clicks of plates with chosen havvage landing on the plastic trays being dragged along narrow railings by the kitchen counter towards the woman in the stiff tube of white cloth upon her head behind the cash register in the end of the multi-rail-path.
With a fleeting glance at the tray’s load, the nun of the order of Starched Cashiers announced the verdict—from 60 kop. to 1 ruble—accepted the payment, gave the change, and her box spat out another paper slip onto the heap of the neglected checks… At times some students, with a quirk for research, took the same set of food while in different points in the moving line – just so, from purely scientific curiosity. The payment for those control sets varied. The cashier created the price on the fly, by the inspiration prompted by the client's looks, the outside weather conditions, and the level of noise in the hall…
After finishing their meal, guests went to the first floor, past the shortest embodiment of human wisdom E = mc2, painted on the wall at the staircase landing. Plagiarizing a Russian byword, an empty stomach makes you a slow learner, while after the meal the theory of relativity and stuff might seem more digestible, you never can tell.
(…by the by, it's a moot point who's wiser – Einstein or the guy who found such a fitting place for the application of the genius’ formula…)
On the first floor, there was the constantly locked hall of celebrations that hosted a couple of weddings per year. Going out onto the high porch you could still turn into a glass door of a small confectionery with 2 saleswomen in nun whites, and the usual assortment of sand cakes for 22 kop., two-day-old donuts, and tobacco products. Cigarettes were not too good, rather on a dampish side, except for "Belomor-Canal" of the most excellent quality – stuffed with dry and finely chopped tobacco, which is very important.
Once, being on high, I demanded from the saleswomen "The Ledger of Complaints and Proposals", which presence was the must in any Soviet store, and scribbled thanks on the Belomor account, concluding it "be blessed, dearest dears!" A graphomaniac would always find a vent for his unpretentious passion…
Now you could return to the five-storied Hosty. 3 columns of wide-section (36 cm) iron pipes, paint-coated in the tonality of medium rust, supported the flat concrete canopy over the wide two-step porch at the entrance. The columns, when knocked at, sounded differently letting play the phrase "do-re-mi-do-re-do!", thanks to precise tone pitch of the iron pipes. Although the institute had, among others, the Department of Music Teachers, yet the honor of that particular music discovery belonged to a student of the English Department who graduated before my enrollment. As for the mentioned music phrase, it was an old-time curse used by the lahboohs. Wherever you played it, any lahbooh, if he happened around, would get at once that old good jive running, "Go and fuck yourself, jerk!" One syllable for each note, exactly…
The glazed door on the porch let you inside the small glass-walled cage of vestibule with another door opening into the lobby in whose right corner there stood a sizable desk with the on-duty watchwoman behind it guarding the square shield of plywood fixed on the wall, with rows of nails for hanging the keys to the rooms in the Hosty. If the nail beneath the ink-written ‘72’ was empty, then one of my roommates had already grabbed the key and passed over to the room. In the long corridor behind the lobby you could take any, either right or left, turn and reach one of the two staircases to the upper floors, yet the left one was the shorter route to Room 72.
Each of the floors belonged to a different department, aka faculty. Thus, the second floor was inhabited by the students of the Biology Department, aka Bio-Fac. The English Department, aka Anglo-Fac, possessed the third floor. Mathematicians from the Phys-Mat lived on the fourth, and the uppermost—fifth floor—was for the Music-Pedagogical Department, aka Mus-Ped…
On any floor, leaving the staircase landing, you entered a long, pretty dark, corridor to which the light was getting only from its opposite ends, thru 2 windows (1 per each end) distended from the floor to the ceiling. The rest of the scenery was made of walls with rows of closed doors above the smoothly ground dark-gray concrete in the floor.
Room 72 followed the washroom of 6 sinks, which was the first from the end window, opposite the door to the men's toilet on the other side of the same window. At the faraway opposite end of the long corridor, everything was exactly the same, only the toilet there was for ladies.
On entering the room, you got into its narrowest part squeezed between the 4 plywood lockers reaching the ceiling—2 of them on each side. After the lockers, the room became a bit wider to accommodate a bed, a cabinet-box, and another bed lined under the walls which pattern was mirrored by the same arrangement under the opposite side wall. The wide, three-winged, window was right ahead between the 2 and under its sill were 2 more cabinet-boxes pressed to the pig-iron radiator of the central heating system. The center of the room was occupied by the dark-brown varnish-scarred veteran of a table with 4 wooden chairs pushed under, so that you could bypass it when heading to the window.
The soiled spots in the wallpaper marked the places where the inmates or their visitors habitually leaned their heads taking a seat upon the bed covers, while the wallpaper cleaner stretches bore dense columns of inscribed card debt records and scores in Throw-in-Fool competitions.
The round tin box in the center of the whitewashed ceiling slab contained 2 naked light bulbs of low voltage. The room was also equipped with 2 wall sockets (the left one falling out from the partition with the following room but it was a double partition so the socket couldn’t be