Short Story

I HAVE A DREAM

Jenny Campbell, Sherborne Scribblers

Midwinter, 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

conquest. For the first time the eagle lowered its head. Dark days! The Emperor returned slowly, leaving behind him a Moscow in flames. It snowed. Winter’s end brought an avalanche of melted snow. After the white plain another white plain. They no longer knew the leaders nor the flag: Yesterday the great army, now a flock. They could no longer make out the wings nor the centre. It snowed. The wounded sought shelter in the stomach of dead horses…

My translation will not be perfect. So, to get the full impact of this poem, written in verse form, it really needs to be read in the original French. Hugo moves on to the equally bloody battle of Waterloo and there can be no doubt that both wars affected the author of Les Miserables and The Hunchback of Notre Dame deeply. Even though he was only a schoolboy at the time, they inspired his own dream of a united Europe in which there would be no more wars. In an excerpt from his passionate speech to an international audience at the peace congress in Paris, in 1849, he shared his own vision of a better world, saying, ‘…a day will come when war between Paris and London, St Petersburg and Berlin, Vienna and Turin will seem as absurd and impossible to you as between Rouen and Amiens today…’ He sees a new union of all the European nations, including Angleterre, as trading partners promoting commerce and fresh ideas while maintaining their own, separate identities. He went on to say, ‘A day will come when bullets and bombs will be replaced by votes.’

So, despite my vote to join the seven nations Common Market only, in 1973, the European Project must have been bubbling along in the French pipeline for almost two centuries; which is why my other literary companions on the long train ride to Vladivostok are: Les Grands Jours de l’Europe 1950-2004 by Jean-Michel Gaillard, former diplomatic adviser at the Élysée, and My Secret Brexit Diary by Michel Barnier which was published in 2021 and was a requested Christmas present. Strange choices for a Brexiteer? Not really. I just wanted to see the view from the other side of the Channel. Which is pretty much what Victor Hugo had in mind: understanding each other.

These three books should certainly help to pass the hours in between looking out at the snow and scintillating over dinner. But, one more thing. Regardless of what the dream merchants say, I am keeping the Dior and diamonds!