Baking Cakes in Kigali (10 page)

“That is a beautiful forest,” declared Angel. “Why did we not see it when we passed through it yesterday?”

“
Eh!
Yesterday our heads were full of death and violence,” said Dr Binaisa. “Eyes that are focusing on that kind of past cannot look around and see beauty.”

“That is true,” agreed Angel. “That lady who showed you around that place yesterday, I don’t know how she can bear to look at what she sees every day of her life.”

“I think she looks but she does not see,” offered Gasana. “Otherwise how can she live her life?” He shrugged his shoulders. “Maybe we’re all like that in some way—even me. For example, I know that many of our Catholic priests helped to kill people
—eh
, even the Bishop of that area we went to yesterday, the Gikongoro
préfecture
, he’s on trial now as a
génocidaire.
But still I’m a Catholic; still I live according to the teachings of the church that helped to kill us.”

“
Eh
, now you are on a subject for
Mama
-Grace!” declared Pius. “We will not hear the end of it before we reach Kigali.”

Angel shot her husband a glance, which he did not turn in his seat to catch, but said nothing.

“Tungaraza has told me that your family attends many churches,” said Dr Binaisa. “But are you not Catholics?”

“We are Catholics,” explained Angel, “but in Rwanda we’re simply Christians. I’m nervous of attending just one church here, of listening to just one priest. Because how can we know what is truly in that priest’s heart after so many showed that love and peace were only words in their mouths? So we attend a different church every second week; in between, we still attend our local Catholic church.”

“Are you not afraid that you might make the mistake of attending the service of a cult?” asked Dr Binaisa. “All you Tungarazas could end up dead like those Restoration of the Ten Commandments people in my country. That church killed nearly one thousand people in Kampala alone.”

Angel shook her head and smiled. “I think I would recognise a dangerous cult, Baba-Zahara. If a priest tells me that I must die or that I must kill others, I’ll know that he’s not speaking on behalf of God.”

“Eh, don’t be so sure of that!” warned Gasana.

Angel was silent for a while as she contemplated this warning, which happened to come at the very moment that a familiar warmth began to spread up her throat and across her cheeks. Discussing a serious topic at such a time would only double her discomfort; it was time to lighten up the conversation.

“You know what?” she asked her fellow passengers as she plunged her hand inside her blouse to retrieve a tissue from her brassiere. “I cannot think right now about those whose job is to guard our souls; I’m too busy thinking about those whose job is to guard our bodies. I’m wondering if that soldier is still asleep on the back of that van.”

That induced much laughter; and they were still in high
spirits when they arrived back in Kigali late in the afternoon. As had been agreed before they left, the driver dropped Dr Binaisa at the Tungarazas’ compound so that he and Angel could discuss the matter of the birthday cake for his daughter Zahara. After a tumultuous welcome from the children, Pius went down into the yard with them and Titi so that Angel could discuss business with her customer in privacy.

When she emerged from the kitchen with their tea, Dr Binaisa was on his knees on a sheet of
The New Times
that he had spread out on the living-room floor, his forehead resting on a job advertisement for an administrative assistant at the Russian Embassy. Angel seated herself quietly and waited until he had finished his prayers.

“Your church requires you to pray a lot,” she said as he sat down opposite her. “Even very early in the mornings, around five o’clock. From here I can hear your priest calling you to prayers at the mosque near the post office. That’s very far for a man’s voice to travel.”

“All the faithful must hear the muezzin’s call,
Mama
-Grace. But now! Let us talk about Zahara’s birthday cake.”

Angel reached for her photo album. “What kind of cake do you have in mind?”

Dr Binaisa shrugged his shoulders. “Just a cake.”

“Just a cake?
Any
cake?”

“Any cake will be fine. Just write Zahara’s name on the top.”

Angel looked at Dr Binaisa as he sipped his tea. She took off her glasses and began to polish them with a tissue retrieved from her brassiere.

“
Baba
-Zahara, a cake with just a child’s name on top is a cake ordered by a parent who doesn’t know his child, a parent who is unable to imagine. I know that you are not that parent; it is only that you are tired because you’ve had a long journey.

Perhaps I can guide you, because I’m very familiar with this business of choosing cakes. May I ask you some questions?”

Dr Binaisa shrugged his shoulders again. “Go ahead.”

“Let us start at the beginning. Does Zahara prefer vanilla or chocolate?”

“Oh, she loves chocolate!”

“You see? Already you’re showing me how well you know your child. Okay, so the cake itself will be chocolate. Now, what else does she love? Maybe a kind of animal? A special toy? Something that she’s seen and often talks about?”

Dr Binaisa thought for a while. “You know, since she flew on an aeroplane for the first time she’s been excited about planes. Whenever there’s one flying overhead she runs outside to look at it. And she loves to visit the airport here at Kanombe. She’s even put a picture of an aeroplane on her bedroom wall.”

“Do you think an aeroplane is what she loves most?”

“Definitely. I’ve even said to my wife that our daughter will grow up to be an air hostess.”

Angel had not yet put her glasses back on. She gave them another polish. “Perhaps your daughter will grow up to be a pilot,” she suggested.

Dr Binaisa laughed and slapped his thigh. “You’re a very funny somebody,
Mama
-Grace!”

She persevered. “Or maybe she’ll grow up to be an aircraft engineer. After all, her father is an engineer. A father is always very proud when his child follows in his own footsteps. It’s a very big compliment.”

Putting her glasses back on, she watched as Dr Binaisa’s smile faded on his lips and his eyes darted from left to right and back again as this new idea struggled to find a place in his mind where it could belong.

“Mama-Grace, what does all this talk of aeroplanes have to do with cakes?”

“Everything, Baba-Zahara!” She gave him a big smile. “Zahara’s birthday cake will look like an aeroplane! She’ll be so pleased that her father had that idea!”

Dr Binaisa smiled back at Angel. “Yes, it is a very good idea.”

“Let me show you some other cakes here in my album so that you can have a sense of how it will look. See, here, this child had a toy dump truck and he played with it all day long.”

Dr Binaisa examined the photograph. The entire cake was a yellow truck with blue glass windows and fat black tires. The back of the truck was beginning to tip up, and its cargo of M&Ms had started to slide off the back. “Eh! Mama-Grace! This is a very fine cake!”

“Thank you, Baba-Zahara.” Angel smiled and patted her hair. “But I’ll make Zahara’s aeroplane even finer. And see this one here. This was for a teenage girl. Her mother said that girl was always talking on her cell-phone.”

“
Eh!”
said Dr Binaisa as he admired the cake. It was in the shape of a big cell-phone, dark blue around the sides with a paler blue panel on the top. A square of light grey was the phone’s small screen, bearing the words
Happy Birthday Constance
like a text message. Smaller squares of pink bore numbers and letters, just like a real cell-phone.
“Mama-
Grace, this looks real!
Eh!
And look at this one, here. It’s a microphone—although I don’t know that particular news station. But it looks real!”

Angel beamed. “But wait till you see Zahara’s aeroplane. All the children at the party will love it. And many weeks after the party, the parents of those children will still be talking about the cake that Dr Binaisa ordered for his daughter.”

Dr Binaisa smiled as he imagined that.

“Of course, a cake like that takes much time and much work. It is not a cheap cake,
Baba
-Zahara. But nobody talks for a long time about a cake that was cheap.”

“You’re right, of course,
Mama-Grace,”
agreed Dr Binaisa. “So let us plan a cake that Kigali will talk about for many, many weeks.”

IN
the early hours of the following morning, Angel awoke with a start to find Pius sitting up in their bed, his breath catching in his throat. He had had a dream, he told her, in which he found himself back at the school on the top of the hill. All the classroom doors were shut, but he seemed to know exactly which room he was looking for. He went to it and opened the door. Desperately searching amongst the ghostly bodies that lay across the wooden benches inside, he at last found the one he was looking for: a small child dressed in the remnants of a decaying khaki T-shirt edged with orange. He squatted down on the bench next to the child’s body and gently turned it over so that he could see the face.

“Angel, it was Joseph. It was our own son!” Pius struggled to get his breath. “He looked at me—his face was
white
, Angel!—and he said, ‘They shot me,
Baba.’
I tried to hold him, but he pulled away from me, and he said, ‘I can’t find Vinas.’ Those were his words, Angel, and they made me panic. I had to find her! I ran from room to room at that school, calling her name, but she wasn’t there …” Pius was breathing like someone who had just run all the way to the top of a very steep hill. “Vinas wasn’t there.”

“Pius, you need to breathe,” said Angel. Taking his right hand, she placed its palm flat against the area between her throat and her breasts, holding it there with her left hand as she flattened her right palm on his chest. “Breathe with me.”

It was the way they had calmed each other throughout their marriage, the one guiding the other until their breaths were equally deep and slow, in and out in such unison that they lost track of which of them was setting the pace.

At last he was able to speak again. “She wasn’t there,” he repeated, sadly now, exhausted.

They settled back down in the bed, and Angel held him tightly, whispering soothing words into his ear. With Pius’s worry of Vinas being lost—of Joseph and Vinas not being in the same place—now running from room to room in her own mind, she had no expectation of sleep. But his breathing took her with him as he slipped into sleep in her arms, and she found him still there when the muezzin’s call from the mosque near the post office woke her before dawn.

DESCENDING THE STEPS
that led down to the Chinese shop on Rue Karisimbi in central Kigali, Dr Rejoice Lilimani successfully deflected both a woman intent on selling her some baskets hand-woven from banana-fibre and a man who was urging her to buy one of his small stone carvings of mountain gorillas. She was on the point of entering the shop’s busy and shadowy interior, crammed with shelves of kitchen and household goods, when somebody called her name.

She turned and looked back up towards the road from which the steps descended. Crowds of Saturday-morning shoppers weaved their way past the cars that were parked on the unsurfaced verge, while behind them packed minibus-taxis raced along the road in the direction of the post office, on their way to the central minibus station on Rue Mont Kabuye.

Seeing no one who was paying her the slightest bit of attention—apart from the man with the stone gorillas, who was beginning to descend the steps towards her in the belief
that she had changed her mind about making a purchase—the doctor turned and entered the shop.

She heard her name again: “Dr Rejoice!”

She stepped out of the shop and looked up the steps again, and as she did so the man with the stone gorillas paused in his descent and looked back down at her hopefully.

“Who is calling Dr Rejoice?” she asked, a look of puzzlement furrowing her brow.

“It’s me,” said a voice. “Here I am.”

The doctor became aware of a movement to her left, where scores of brightly-coloured plastic goods—enormous bowls, basins, dustbins and wash-baskets—lined the landing at the bottom of the steps outside the doorway into the shop. Above a purple dustbin a hand waved a piece of white tissue. Dr Rejoice took a step forward and peered around the dustbin into the patch of shade in which Angel sat on a tiny wooden stool.

“My dear! Hello! What are you doing sitting there?”

“Hello, Dr Rejoice.” Angel smiled as she dabbed at her face with the tissue that had attracted the doctor’s attention. “You didn’t see me!”

“How was I to guess that you were sitting behind a purple plastic dustbin?” laughed Dr Rejoice. “Are you okay, my dear?”

“Oh, I’m fine, really. I was inside the shop when I began to feel hot like someone had thrown a blanket over my head, so I had to come outside. They brought me a stool to sit here in the shade till I feel better.”

“Then let me ask them to bring a stool for me, too. I’ll sit with you a few minutes.” Dr Rejoice went into the shop, returning moments later with a man carrying a plastic chair. He put it down next to Angel.