Baking Cakes in Kigali (19 page)

It was still early; they had had the first appointment of the day, and they would be home before half-past nine. She took the boy by the hand and they set off together towards their compound that lay at the far end of the dirt road. As they walked, she did her best to comfort him.

“You were very brave, Benedict. Nobody likes to go to the dentist, but you were strong like a big boy, a teenager.
Mama
was very proud of you.”

Benedict attempted a smile.

“Now, I know that when we get home you won’t be able to eat because your mouth is still hurting, but you can drink. Would you like
Mama
to make you some tea, or shall we stop at Leocadie’s shop and buy you a soda?”

“Fanta, please,
Mama!”
Benedict declared emphatically.

Of course, the dentist had just lectured Angel on the advisability of cutting down on the amount of sugar in her children’s diet. He had even specifically mentioned sodas and cakes as being very bad for a child’s teeth. But this dentist came from an island somewhere far away in the Pacific Ocean, and he
had the strange idea of being a Christian but worshipping on a Saturday instead of a Sunday—just like Prosper. Angel knew that it was very unfair to judge an entire congregation by the regrettable behaviour of one of its members, but Prosper was the only Adventist she knew personally, so it was difficult for her to be objective. If she could become acquainted with some others who were more sensible than Prosper, she might be able to convince herself that this dentist’s advice should be taken seriously; but until somebody could persuade her that his advice was indeed good, it was better simply to ignore it. She would try to remember to ask Dr Rejoice about it.

They walked past a high yellow wall over which deep red bougainvillea blossoms spilled. Behind the wall, invisible from the road, sprawled the big white house that was shared by the families of two of Pius’s Indian colleagues, where the boys went to play with their school friends Rajesh and Kamal. Miremba, the Indian boys’ young Ugandan-Rwandan nanny, had become a close friend of Titi’s, and the two girls had gone into town together this morning.

As Angel and Benedict neared Leocadie’s shop, its owner stepped out of it, and saw them approaching.

“Mama-Grace!” she called, giving a wave and a big smile. Really, she was so much happier now that the business with Modeste’s other girlfriend had been settled. Apparently the girl had decided to go with her baby and stay with her aunt near Gisenyi, right up in the north of the country.

“Benedict, why are you not at school today?” she asked, when Angel and the boy reached her shop. “Are you sick?”

“I went to the dentist,” replied Benedict, opening his mouth wide to show Leocadie the hole where a tooth had been extracted.

“
Eh!”
said Leocadie. “You’re a brave boy. Was he brave, Mama-Grace?”

“Very,” assured Angel. “He had to miss a day of school
because those dentists don’t work on Saturdays. He’d like a Fanta
citron
now to help him to feel better, but all our empties are in the apartment.”

“No problem,
Mama-Grace
, you can take a Fanta now and I’ll remember that you owe me one empty.”

“Thank you, Leocadie. Now tell me, have you and Modeste started to make plans for your wedding?”

“Not yet,” said Leocadie, stepping into the shop and reaching into the fridge for a Fanta. As she opened its door, the fridge cast just enough light into the dim interior of the container for Angel to make out the still form of Beckham, lying asleep on the lowest shelf between the bags of sugar and the rolls of pink toilet paper. “But what plans will we make, Mama-Grace? We have no family, so there’ll be no negotiations about bride-price. And we can’t have a wedding party because we don’t have money.”

Angel suddenly felt very sad for this girl, whose only happiness was that her fiancé had chosen her above another girl who had had his baby, too. And, Angel noticed, Leocadie had now reached the stage of disowning her relatives—incarcerated and in exile—as family. Perhaps Angel was partly to blame for that, because she had given Leocadie an honest account of her meeting with the girl’s mother in jail in Cyangugu: her mother was simply no longer there. Then Angel thought about her own daughter, and about the silence, the distance, that had grown between them.

Had Vinas ever felt that her mother, like Leocadie’s, was simply no longer there?

Suppressing the startling urge to sob, Angel heard herself speaking before she even knew what it was that she was going to say.

“Leocadie, it is not true that you have no family, because I’m going to be your mother for this wedding.” “Mama-Grace?”

“I’ll help you to plan everything, and of course I’ll make your wedding cake for the reception.”

“Eh,
Mama-Grace!”
Leocadie’s eyes began to fill with tears. “But we cannot afford …”

“Nonsense! God will help us to find a way. You leave everything to me. Now, take my hundred francs for Benedict’s Fanta so that I can take him home and put him to bed. He needs to rest after all his fright and pain.”

Leocadie reached for the note that Angel handed her. “Thank you, Mama-Grace. You’re a very good mother.” Then she began to sob. “I’m very happy that you’ll be my mother for my wedding.”

“Don’t cry, Leocadie, you’ll wake up Beckham, and then
he’ll
cry.” Angel did not add that she might join them.

After saying their goodbyes, Angel and Benedict walked the last few metres along the road, past the big green Dumpster that had at last been emptied of the neighbourhood’s rubbish, towards the corner where their compound lay. They could see Gaspard and Modeste standing there with two men who had apparently paused for a chat on their way up the hill. Each of the men carried a wire cage, the larger of which held a large grey parrot and the smaller of which held a small monkey. There must be a market for such creatures—many could be seen for sale on street corners—but Angel found it hard to understand why anyone would want to share their home with an animal that needed to be fed but contributed nothing in return. A chicken or a cow was a useful animal; but a parrot? A monkey? Uh-uh.

Benedict, on the other hand, was fascinated by the small grey monkey whose button eyes gazed absently from the black of its face through the bars constraining it. He squatted down beside the cage, which the man had now put down on the ground, and said hello to the creature. Something in the boy’s voice—perhaps the kindness of his tone—awoke the monkey
from its stillness, and with its eyes never leaving Benedict’s, it took hold of the bars with both hands and flung its body around violently within its prison, all the while screeching like a terrified child. Letting go of the bars, it flung itself against the side of the cage and toppled it over sideways, screeching all the more loudly and appallingly. This unleashed an echoing wail in Benedict, clearly distressed at having triggered such wretchedness in the creature, and as the man bent to right the cage, Angel scooped the boy up in her arms and carried him inside.

A while later, after Benedict had been calmed and had finally drifted off to sleep tucked up in his bed, and after Angel had changed out of her smart, tight clothes and settled down to review what she was going to say that afternoon to the Girls Who Mean Business, a soft, continuous knocking began at the door. Recognising it as Modeste’s knock, and knowing that it was futile to call for him to come in because he did not feel it was his place to do so, Angel went to the door and opened it.

“
Madame,”
said Modeste, “here is a customer for your cakes.”

Next to him stood a soldier, an earnest-looking young man dressed in camouflage uniform and khaki Wellington boots with a semi-automatic rifle slung over his shoulder. The thick welt of an ugly scar snaked its way down from below his left ear and across to somewhere under the right lapel of his uniform.

Angel thanked Modeste as he left, and then turned her attention to the soldier.
“Unasema Kiswahili?” “Ndiyo, Bibi.
Yes, I speak Swahili.”

“Good. I’m sorry that I cannot yet speak Kinyarwanda to you.”

“
Hakuna matata, Bibi.
No problem.” He flashed a smile of chocolate-coloured teeth at Angel.

“Bwana
, you are very welcome in my house, but I’m afraid that your gun is not welcome here. My husband and I do not allow guns to come inside.”

“
Hakuna matata, Bibi.”
The young man removed his weapon from his shoulder and leaned it up against the wall outside the door to Angel’s apartment, clearly intending to leave it there. Angel felt a stab of panic.

“That is not a safe place for a gun to rest,
Bwana.
There are children who live in this compound. One of them could pick it up and then there could be a terrible accident.”

The soldier glanced at the gun. “You’re right,
Bibi.
Let me leave it with your security guard outside.” He ran out with the gun to give it to Modeste and then came back and sat down opposite Angel in her living room.

“Allow me to introduce myself,
Bibi.
I am Calixte Munyaneza, a captain in the army.”

“I’m happy to meet you, Captain Calixte. Please call me Angel; I’m not comfortable with
Bibi
or
Madame.”

“
Sawa
, Angel. I’ve come to you because they tell me that you’re somebody who makes cakes for special occasions.”

“That is true, Captain Calixte. Do you have a special occasion coming up?”

The soldier nodded. “I’m taking a fiancée.”

Angel clapped her hands together and beamed. “An engagement! That is indeed a special occasion! I’ll make tea for us and you can tell me all about it. Meanwhile, you can look at my photos of some other cakes that I’ve made.”

Angel prepared two mugs of sweet, spicy tea and put a few cupcakes—iced in red and dark shades of green and grey—on to a plate. She carried them on a tray into the living room, where she found the soldier examining her photo album studiously.

“Do you see any cakes that you like?” she asked, placing the tray on the coffee table.

Captain Calixte looked uncertain. “I think that you’ll need to advise me on the kind of cake to order, Angel. I’m not certain what my fiancée will like best.”

“I’m always happy to advise my customers,” assured Angel. “But before we settle with our tea, come and look here on my work table. I’d like to show you my most recent cake. There’s no picture of it in my album yet.”

On the table sat an extended oblong cake decorated in a way that made it immediately recognisable—though its design had been simplified and modified—as an enormous version of the Rwandan 5,000-franc note. Against a pale pink background, the words
Banque Nationale du Rwanda
ran across the top edge of the cake in capital letters that were dark green at the top and red at the bottom; to the right of these words was the large figure 5000, also green at the top and red at the bottom. Running across the bottom edge of the surface of the cake was a red stripe with a green stripe immediately above it, and outlined in pale pink above the two stripes, with the colours showing through, were the words
cinq mille francs
, and again the number 5000. Those letters and numbers had been very difficult for Angel to write with her icing syringe; next time Ken Akimoto went home to Washington, she would send a note to June requesting a white
Gateau Graffito
pen.

Captain Calixte looked at the cake in wonder. He reached into a pocket and removed a 5,000-franc note so that he could compare it to the cake.

Angel pointed at his note. Going up the left-hand side of the original banknote were three dark grey triangles decorated with leaves over which the figure 5000 appeared in pale pink, and a drawing of a black-and-white bird sitting on a stick. “This part was too difficult and there were too many details,” she explained. “I made it simpler: just one grey triangle with 5000 written over it in pink.”

“That is very good. I can see that you’ve taken away some
of the details, but still when we look at it we know that it is this banknote.”

“And these dancers here,” said Angel, pointing to the picture in the central area of the soldier’s banknote. “That was going to be much too complicated. I couldn’t copy that.” In the picture on the note, seven male dancers performed in traditional costume: leopard-skin skirts, straps of beads worn crossed over the chest and long, flowing straw-coloured headdresses that looked like blond
Mzungu
hair. In front of them were four female dancers in sleeveless T-shirts and knee-length wrapper skirts, a string of beads around each forehead and strings of bells or seed-pods around their ankles.

The Captain shook his head. “No, this picture is too complicated for your cake, I can see that. But what is this that you’ve written instead?”

“Well, I’ve taken these words from the note here,
Payables à vue
, and I’ve added
aux Girls Who Mean Business.
That is the name of a club that I will address this afternoon. They’re all girls who plan to run their own businesses when they’ve finished their schooling. Now, if you look down the sides of the cake here, all the way around I’ve put thin red stripes to indicate that this is actually a large pile of money.”

“
Eh
, that is clever. So this cake is saying that those girls will make a lot of money from their businesses.”

“Exactly.”

Angel had initially thought of making an American dollar cake rather than a franc cake, but when she had looked carefully at a $100 note from Pius’s wallet, she had seen that it was very boring: cream with grey and only a little bit of green, and a big picture of an ugly old
Mzungu
man. That was not something that was going to inspire these girls; and in any case it was very possible that none of them had ever seen a $100 note, and so they might not be able to recognise immediately what the dollar cake was saying. No, the Rwandan money was a
much better choice; it would speak to them in a language that they knew.

The two sat down and sipped their tea. Angel watched as her guest’s chocolate-coloured teeth bit into a chocolate cupcake; she could almost hear the Adventist dentist’s gasp.