, and he's been missing it. Now he can envision himself living a better, brighter, and more meaningful life over there. He wants to not just visit the city again, as Pablo suggests, but move over permanently and start from scratch.
As a token of his guaranteed coming back to the city, he leaves his sports watch to Pablo saying that he has a spare one. In truth he doesn't, but he feels like he's ready to go to all lengths to return to the city of his dreams one day, so he tries to sort of secure this possibility through a symbolic gesture. When his plane takes off at night, he looks at the beautifully illuminated capital from above and says to himself in the language that he has over these numbered days fallen in love with: "No te digo 'adiós', Barcelona. Te digo 'hasta luego'".
[Spanish: I am not saying goodbye to you, Barcelona; I'm saying, 'See you later'.]
When Andrew returns to Moscow, he starts digesting thoughts about emigration in a more pragmatic way. He contacts one of his university friends, Irina, who relocated to Madrid a few years ago, and what he learns from her strengthens his resolve. As it transpires, she is successfully moving ahead in her career in the Spanish industry that is free from institutionalized corruption and educational obstruction of young specialists and is effectively managed both in its public and private sector. Irina confirms his reckoning that physicians in Spain have near-to-middle-class legal salaries already in the years of residency, and after graduating from it and becoming fully licensed specialists, they have a real chance to grow to upper middle class. At this point, Andrew understands that the lifelong poverty he faces because of the plight of his occupation in Russia is neither necessary nor inevitable. With the help of online sources, he begins learning Spanish and is amazed at the ease with which the language enters his brain. Strangely, it doesn't feel like he learns something new but like he remembers some long-forgotten knowledge. He starts discovering Spanish music, Spanish poetry, Spanish cuisine, Spanish history, and he quickly gets obsessed with this country. In a matter of one month his language skills are good enough for him to start downloading movies with Spanish subtitles in order to intensify his practice. He sees Spain in his dreams at night, and during his days he envisions his better future over there with increasing clarity.
But here's the rub: he isn't free to move away from Russia. He is married, and although, to be honest, he is not happy in his marriage, his wife is now about to give birth to their daughter. When he shares his thoughts about emigration with Nathalie, she ridicules them. Unlike his, her professional life is perfectly comfortable in Russia — her father secured her in a well-paid job at a real estate advertising agency and steadily sponsors her promotion. Aside from that, she feels in her element enjoying the luxury of Moscow's high society, oblivious to the fact that just like her father, most of the people she hangs out with didn't earn or inherit their capital but in fact illegally seized it from public property taking advantage of the chaotic transition to market economy following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Now, hearing Andrew's reflections on the possibility of emigration, she calls him "a traitor of his homeland" and insinuates that if he proved unable to settle for the realities of Russian healthcare and make his way to a money-making position there, he is a loser and he is unlikely to achieve success elsewhere. Either way, she refuses to follow him if he chooses to move away from Russia. Hurt by her reaction, Andrew never says a word about Spain to her again. He can't help realizing that for an umpteenth time, his wife exhibits lack of empathy and common vision for their future as a family.
However, when their daughter is born, Andrew sees a whole new dimension of happiness open in his life. In fact, the baby becomes his only source of real joy, but it feels enough. However, now it becomes yet more obvious that his marriage is in trouble. Andrew is shaken up by Nathalie's coldness and indifference towards the baby. She ignores her maternity leave, doesn't even consider breastfeeding, and returns to her job and nightclub-parties-and-fashion-shows kind of life in a matter of weeks. In the meantime, her mother Sofia moves in with them under the alleged pretext of helping with baby care. While Andrew seeks out every available moment to be present with their child in her early life, Nathalie is in fact absent from home for the most of the week. Sadly, Andrew's expectations that motherhood would pull her back into family miserably fail. Now he understands that choosing fashion shows, shopping, and corporate parties over being with them, she not only rejects him as a husband, but their daughter as well. Unable to figure out the situation at the moment, he makes himself believe that Nathalie will change for better with time.
A few months later, Nathalie's father calls Andrew and asks him to come to his company's office in order to discuss what he calls an urgent matter. To put it charitably, Andrew's relationship with his father-in-law is tense, but he agrees thinking that Nathalie could be in trouble. Now, talking to Andrew in an openly scornful manner, her father again shames him for his measly earnings and claims that she will not keep him by her side forever because of his attractive appearance. In Andrew's face, he waves a photo of Nathalie taken at one of her numerous parties, where a man who Andrew knows to be her boss paws her breast in an unambiguous way. Andrew is stunned. His father-in-law proceeds to say if he does not start making good money soon, Nathalie will dump him and divorce from him, and he will never see their daughter any more. Andrew's rage begins to boil as he sees that his father-in-law knows how much the baby means to him and uses it against him. Continuing to talk in an aggressive and domineering way, the man orders Andrew to give up on his "penniless" medical profession and start working for his real estate business. After another insult, Andrew can no longer keep his anger at bay. He punches his father-in-law's the face and storms off.
An hour later, crushed by the news of his wife's possible infidelity and realizing that she will hardly be able, or willing, to adequately care for their daughter in the event of divorce, he crawls in the traffic jam on his way home. Dreams about moving to Spain are whirling in his mind. He fancies he will move over there and take his daughter with him, even though he still can't figure how this can happen. At this vulnerable moment, as if on cue, he receives a call from Pablo asking him to come back to Barcelona.
Andrew takes the Spanish friend's request as an opportunity to escape from the painful reality of his life in Moscow to the city of his dreams. To the place where he belongs. This is exactly what he needs right now in the midst of uncertainty and confusion about his marriage. His trip to Barcelona is unplanned, and he keeps it in secret, telling lies at work and to Nathalie about where he goes for a few days. Deep down, he hopes that this short respite from his reality would allow him to see how to move on with his life, aside from helping the friend who he misses and wants to meet.
Instead, the news he hears from Pablo causes him a new distress. At this moment, he is just not ready to reckon with what he actually feels for Pablo. Instead, he sticks to perceiving him as a friend, and after Pablo's coming out he believes that there's no way their friendship can proceed. Now it's easier for him to make a snap judgement that Pablo's interest in him was exclusively sexual right off the bat, which leads him to conclude that the feeling of good understanding and belonging with Pablo that he had, just like the possibility of their friendship, was an illusion that he fell for in the midst of his rapture. Losing critical perspective because of the overwhelming shame he feels for Pablo and for himself, he bullies himself into believing that all his dreams about a better future in Spain were meaningless fancies. This entire trip, instead of giving him a respite from the toxicity of his reality in Russia, now feels like a miserable failure. He himself feels like a failure. So now, he decides to settle. He spends his last day in the city without going out anywhere, lying in bed and switching TV channels in his hotel room. He deludes himself into seeing his feeling of belonging here as "deviant". Just as "deviant" as he believes Pablo is. Just as "deviant" as he could eventually find out himself to be if he allowed this thing between Pablo and him to go on. Rushing to leave Barcelona the next morning, he is scared of his truth. He decides to erase dreams about Spain from his mind and heart. He resolves to come back to Moscow and find happiness in caring about his daughter. He believes he is supposed to be content with that, regardless of his marriage dysfunction and career deadlock.
But as his plane takes off from the Barcelona airport, a scary thought about Pablo crosses his mind. Remembering Pablo's desperation and the desolate spot in the park where he left him located at the verge of a cliff, he is haunted by the vision of Pablo committing suicide by jumping off. The scene plays again and again in his mind, and he can't shake it off as he remains sleepless during the flight. At the same time, he thinks there's no way he can contact Pablo just to check that he is okay. He believes that their connection is severed forever.
When his plane lands in Moscow, he tries his best to see it as a sweet, welcoming home. But snowflakes and fierce wind hit his face in the darkness of early November morning, and it just doesn't feel that way. Sleety weather, after all, is just a superficial thing. Now that Andrew has known and seen enough to understand why this reality doesn't feel like home to him (and, when he gets painfully honest with himself, why it hasn't felt like home to him for years), there's no way back to his old self. As much self-deception as he tries to employ, he cannot un-see the truth that life in Russia holds no prospects of joy, belonging, and self-actualization for him, save for one: being a loving and caring father to his child. He decides to focus on that from now on.
During following three years, his professional stagnation continues and his marriage progressively falls apart. Nathalie keeps living a chaotic life between night clubs, shopping malls, and high society parties and avoids spending time with him and their daughter. Now it hurts Andrew way more that it did before because he realizes that she might actually cheat on him. More 1importantly, he sees that Ann, their daughter, obviously suffers from lack of motherly love and attention. Andrew keeps making efforts to get his wife back into family and comes up with various ideas about spending time out together, but Nathalie dismisses them and chooses to enjoy "the luxury of her youth" in her social circles. Meanwhile, her mother continues living in their apartment even though Ann is growing up and there's no longer a pressing need to help with her care. Andrew is appalled at the increasingly rude treatment Nathalie gives her and cannot make sense of it. One day, when Nathalie goes to her father's country house, Andrew notices that her mother refuses to come along under the pretext of feeling sick. Andrew himself has never been a welcome guest there, so it goes without saying he wasn't invited, but Sofia's reaction surprises him. When she and Andrew remain alone in the apartment, she bursts into tears and confesses to him that she can't move back to her husband's house because he brought a young girl he sleeps with in there and made Sofia's life unbearable, practically expelling her from home. She tells Andrew that he was always a bully, that she never really loved him and was forced into this ill-assorted marriage by her parents. Andrew is shocked by realizing how much he didn't know about his wife's seemingly perfect family. Sofia proceeds to reveal that she had to abandon her ballet dancer career because of her domineering husband, that she had known about his affairs with young women for years but settled for it until recently, when he had the insolence to bring another bimbo to their home and showed Sofia to the door. She says that he is about to divorce from her soon, which, given the notorious corruption in Russian courts and his wealth, is going to leave her penniless and homeless in her sixties, without a job and relatives to count on. She feels used and betrayed and ashamed, but she is most hurt by Nathalie's support of her father. That turns out to be the reason why she treats the elderly woman like garbage and, moreover, she is going to drive her out of their apartment soon as well. Andrew cannot believe what he hears. He can barely contain rage boiling within him. He assures Sofia that he will take no prisoners settling this issue with Nathalie, and she can stay in their apartment as long as he lives here. At the same time, he realizes that his daughter is Sofia's only solace in her misery, and she tries her best to make up for the almost constant absence of the girl's mother. Given how his wife treats Sofia now, Andrew finds himself thinking if she will ever be capable of being a good mother.
The decay of their marriage deepens when for the first time in their being together Nathalie brings up the subject of Andrew's low earnings in an overtly insulting way. Aware of how much effort he has put forward over the years to earn more, including exhausting himself with frequent night shifts, how much he is devoted to his profession, and how complicated the realities of the industry are in Russia, she nevertheless uses his vulnerability to shame him. For Andrew, this is a no-return point. In the background of all this darkness, dreams about moving to Spain come back to Andrew's mind every once in a while. Despite his denial, deep down he still wants to emigrate and take Ann with him. He amasses penny after penny from the "tips" he earns at the hospital, and after a pause he comes back to learning Spanish. Thoughts about Pablo haunt him often, even though he struggles to ignore them. After he had left Barcelona, his worries about Pablo didn't go away until a month later, when he caught a game of his team on TV. Watching as Pablo artfully scored a few goals to the ecstasy of the club's roaring fans, he was greatly relieved. Unlike a quivering mess of nerves that Pablo looked like when they were alone in the wilderness of the park, on the field Pablo looks infallibly smiling, strong, and confident. Andrew hopes that Pablo will forget him and get rid of the feeling he had. Maybe, he believes, given Pablo's young age it was just a phase. Choosing to believe this over and over again, every time he regrets that he and Pablo were not destined to become friends. Because he liked Pablo so much. To be honest, he liked Pablo in a special way, but he is too scared to be honest with himself. He believes he was not supposed to like a man this much and in this way. Just like he wasn't supposed to feel this intense sense of belonging in Spain, but boy, did he feel it. And maybe, just maybe, he felt it for a reason. Maybe, just maybe, he and Pablo met for a reason, too, but this is still too uncomfortable to consider, and anyway he chose to walk away from Pablo that night. He still sees no way he and Pablo can reconnect. But way too often at nights, he sees a dream involving Pablo. More exactly, it's a nightmare. He finds himself driving a car on an empty country road in summer, the grass around burnt-out, the heat scorching outside, the landscape faceless and lifeless, but somehow he knows he is in Spain. He knows he is desperately chasing after something or someone, and he floors the gas to go faster. Then, he sees a little girl in a white lace dress beside him riding shotgun. He doesn't know who she is, but she tells him she knows where he should go to find what he's looking for. Then, he hears a beep sound, and as he looks at the car's dashboard, in place of the speedometer he sees huge red digits of a countdown timer reaching the deadline. In panic, he floors the gas even harder, and the beeps gets louder and increasingly frequent. The next second he sees himself in the desolate park spot where Pablo confessed to him and sees the suicide scene of Pablo jumping off from the steep slope of Montjuïc onto the highway running below. Every time Andrew wakes up in cold sweat, and every time the scenes of the nightmare assume new graphic, horrifying details, but the plot remains the same, and Andrew cannot make sense of it.
Andrew and Sofia give the best of their love and care to his daughter, but their efforts cannot fully ease the pain that the little girl feels and communicates about her mother emotionally neglecting her. In spite of Nathalie's behavior, Andrew still holds onto believing in her goodness and hopes that she will do better with time. On the third birthday of Ann, however, their marital dysfunction reaches the boiling point. After another exhausting day at the hospital, Andrew comes home to help Sofia set up a familial celebration, and Nathalie after making multiples promises to come at increasingly late time finally sends Andrew a text saying that she will stay at another fashion party till midnight instead. The little kid starts weeping when she learns that her Mom will not come, and Andrew with Sofia have to deal with their own pain silently as they try to comfort and cheer her up. At this point, Andrew feels that the last thread in their connection with Nathalie is cut off. He spends a night alone in their bed, tossing and turning, trying to fall asleep. He finally accepts that his marriage has come to its end, and the dreams about a better future in Spain come flooding his mind. And now, they feel different. Because now Andrew is no longer in the business of denying the feeling that has been growing in his heart for three years. This feeling bursts out into his mind, and instead of feeling shame about it, he feels truly, completely happy. At dawn, he turns his computer on, opens the email app, and finds his and Pablo's long-abandoned correspondence. He writes to Pablo that from the first day they met he had a special feeling for him, and it took him this much time and a lot of pain to realize what it was. He writes that the days the spent together in Barcelona were the happiest days of his life. He says that his dreamy feelings about this city are inextricably connected to his feeling for Pablo whose nature he finally understands: it is true, fierce romantic love.