Baking Cakes in Kigali (16 page)

LATER
that afternoon, it was Amina’s turn to hear Dieudonné’s story from Angel. By that time the story had become even happier, because Angel was able to add to it Benedict’s delight at sharing his name with an important character in the story.

Amina had come to Angel’s apartment to help her to dress for the function at the Tanzanian Embassy. At the Tungarazas’ house in Dar es Salaam there had been a full-length mirror on the bedroom wall and a smaller mirror on the inside of one of the doors of the wardrobe. If Angel had stood in a particular place and angled the wardrobe door carefully, it had been possible to see, in that smaller mirror, a reflection of her back view in the mirror on the wall. But all she had in this apartment was a mirror on the bathroom wall that ended at her waist; she could only judge how she looked full-length and from behind through Amina’s eyes.

The fabric of her new dress was royal blue patterned with small butterflies embroidered in gold. The sleeves puffed up
and out from the bodice, tapering to a small cuff at the elbow, and a broad row of frills spread out at her middle above a long, straight skirt to create the illusion of a waist. A simple gold chain adorned her neck; small gold hoops hung from her ears; her smart black sandals had kitten heels. She twirled for Amina, who looked at her friend critically before giving her judgement.

“When your husband comes home from work and sees you looking like this, his eyes will jump out of his head and run around the room like they’ve just scored a goal at soccer.”

Angel laughed. “Thank you, Amina.
Eh
, it’s nice to wear something smart that isn’t tight.”

Amina reverted to their earlier conversation. “When do you think we’ll hear?”

“I don’t know. It depends how long the girl is in labour. Titi will go to the shop when Leocadie opens tomorrow. She’ll come and tell us the news.”

“We must all support Leocadie tomorrow, because if the girl has not yet delivered it will be a difficult day for her. And of course it will be a difficult day for her if the girl has already delivered a boy.”

“Yes,” agreed Angel. “I’ll speak to Eugenia and some of the others, and we’ll form a group and take turns to go and sit with her in the shop. Leocadie has no mother and no sister here to support her; we will be that for her tomorrow.”

ON SATURDAY MORNING
Angel baked two cakes: a round one in two layers for Ken Akimoto’s dinner party that night, and a large oblong one for Dieudonné’s homecoming celebration the following day, both in plain vanilla; the remaining batter made up a batch of cupcakes. In the afternoon, when the cakes had cooled, she settled down in the peace of the empty apartment to decorate them. Pius had gone off in his smart suit to attend the funeral of a colleague—TB, everybody said, although everybody knew that TB was not what they meant—and the children were all upstairs with Safiya, putting together a large jigsaw puzzle that Safiya’s Uncle Kalif had sent her. Titi was keeping Leocadie company at the shop.

Modeste’s other girlfriend had been in labour for more than two days now, and she had still not delivered. While some were convinced that the long labour heralded a baby boy—because boys were difficult even before they came into the world—others speculated that the mother was deliberately
delaying the delivery because she feared that the baby was a girl whose birth would mark the end of her hold on Modeste.

“I don’t want to be alone again, Mama-Grace,” Leocadie had said in the small, quiet voice of a child when Angel had been in the shop earlier that morning. “After … Afterwards … I was alone. Everyone was gone. Then I got Modeste and Beckham. I got a family.”

As the neighbourhood held its breath for the news, people found reason after reason to visit Leocadie’s shop for some or other forgotten purchase. For Leocadie—at times tearful, at times brave—business had never been so good.

Angel once again had free rein in decorating Ken’s cake, and she decided that she would use the same colours that she would be mixing up for Dieudonné’s cake: red, yellow and green. Of course, it was possible for so few colours to be boring, but she was going to create a design that she knew would be meaningful to Ken. When she had delivered a cake to his apartment once before, her eye had been caught by a round design on a big black-and-white poster on the wall of his living room. She had asked him about it.

“That is yin-yang,” he had explained. “It’s a Chinese symbol meaning balance.”

“It looks like two commas,” Angel had observed. “Or else two tadpoles: a black tadpole and a
Mzungu
tadpole.”

Ken had laughed. “Yes, I can see that. A black tadpole with a big white eye and a white tadpole with a big black eye. But it’s supposed to remind us that nothing is purely black or purely white; nothing is completely right or completely wrong, totally positive or totally negative. We need to find a balanced way of looking at every situation.”

“But why do you have a Chinese something on your wall?” Angel had asked. “Are you not a Japanese?”

“Actually I’m Japanese-American. But that symbol has
become universal now. I like to sit here and look at it; it can help me to think more clearly.”

So Angel set about re-creating that same symbol now on the top of Ken’s round cake. Not in black and white, but in red and green: a green tadpole shape with a big red eye curving around a red tadpole shape with a big green eye. As she did so, she found her thoughts drifting away from Leocadie to Modeste’s other girlfriend, who was in the throes of a long and difficult labour. What was going through her mind right now? To deliver a girl would be to lose her boyfriend; yet to deliver a boy would be no guarantee that she would keep him. At the time that she conceived this baby, did she know that Modeste had another girlfriend? Did she know that that other girlfriend was already carrying Modeste’s baby? Really, it was a very difficult situation for both of these girls.

Having completed the design on the top of the cake, Angel smoothed yellow icing all the way around the sides of the cake and then, around the bottom of the cake where it sat on Ken’s large round plate, she piped alternating red and green scrolls in a similar curved tadpole shape. Standing up, she inspected the cake from the three sides of her work table that were not up against the window. Yes, it was a very fine cake indeed: a universal cake; a cake that spoke about balance.

Sitting down again, she moved Ken’s finished cake to the back of her work table and pulled Dieudonné’s cake towards her on its board. As she smoothed red icing on to one end of the cake, the quiet of the neighbourhood began to be interrupted by a shout, distant at first, then taken up and brought closer by other voices.

“
Umukobwa!”

“
Umukobwa!”

It was a Kinyarwanda word that Angel knew well because she had once had a conversation with Sophie and Catherine
about what it meant. The word described someone’s function within the family: it said that the purpose of this person’s life was to bring in a bride-price to increase the family’s wealth. It was the word for a girl.

The door of the apartment flew open and Titi stood in the doorway, breathless and excited.

“Auntie! The baby is a girl!”

“
Eh!
That is good news for Leocadie!”

Then Titi ran off to share in the happiness of the news with the rest of the neighbourhood, returning briefly later on to report that Modeste and Leocadie were indeed to marry. By then, Angel had already finished decorating Dieudonné’s cake, creating the black letters down the central yellow part of the flag with strips of liquorice from the shop at the petrol station on the corner opposite the American Embassy because there had not been enough of her black
Gateau Graffito
pen left to do the job. She had used up the last of the red, green and yellow icing on the batch of cupcakes.

No sooner had Titi hurtled off again to spread the news of the betrothal than Dr Binaisa and his daughter Zahara came to visit, bringing with them the photographs of Zahara’s birthday party. The children were still upstairs in Amina’s apartment, so Zahara ran up to call everyone down.

Angel and Amina chatted in the kitchen as they boiled up a big pot of milk, and Dr Binaisa and Vincenzo made sure that the children did not mess cupcake or icing on to the photographs as they looked at them. Safiya was particularly excited to see the pictures, as she had missed the party by being away in Kibuye.

“Mama-Grace, this cake is so beautiful!” she declared as Angel and Amina carried trays of tea in from the kitchen. “Look,
Mama!”

Amina looked over Safiya’s shoulder at the aeroplane flying above the clouds with the candles burning behind it.
“Eh,
Angel!
That is a very fine cake! I think it’s the finest you have ever made so far.”

“Everyone at my party said they had never seen such a beautiful cake,” said Zahara. “All the mothers and fathers were asking
Baba
about it.”

“It’s true,” Baba-Zahara confirmed. “I felt very proud of myself that it was my idea to order such a cake.”

Angel put down the tray and gave her glasses a quick wipe on her T-shirt. “Yes, a parent has to think very carefully about what cake to order for a child’s birthday. You cannot order just any cake.”

“You’re right, Mama-Grace,” declared Dr Binaisa. “Everybody wanted to know who had made the cake and where they could find you. But do you know my colleague Professor Pillay? He teaches entrepreneurship.”

“Yes, I know him, his children school with ours.”

“Well, he brought his daughter to the party and he wanted to know about the cake and he asked if I had one of your business cards!”

Angel laughed. “My business cards? That is not something that a person needs here. Okay, big people have them. But why? Everybody already knows who they are.”

“Exactly. Here you simply ask where to find the person you want, and somebody tells you where to go. A good name shines in the dark. But Professor Pillay said no, somebody without a business card is not a professional somebody.”

Amina cut in. “That professor is wrong! Angel doesn’t have a business card but she’s a very professional somebody. Perhaps the problem lies with that professor, because he doesn’t know how to ask somebody a simple question about where to find the best cake-maker.”

All the adults laughed, and Dr Binaisa said, “When Professor Pillay’s daughter’s birthday comes and she wants a cake as nice as Zahara’s, then he’ll come to me and ask where
to find you. Then I’ll ask him if he’s sure he wants to order a cake from somebody who is not professional!”

“He’ll come to Angel because she’s the best,” said Amina.

“And the day that Professor Pillay comes to me, I’ll ask him for
his
business card!” said Angel.

IT
had been a happy day, thought Angel that night, sitting propped up with pillows, hot and unable to sleep, as Pius snored quietly beside her under a blanket. Even though watching Dr Binaisa with his daughter and Amina with hers had made her long for Vinas to be there; and even though Pius had come home from his colleague’s funeral too drained for her to tell him how sharply she had been feeling their daughter’s absence, still it had been a happy day.

She fanned her face with the copy of Oprah’s new
O
magazine that she had borrowed from Jenna, listening to snatches of song from Ken Akimoto’s party at the other end of the building. Tonight some wine-fuelled voices were singing their own version of “Massachusetts”—
and the lights all went out in Kisangani
—shouting the name of the town in DRC where war was imminent, and then laughing loudly at their own cleverness.

Ken had been very excited by the cake and had declared it Angel’s most beautiful yet. That had been very gratifying indeed. Now she thought about the meaning of the symbol on the cake and worked at applying it to the major event of the day. She would think of the good parts of the situation as belonging in the green half of the symbol, and the bad parts as belonging in the red half.

Modeste was going to marry Leocadie, and they were going to be a family with their baby, Beckham. That was green. But there was a circle of red inside the green, and that was that Leocadie already knew that Modeste was the kind of man
who would have other girlfriends, and that he must give some of his small salary to help with his other baby. The other girlfriend’s situation was red: she had lost her boyfriend to another woman and would be raising her baby daughter alone. What could be in that girlfriend’s green circle? Perhaps that her situation was now clear—which it would not yet be if she had delivered a boy—and that Modeste had promised to help her financially with the child. There were not many men who could be relied on for that. If Modeste had power and satellite TV at home, programmes like
The Bold and the Beautiful
and
Days of Our Lives
would tell him about a test that could be done by a doctor to see if a man was really the father of a baby, and then if he wasn’t he could decide not to pay. But that test had not yet come to Rwanda; here a man could decide not to pay without even knowing about such a test.