Its narrator, an ordinary Soviet citizen, encounters the fences that surround the Communist leaders’ estates and begins to fantasize about what the fences conceal: fresh, untrampled grass, clean air, hard-to-find chocolate-mint candy, birds of different kinds, shish kebab consumed in the security of knowing the fence is guarded, and at night, to top it all off, “they show films about whores.” The narrator cannot take it anymore, heads back to the city, and the whole way back, he is subjected to a lecture extolling Soviet egalitarianism, broadcast over the train’s radio system. He thinks of the
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