horns of Africa

The morning after the kudu bull was killed by the lions who then lost its carcass to the hyenas, John and I return to Chudob waterhole to have a look at the yesterday's battlefield. It is all quiet now, with the ochre sand blowing here and there as the wind increases and an odd ungulate walks across the salt pan to get a drink. I look for the great kudu horns but they have already vanished, as if all traces of the battle had to be wiped off the stage to make room for another play. 

But these magnificent African horns haunt me. I grew up in Poland, at the time when the culture of hunting and rifles, trophies and venison suppers, was still very much alive. My father, a forester's son, grew up in the woods and remembered shooting his first hare one snowy evening before he was old enough to go to school. Like many kids in those days, he roamed unsupervised, learning the sounds and silences of the forest with every step: an only child, a boy alone, mesmerized. He told me he often returned home at night after having to find his way in the dark, and hearing the owls, the wolves and the wind talking to each other. And he learned to imitate animal sounds so well that when I heard the hyenas' battle cry yesterday I had little doubt he would have learned it, too.

He was a very good hunter, and I grew up with big mounted heads hanging on our walls. 

But these heads with their massive horns came from Africa. There was a Cape buffalo I did not like very much because it seemed too cow-like and graceless, and a lovely impala buck with its lyre-shaped horns, and a mysterious head I loved best for its delicate lines of its great horns. Many years later, in Kenya, I finally thought I found its origin: it was probably a topi, a big reddish antelope with sloping shoulders and tiny yellow eyes located so low on its beautiful narrow head the animal seemed blind. 

But why on Earth did we have African animal heads in a small city apartment?  Right after the war, Pecia, as we children called our father, was encouraged by Mister Antoni, another forestry engineer, to take a train to what had just become western Poland, newly liberated by the Allies and handed to Poland after the Yalta accords became final. Virtually all Germans who used to live there were deported or fled on their own, leaving behind an unimaginable wealth of their fully equipped homes, stores and outbuildings.

And some Poles, who still had to mourn their war dead, and whose own possessions were all but gone, and who were often hungry and penniless, quickly realized this was the best time to go and collect from the newly abandoned German houses whatever they could, from furniture to underwear. I remember this postwar Klondike rush was called "szaber." The new and chaotic phenomenon amounted to mass looting of properties no longer guarded or legally owned. And so the Second World War continued, as if its destructive course which already lasted six terrible years maintained its deadly momentum and could not stop on its own, perhaps never.

I dimly understood that szaber, if performed to benefit your hungry and ill-dressed family suffering through another bone-freezing Polish winter, was an honorable undertaking, which amounted to "taking what was rightfully ours." Yet if it was conducted solely to speculate and sell the loot to those in dire need, it was considered a plain and immoral robbery. This distinction and the final judgment greatly depended on who was talking.

So Mister Antoni, a refined and urbane man with slender wrists and wire-rimmed glasses, led our reluctant and somewhat bewildered Pecia to the szaber grounds out west. They soon came across a German hunting villa with well appointed grounds, and set to work. The absent owner appeared to be a wealthy man and an avid hunter. Perhaps -- and I can only speculate on this subject -- he even had a strong connection to the German colony of South West Africa, including parts of today's Namibia. And so the two intrepid engineers collected what they considered the most important, boarded a passing train full of similarly burdened passengers, and safely returned to their families. 

I remember Mister Antoni brought back a score of pots and pans, some fluffy down comforters, clean linen and heavy table silver, which could be sold to buy food. It was a hungry time in Poland, and precious metals were a common currency of need. He also brought some winter clothes for his family, all practical good stuff, hugely desirable and much needed.

And what did our Pecia bring? Three large sets of the above mentioned African trophy horns, all mounted. One native African hunting lance, 6 feet long, tipped with a sharp bit of metal. Two grass African plates, with nice muted designs in many shades of wet clay. And two heavy volumes of a German book titled "The Grave of Tutankhamun," describing an archeological expedition which discovered and excavated Tutankhamun's tomb under one of the pyramids in Egypt. The books had black linen covers with gold letters and were published in old German Gothic alphabet.

My mother despaired, albeit not for long. By then, she knew what she could expect from her husband, and I am sure she knew what she would have done if she had gone instead. She was born in the tsarist Russia, lost her father who was murdered soon after the Bolshevik revolution engulfed the country, and came to Poland as a refuge when she was 12, already hardened and endlessly resourceful.  Perhaps she also recognized that not everybody could be like her, madly courageous, hard driving, and kicking her priorities in a strange but logical order. When she saw a couple of straw mats she wanted to hang above our kid beds, she slipped off her ring and left it in the store to pay for it later, but the mats went home with her that day. And when our dog Czertez found a roast -- which someone miraculously procured and left on a high window sill outside until a gust of wind blew it down -- she would serve it for our dinner and let Czertez have his share. So, if she made a mistake of letting Pecia go, she should not have been surprised by the results of his szaber expedition.

And for me his esoteric loot became an instant source of delight. I loved waking up to the shadows of those great horns moving slowly across the room as the sun rose. I played with the lance and imagined I was strolling all alone across the savannah, ready to meet many animals who would accept me immediately as one of their own. The grass plates were wonderful to touch and very pretty. There were also the books. I could not read yet -- in German or otherwise -- but there were many pictures. Small, black and white, and beguiling. The pyramid, the camp, the bearded men digging and excavating one ancient chamber after another, all mysterious and dim. I still remember marvelous reliefs on the walls of the catacombs and finally the find, the sarcophagus, and the scary, strange and very dead mummy. Then the opening of the casket, shaped like a person and richly decorated, and a wrapped human shape, and the unwrapping.... 

All this was thrilling beyond description. I knew I did not want the warm clothes Mister Antoni's daughter just received: this is what I needed more than anything else. This, and the African animals' heads with their horns turned to the sky. And perhaps in my life's journey I traveled as determinedly as my mother did, and brought back the amazement my father would like.   ©Yva Momatiuk