Parallel to Nezhyn Street, about three hundred meters off, there ran Professions Street one side of which was just one endless wall of tall concrete slabs fencing the Konotop Steam-Engine and Railroad-Car Repair Plant, which name was commonly eschewed and substituted by the short and nice KahPehVehRrZeh. Because of that plant, the part of Konotop outside the Under-Overpass was named the KahPehVehRrZeh Settlement, or just the Settlement.

On the Plant’s opposite side, the same slab-wall split it from the multitude of railway tracks in the Konotop Passenger Station and the adjacent Freight Station, where long freight trains were waiting for their turn to start off to their different destinations because Konotop was a big railway junction. The marshaling yard of the Freight Station with freight cars running down the hump, both as loners or in small groups into the sorting lines, sent forth the shrieking screech of wheel chocks, bangs of cars against each other, indistinct screams of loudspeakers with reports about that or another train on that or another sorting line. However, in the daytime the marshaling yard symphony was not too overbearing, its racket whooped it up against the background of night quietude after the noises of day-life subsided…

Regardless of any time of day, whenever it breezed from the nearby village of Popovka, the distillery there permeated the air by its unmistakable stink, which atmospheric phenomenon the Settlement folks christened “From Popovka with Love”. Not that the reek was totally lethal, yet you were better off if shunned to sniff at it attentively, anyway, to have a running nose on such days was kinda blessing…

Nezhyn Street connected to Professions Street by lots of frequent lanes. The first of those side streets (counting from School 13) was called Foundry Street because it led to where the former foundry was located inside the Plant and now not seen because of the concrete wall.

Then there came Smithy Street offering the view of the tall brick smokestack by the Plant’s smithy behind that same wall.

The next (past our house at number 19) was Gogol Street, neglecting the fact that there was no Gogol, or any other writer for that matter, in front or behind the Plant wall.

The mentioned three streets were more or less straight but those following them before and after the Nezhyn Store tangled in the warren of differently directed lanes which, in the end, also led to the Plant wall if you knew how to navigate them…

The Nezhyn Store gained that name because it stood in Nezhyn Street and it was the largest of all the 3 stores in the Settlement. The smaller ones were named by their numbers.

The premises of Nezhyn Store occupied a separate one-story brick building and a backyard. It comprised 4 departments entered separately and marked by the time-worn tin frames over their doors: “Bread”, “Industrial Goods”, “Grocery”, and “Fish and Vegetables”.

The “Bread” opened in the morning to work until all of the “white” loaves and darker “brick”-bread there got sold out and they could safely lock the emptied department. In the afternoon, with the arrival of the food truck delivering another bunch of “bricks” and loaves from the Konotop Bread Factory, it opened again.

The next, and also the biggest, department—“Industrial Goods”—had two shop windows adorned by dust-smeared miniaturized boxes of security signalization pressed to their panes from inside, on both sides of its mighty door. The store-soiled goods in the glazed showcase-counters were looked after by 3 dead bored saleswomen because they hardly saw a couple of customers a day. The Settlement population, when in need of such goods, preferred to travel to shops in City.