Baking Cakes in Kigali (8 page)

Angel and Odile finished their business quickly and walked out into the street together to wait for a passing
pikipiki
to take Odile home. The motorbike-taxis were a relatively cheap form of public transport; bicycle-taxis were cheaper, of course, but this particular slope of the hill was too steep for the riders to climb and too nerve-racking for them to descend with their unreliable brakes.

As they waited, Ken Akimoto’s Pajero turned off the tarred road on to the dirt road and pulled up outside the compound: Bosco had come to fetch his sister’s christening cake. Angel introduced him to Odile, and amidst much shaking of hands, he insisted on driving her home himself.

THAT
evening, as Grace and Faith helped Titi to prepare the evening meal and the boys sat on the sofa watching a video, Angel sat upstairs watching
Oprah
with Amina while Safiya read in her bedroom. Angel and Pius could receive only the
national station on their own TV. Satellite was too expensive, and in any case the enormous dish would have occupied the entire balcony of their apartment when space was already a problem. There was no dish on Amina’s balcony—but there was one on the Egyptian’s balcony immediately above hers. Amina’s husband Vincenzo liked to do the right thing, but his younger brother Kalif was more flexible. Once when Kalif had come to visit, Amina had persuaded him to wire their TV up to the Egyptian’s satellite dish. The operation had demanded a great deal of subterfuge, the ladder from the cash-power room downstairs, nerves of steel and—unfortunately—a level of expertise that Kalif simply did not possess. The result was a clear picture—with no sound.

“What do you think?” asked Angel, relaxing in a chair identical to those in her apartment downstairs, and fanning her face with Safiya’s French workbook from school.

“I think that lady is maybe taking drugs,” suggested Amina.

“No, it can’t be drugs,” asserted Angel. “Look, now she’s drinking from that bottle that she hid earlier. I think she’s an alcoholic.”

“Can a lady be an alcoholic?”

“In America a lady can be whatever she wants,” said Angel, who sometimes used to watch
Oprah
in Dar es Salaam. “And also in Europe. We both know Linda upstairs here.”

“
Eh
, that Linda can drink! You’re right, look, she’s drinking from a glass now—and trying to hide it from her children.”

“And now she’s in the studio with Oprah.
Eh
, she’s crying a lot! She’s a very unhappy somebody.”

“Do you think that man is her husband or a doctor?” asked Amina.

“If he’s the husband, he doesn’t love her,” declared Angel. “Look how he’s sitting. He doesn’t want to be near her.”

“Maybe he’s her brother,” suggested Amina. “Maybe she’s brought shame to the family.”

“Or maybe he’s the ex-husband. Maybe he left her because she drinks.”

“Then why is he sitting there with her now? No, after a man has gone, he’s gone. I like Oprah’s shoes today.”

“Mm, they’re nice.”

A short while later, a sudden change of channel to CNN signalled that the Egyptian had arrived home upstairs. It was fortunate for Amina that his cleaner, Eugenia, preferred more interesting channels during the day. But in any case it was time for Angel to go home.

As she descended the stairs, she was aware of an unfamiliar lightness about her; not about her body, of course—that would have been too much to hope for—but about her spirit. She did not begin to understand it until later that night, when she looked at Grace and Faith asleep in their double bunk. It was then that she recognised that part of her new lightness was the relief that Odile had brought her in providing a solution to one of her biggest worries: these girls were going to learn about the virus and how to keep themselves safe from it.

But it was only as she sat on the sofa watching the late news with Pius, and when she glanced up from the TV—as she had come to do very often—at the photo of their late children, that she fully understood what the rest of the lightness was about. In Odile she had witnessed proof that it was possible to endure a great deal of pain and still manage to survive and go on. They had killed her, Odile had said, but she had not died.

Angel was beginning to feel that she was going to be all right. Reaching for her husband’s hand, she rested her head on his shoulder.

DR YOOSUF BINAISA
followed Pius Tungaraza out of the university’s minibus, then turned back to address Angel, who remained resolutely seated in the rear of the vehicle.

“Mama-Grace, are you sure you won’t join us?”

“Very sure, thank you, Dr Binaisa. Why would I want to go inside a school and look at dead bodies?”

“There may not be dead bodies,” said Dr Binaisa. “There may be just bones. I’ve been to the memorial site at the church in Nyamata; there are only bones there.”

“Why do you want me to look at bones?” asked Angel.

“Do you not want to understand what happened here, Mama-Grace? That is why Gasana brought us on this detour: so that we can understand his country better. Your country and mine are both neighbours of this place; we slept peacefully and safely in our homes for those hundred days while violence was tearing this country to pieces like a chicken on a plate. Do you not think we need to look now at what we did not see then?”

“Dr Binaisa, I’m not going in there,” said Angel, shaking her head. “I don’t need to look at bones or bodies to know that people died here; that is something I can see in the eyes of the living. Look, Pius and Gasana are waiting for you.”

With a shrug of his shoulders, Dr Binaisa turned and went to join his colleagues, leaving Angel alone in the minibus, which the driver had parked in the shade of some trees for her. The driver himself stood chatting to a man a short distance away.

Leaning forward, Angel flipped up and to the side the seat by the open sliding door of the vehicle, and stepped out into the fresh—but unusually quiet—air of the hilltop. To her right, the hill sloped away steeply down towards the small town of Gikongoro, where people worked at their desks, haggled in the market or bustled in the streets, choosing either to gaze at the hazy blue-green hilltops further away or to look up at this one, in whose shadow they lived and on whose crest Angel now stood. To her left stood the classrooms of the technical school where, Gasana had told them, sixty thousand people had been lured by the promise of protection, only to find themselves surrounded and systematically slaughtered.

Angel’s body shuddered involuntarily; the past was not a safe place to visit in this country. It would be more comfortable to think ahead to this evening—though not as far ahead as tomorrow, when a rather difficult task awaited her—for this evening she would catch her first glimpse of Lake Kivu. They would stay at the
Hôtel du Lac
, situated at the water’s edge right at the point where the Rusizi River begins to emerge from the southernmost tip of the lake, in the town of Cyangugu.

Pius and Dr Binaisa had a meeting scheduled for the next day at the large prison in the town, where the university was assisting in a project; Gasana’s role would be to translate between English, French and Kinyarwanda for the meeting.
Pius had explained the project to the children—somewhat inappropriately, Angel had thought—over dinner the previous evening.

“There are too many people in the prison,” he had said. “It was built to hold six hundred prisoners, and now it has six thousand. How many times more is that, children?”

“A hundred times,
Baba?”
Faith had suggested, taking the rare opportunity to prove herself while Grace—to whom arithmetic came much more easily—hurried to swallow a mouthful of rice and beans.

Pius had looked at Faith sternly. “A hundred? Are you sure?”

“Ten!” declared Grace, her mouth no longer full.

“Ten!” agreed Pius with a smile. “Well done, Grace. Yes, so now there are ten times as many prisoners as there should be. What do you think that means?”

“Not enough space,” Faith suggested quickly, eager to redeem herself.

“They need bunk-beds, otherwise they can’t all fit in the bedrooms,” offered Moses.

“Are there enough toilets for six thousand people, Uncle?”

“Titi!” cried Pius. “You’re a very clever somebody!” Titi’s surprise—and her pride—illuminated her sudden smile. “Yes, Titi, the toilets are a very big problem, and that means that conditions inside the prison have become dangerously unhygienic. And not just in the prison itself. Human waste …”

“Pius!” declared Angel. “We are eating food! Is this a good time to be talking of such things?”

“Human waste is as natural as eating food,” her husband countered. “The two are not unconnected. So, as I was saying, human waste is overflowing from the prison and running down the hill on to the surrounding fields. That is dangerous and unhygienic for the prison’s neighbours.”

“Are you going to fix the toilets,
Baba?”

“Don’t be silly, Daniel,” said Grace.
“Baba
is not a plumber.”

“No, I’m not a plumber; my job is to help the university to find ways of earning money so that one day it will be able to support itself. People won’t give this country aid for ever.”

“But,
Baba
, how do the broken toilets at the prison in Cyangugu earn money for KIST?”

“That’s a very good question, Faith. Actually, there’s a big international organisation that’s helping the prison, and that organisation is paying KIST a consultancy fee. Dr Binaisa—you know, Baba-Zahara—well, he teaches Sanitation Engineering at KIST, and he’s advising them on a project that will make the prison’s toilets safe. The project will contain all the human waste and stop it running down the hill, then the waste will be destroyed by tiny things called microbes. That process will produce two things. Number one, it will produce a gas that’s safe to use for cooking in the prison’s kitchens …”

“Like the gas for Auntie’s cake oven?”

“Exactly, Titi. And number two, it will produce a liquid that’s safe to use as fertilizer on the prison’s fields.”

“That is a good project,
Baba,”
declared Benedict, who had listened to Pius’s explanation far more attentively than the other children.

“Is Auntie going to the prison to show them how to cook with gas?”

“No, Titi,” said Angel. “That project has nothing to do with me. I’m going because a friend has asked me to deliver a message for her.”

“Can
Baba
not deliver it?” asked Faith. “Does
Mama
really need to go?”

“Of course I don’t really need to go,” replied Angel. “But I want to help my friend, because we must always help our
friends whenever we can. And I want to go and look at Lake Kivu, because there are people who say that Lake Kivu is the most beautiful of all the Great Lakes here in Africa. I want to see if it is truly more beautiful than Lake Victoria in our country. But you know we’ll be gone only one night. You’ll be fine here with Titi; and remember that Mama-Safiya will be checking that your homework is done.”

They had not originally intended to visit this memorial site on their way to Cyangugu, but when Gasana had suggested it, the others had agreed readily enough. Now Angel could see them emerging from one of the classrooms and being led into another by a woman who was acting as some kind of guide. A few minutes later they emerged from that classroom and went into another, and then another. Angel turned away and settled herself back in the minibus to wait for them.

When at last they returned to the vehicle, they brought with them a deep and impenetrable silence. They seated themselves without a word, Pius and Dr Binaisa in the row of seats in front of Angel, Gasana up front next to the driver; and the silence sat there with them all the way back down the hill to Gikongoro and a considerable distance along the road towards Cyangugu. But it got out with them when they stopped to buy bananas and peanuts from some women at the side of the road just before entering the Nyungwe Forest, and when they set off again, they found—to their great relief—that they had left it behind at the side of the road.

“
Eh!”
declared Gasana. “That was a difficult thing to see!”

“Perhaps we shouldn’t have gone there,” suggested Dr Binaisa.

“But we did go there, Binaisa,” said Pius. “Let us not debate if we were right or wrong to go. No conclusion we reach will help us to unsee.”

“What is it that you saw?” asked Angel. “What is it that
Dr Binaisa wanted me to see that he now wishes he could unsee?”

“Forgive me, Mama-Grace,” said Dr Binaisa. “You were right not to go in.
Eh!
No bones,
Mama
-Grace, but many, many bodies.”

“White!” declared Pius. “Gasana, why were they white?”

“They’re preserved with lime, Dr T,” explained Gasana. “Those bodies were exhumed from one of the mass graves there some time back. The lime is supposed to prevent them from decomposing further.”

“
Eh!”
said Angel.

“And now they’re lying there in the classrooms,” Gasana continued, “so that people can go and look and be reminded of what happened here.”