Chapter 6
Bodyo’s father changed his denomination to Roman Catholic and received a government job on the railroad, and later – an apartment not far from the Austrian three-story stone apartment houses along Horodotska Street built specially for railroad employees. Those were square blocks with bare, spacious courtyards inside. They were called alcazars1 with good reason. Since the apartments there were so tiny, no one called them houses, but rather “toy houses” as if they were made for dolls.
But Bodyo’s father was lucky enough to get a separate house, which, unlike the gray “toy-houses,” had a garden where we used to play. Sometimes I would stay overnight and listen to the cacophony of arriving trains, the roar of their train buffers, and the whistling of locomotives, inhaling the smell
