Free Dreams of My Russian Summers by Andreï Makine

sky, a flock of migratory birds was slowly melting away, accentuating the silence with the echo of their noisy cries.The heavy and syncopated breathing of this Russian world no longer terrified her. She had learned so much since she began her journey. She knew that in a railway carriage or on a farm wagon it was practical to carry a bag stuffed with straw, with a few pebbles right at the bottom. This was what the bandits would snatch in their nocturnal raids. She knew that the best place on the roof of a railway carriage was the one near the ventilation hole: it was to this opening that ropes were attached, which enabled you to get down and climb up again quickly. And when by good fortune she found a place in a crowded corridor, she would not be surprised to see a frightened child being passed from hand to hand toward the exit by the people piled on the ground floor. The ones crouched near the door would open it and hold the child above the footboard while it did its business. This passing down the line seemed rather to amuse them: they smiled, touched by this little creature wordlessly allowing itself to be handled in this way, moved by its very natural urge in this inhuman universe…. No surprise either when whispering was heard above the clatter of the rails in the night: they were communicating the death of a passenger, lost deep among this confusion of lives.
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    Only once in the course of this long journey, punctuated by suffering, blood, illness, mud, did she believe she had caught a glimpse of a modicum of serenity and wisdom. She had already reached the far side of the Urals. On the way out of a village half consumed by a fire she saw several men sitting on a bank scattered with dead leaves. Their pale faces, turned toward the mild late autumn sun, radiated a blissful calm. The peasant who was driving the cart jerked his head and explained softly, “Poor people, there are a dozen of them wandering round here now. Their asylum was burnt down. Oh, yes, madmen, you know.”
    Nothing could surprise her anymore, nothing.
    Often, squeezed into the airless darkness of a railway carriage, she had a dream — brief, luminous, and completely improbable. For example, those enormous camels in falling snow, turning their disdainful heads toward a church as four soldiers emerged from the door, dragging behind them a priest who was admonishing them in a broken voice. The camels with snow-covered humps, the church,the gleeful crowd… . As she slept, Charlotte recalled that time was when such humped silhouettes would be inseparable from palm trees in the desert, oases… .
    Then she emerged from her torpor: and it was not a dream! She was actually standing there in the midst of a noisy market in an unknown town. The heavy snow clung to her eyelashes. Passersby came up and felt the little silver medallion she was hoping to exchange for bread. The camels towered over the swarming traders, like strange drakkar ships mounted on stilts. And under the amused stares of the crowd the soldiers were pushing the priest along in a sledge stuffed with straw.
    After that spurious dream the evening stroll she took was so ordinary, so real. She crossed a street with paving stones that shone by the misty light of a street lamp, pushed open the door of a baker’s shop. Its warm, well-lit interior seemed familiar to her, right down to the color of the varnished wood of the counter and the arrangement of the cakes and chocolates in the window. The shopkeeper smiled kindly at her, as she would to a regular customer, and offered her a loaf. In the street Charlotte stopped, overcome with perplexity. She should have bought much more bread! Two, three, no, four loaves! She should have noted the name of the street where this excellent bakery was located. She approached the corner house and looked up. But the letters had an odd, hazy look: they merged into one another, twinkled. “Oh, how stupid I am!” she suddenly