Marco Polo - Laurence Bergreen [172]
Surprisingly, Marco has kind words for the inhabitants of the land of shadows. “These people are handsome, very large, and well made in all their parts,” he notes with relief, “but they are very pale, and have no color, and this happens because of the want of sunlight.”
Marco had endured his share of frigid Mongolian weather, but he describes the Russian winters as more brutal than anything he had experienced—“the greatest cold that is in the world, so that with great difficulty one escapes it”—and he evokes the sting of the cold so vividly that it seems as if he had suffered it himself. “If it were not for the many stoves that are there,” he advises, “the people could not escape from perishing by the too great cold. But there are very frequent stoves, which the noble and powerful piously cause to be built just as hospitals are built with us. And to these stoves all the people can always run when there is need. For cold so intense prevails at times that while men go through the land toward home or from one place to another for their business, when they go from one stove they are almost frozen before they reach another, though the stoves are so frequent that one is separated from another by sixty paces.”
Seeing no reason to doubt this arrangement, Marco reports: “It very often happens that if a man who is not well-clothed, or cannot travel so fast because he is old, or is of weaker constitution and nature than others, or because his house is too far off, falls to the ground frozen by the too great cold before from one stove he can reach another, and would die there. But others passing by take him immediately and lead him to a stove and strip him, and when he is being warmed there his nature is restored, and he comes back to life.”
Marco is on surer ground when he describes the peculiar stoves, which resembled saunas. He speaks of “thick beams placed in a square one above the other,” and says, “they are so closed up together that nothing could be seen between one and another, and between the joints they are very well caulked with lime and other things so that wind nor rain can come in anywhere. Above at the roof they have a window by which the smoke goes out when fire is lighted in them to warm them. Logs are kept there in abundance, of which the people put many on the fire and make a great pile, and while the logs burn and give out smoke, the upper window is opened and the smoke goes out of it.” These contraptions were so numerous throughout Russia that “every noble or rich man” talked of having one.
MARCO’S LOCAL sources—traders and merchants who had actually ventured into this curious land—confirmed that the Russians were inordinately fond of their liquor. They told how nobles and “magnates,” men and women, as well as “husbands, wives, and children,” gathered in companies as large as fifty solely to drink a “perfect wine, which is called cerbesia,” flavored with honey. “There are men who might be called innkeepers,” Marco goes on, “who keep this cerbesia for sale. These companies go to these taverns and continue the whole day in drinking. They call that drinking straviza. In the evening, the innkeepers make reckoning of the cerbesia they have consumed, and each pays the share belonging to himself and wife and children, if they are there.”
Special times were reserved for women only to drink their fill of cerbesia, with customs unique to their sex. “When the ladies stay all day,” Marco reports, “they do not leave them because they wish to pass water, but their maids bring great sponges and put them under them so stealthily that the other people do not notice. For one seems to be talking with the mistress and another puts the sponge under, and so the mistress passes water in the sponge as she sits, and afterward the maid takes away the sponge quite full, and so they pass water whenever they wish to do so.”
Marco’s final vision of the Russian people, based on an anecdote he had heard, is comic and grotesque. He begins: “While a man was leaving the drinking with his wife to go home in the evening, his wife set herself