Short Story
I HAVE A DREAM
M
Jenny Campbell, Sherborne Scribblers
idwinter, and I am about to board the Trans-Siberian Express to Vladivostok. It’s something I have always wanted to do; just as in my twenties, I dreamed of going to China and Tibet. Now, here I am, furhatted and fur-coated, stepping onto the luxurious Golden Eagle train, followed by a porter half-hidden behind my trolley load of Louis Vuitton luggage. I know… I know… but this is a dream so I may as well travel in style. A year or two back, I watched a TV documentary about the Russian dancer, Natalia Makarova, returning to her native country for the first time since defecting to Britain from the Kirov Ballet in 1970 at the age of thirty. Also travelling from Moscow, she was following the silk route to Tashkent; and for my own journey across Siberia, I think that one should look as interesting and exotic as Makarova. Each evening, therefore, having gained several inches in height, I shall sweep into the dining car – all Dior and diamonds – where the most delightful travelling companions will join me in scintillating conversation (still a dream, okay?) over the Beluga, borshch and Dom Perignon. Memo: Must practise sweeping. But, why winter, you may ask. Why not summer, when you will see the Russian Steppe in all its glory? Forests of sun-dappled silver birch, apple orchards, sparkling lakes and maybe even a hungry leopard or Siberian tiger, straying off-piste from their Arctic homes in the tundra are, surely, much more appealing than over one week and 9,000 km of snow-covered landscape, passing through eight different time zones? Because, I would say, this journey is also one of bringing history to life. Trying to imagine, for instance, just a fraction of what it must have been like for the Russian writer, Solzhenitsyn and other political prisoners slaving in the gulags of Siberia. I will also, on this journey, be treading on another person’s dream as I open one of three books that will be accompanying me to Vladivostok. It is a volume of French poetry in which the first part of Victor Hugo’s L’Expiation (Atonement) never fails to move me. Recounting Napoleon Bonaparte’s return to France after the 1812 Russian Campaign, it is as graphic a description of the aftermath of war as any that has been written, beginning with: It snowed. They were beaten by its
140 | Sherborne Times | March 2022
