Baking Cakes in Kigali

11

THE DRIVER OF the taxi-voiture opened the back door and carefully took the cake-board that his passenger handed to him to hold while she got out of the car. He looked at the cake admiringly. It seemed to have been built up out of red-earth bricks sealed together with grey cement. On the upper surface of the cake was a large window giving a view into a dark grey interior. Thick vertical bars in light grey blocked the window, but the central bar had been broken and the bars on either side of it had been bent. Tied to the lower edge of one of the bars was a thick plait of powder-pink marzipan that looked like fabric; it hung out of the window and down over the edge of the cake, settling into a pool of plaited fabric on the cake-board.
“What does this cake say to you?” Angel asked the driver, paying him the agreed fare and relieving him of the board.
The driver pocketed Angel’s fare as he spoke. “Bibi, it says to me that somebody has escaped from prison. He has broken the bars on the window, and climbed out on a rope that he has made from his prison uniform.”
“Eh, that is exactly what I want this cake to say! Thank you.”
The taxi-driver furrowed his brow. “Bibi, is this a cake for somebody who has escaped from prison?”
“No, no. It’s a cake for a Mzungu who has divorced her husband. She’s having a party tonight here at Chez Fran?oise because her marriage was like a prison and now she’s celebrating because she feels like she has escaped.”
“Eh, Wazungu!” said the taxi-driver, shaking his head.
“Uh-uh,” agreed Angel, shaking her head, too.
“Angel! Are you going to stand there all morning talking to the taxi-driver or are you going to come inside and drink a soda with me?” Fran?oise had appeared at the gate leading into her garden, with blue plastic rollers in her hair and a green and yellow kanga tied around her short, stocky frame. She led Angel through the garden that constituted Chez Fran?oise, shouting instructions along the way to a woman who was wiping down the white plastic tables and chairs with a cloth.
“Eh, that cake is beautiful!” declared Fran?oise, as Angel placed it carefully on the counter of the small bar just inside the entrance to the house. “This Linda is a very strange Mzungu, but thank you for sending her to me. It’s not often that Wazungu come here, and tonight there’ll be a party of sixteen. Tell me, Angel, is that girl always only half-way dressed?”
Angel laughed as she endeavoured to balance her buttocks—tightly encased in a smart long skirt—on a high wooden bar stool that rocked slightly on the uneven floor surface. She held on to the edge of the bar-top to prevent herself from toppling over.
“Eh, Fran?oise, I hope she dresses more modestly when she talks with big men about human rights being violated. How is a Minister going to listen to what she is saying about rape, meanwhile she is showing him her breasts and her stomach and her thighs?”
“At least he’ll be thinking about rape!” retorted Fran?oise, laughing and shaking her head. “Fanta citron?”
“Thank you.”
Fran?oise retrieved two bottles of lemon Fanta from one of the two large fridges that stood against the wall behind the bar, and levered off their tops. She placed two glasses on the counter before climbing on to a bar stool on the other side of the counter, opposite Angel.
“But seriously, Angel, even if she covers up her body, she’s still too young. Big people cannot take a young person seriously.”
“Exactly. It’s only with age that a person becomes wise.”
“Yes.” Fran?oise drank some of the soda that she had poured into her glass. “Whoever is paying her big Mzungu salary, they are wasting their money. Because what can she achieve here? Nobody will listen to her.”
“But still, they’re spending their money; sometimes that’s all that matters to some organisations. They can say to everybody: look how many dollars we are spending in Rwanda; look how much we care about that country.” Angel sipped her soda before continuing. “But let us not complain too much, Fran?oise. Tonight her Wazungu friends will be spending their Wazungu salaries here at Chez Fran?oise.”
“Yes.” Fran?oise smiled. “I’m going to make everything perfect for them so that all of them will want to come back again.”
“A good way to impress them tonight will be to serve Amstel.”
“Yes, thank you for giving me that tip earlier. I phoned a friend in Bujumbura and she was able to get two cases to me. Well, there were four cases, but the customs officials on both sides of the border had to be taken care of. But I think that will be enough to please these Wazungu. I do need more customers.”
“Is business still not good?”
“It can always be better. A lot of customers come just to drink, and then they go home to eat. Or they come here with their stomachs already full. It’s only when they eat here that I can make a good profit.” Fran?oise sighed and shook her head. “It’s not easy to raise a child alone.”
“Eh, it must be very difficult,” said Angel. “I’m lucky that I still have Pius; I don’t know what I would do without him. I’m not an educated somebody who can get a good job with a good salary.”
“Me neither,” said Fran?oise. “I thank God that my husband built this business in our garden many years ago. After they killed him and our firstborn, all I had to do was keep it going.”
“Eh, Fran?oise! I knew that your husband was late, but I didn’t know that they had killed your firstborn, too!”
“You didn’t know?” Fran?oise looked surprised.
Angel shook her head. “You never told me, Fran?oise. How can I know something that I’m not told?”
“I’m sorry, Angel. I thought you knew because everybody knows. Everybody round here.” The circular gesture that she made with her right arm to indicate everybody in the vicinity—perhaps even everybody in Kigali—triggered a serious wobble of her stool. Steadying herself by clutching at the counter, she went on. “But really, when I think about it, how can somebody from outside this place know without being told? So let me tell you now, Angel.” She took a sip of soda, and when she spoke again there was no sadness in her voice, there was no emotion at all. “They killed my firstborn as well as my husband.” Her words seemed to come from a barren hardness deep inside her, a place of cold volcanic rock where no life could take root and thrive.
“I’m very sorry, Fran?oise,” said Angel, sorry for Fran?oise’s loss but also sorry for having made her friend tell her that she had lost a child. Perhaps she should simply have pretended that she knew already. Perhaps she should simply have kept quiet so that Fran?oise could, too.
But Fran?oise showed no signs of wanting to keep quiet. “It happened right there,” she said, pointing towards the gate that opened on to the street from the garden. “I watched it.”
“Eh! You watched it?” Angel clapped her hand over her mouth—carefully maintaining her balance on the stool by keeping hold of the counter-top with her other hand—and looked at Fran?oise with wide eyes.
“Yes. I’d gone to check on my mother-in-law because she wasn’t well, and the stress of what was happening was making her even more ill. Gérard was still a small baby, so I strapped him to my back and took him with me. I was still breastfeeding. When I came back in the evening the darkness was already coming. I saw from the end of the road that there were many people near our gate, and I thought that they were customers. But as I got closer I saw that they were young men with machetes and soldiers with guns. I knew at once that they had found out.”
Fran?oise’s hand was steady as she drank from her glass.
“Found out what?”
“We’d been hiding people here, protecting them from the killers. There’s a space in this house between the ceiling and the roof; I don’t know how many we put in there. And round the back there’s a lean-to where we keep the wood for the cooking fire. Some hid in there, behind the wood.”
“Eh! Were these people your friends?”
“Some were friends; some were neighbours. Some we didn’t know.”
“But you risked your lives for them?”
“Angel, you have to understand what was happening. Every day the radio told us that it was our duty to kill these people; they said that they were inyenzi, cockroaches, not human beings. But if we had killed them, we would not have felt like human beings ourselves. How could we live with the blood of our friends and our neighbours on our hands? How could we look people in the eye, as one human being recognising another, and then take their lives? There were thousands who did what they were told to do, thousands who had no choice because it was kill or be killed. But we felt that we had a choice because we had this bar.”
Angel was confused. “I don’t understand. What does this bar have to do with it?”
“We’d heard about what was happening at Mille Collines. Thousands were hiding there from the killers. Whenever the soldiers went to that hotel looking for inyenzi, the manager gave them beer to drink and they went away.”
“So you thought you could do the same?”
“Yes—but of course on a much smaller scale. And it worked for a while. Until that evening when I hid behind the wall of a garden across the road with my baby on my back and I watched them hacking his brother and his father to death, along with the people from in the ceiling and from behind the wood.” Fran?oise took another sip of her soda. She seemed unmoved by her own story, as if she had just spoken about buying potatoes at the market.
“Eh!” Angel found the horror too difficult to imagine. Yes, she had lost her own children, unexpectedly, and her son’s death had been violent. But she had not watched either of them die. She and Pius had begun to prepare themselves to lose Joseph from the moment he had told them that he was positive, even though he was still fit and well. Even so, when the police had come to their door in Dar es Salaam to tell them what they had learned from their colleagues in Mwanza, the shock of his loss had been devastating, and it had taken them a long time to learn to cope with it. Then they had lost Vinas, too, and they had still not even begun to cope with that. They had not even spoken—really spoken—to each other about it yet. When they did, would Angel be able to do it in the way that Fran?oise did, without showing any emotion? Perhaps Fran?oise simply had no emotion left to show.
“What did you do after that, Fran?oise?”
“I sat behind that wall for a long time, praying to God to keep my baby quiet until the killers had moved on. Then I spent the whole night making my way slowly by slowly back to my mother-in-law’s house—because where else did I have to go? But when I got there at dawn, I found that the killers had already been there before us.”
“Eh!”
“Yes. So I fled up north to where a relative worked on a pyrethrum farm. I was safe there; nobody was going to try to kill me, because nobody there knew that I was guilty of trying to save lives. It wasn’t long before Kagame’s forces came and put an end to the killings. When it was safe enough to come back, I expected to find the bodies still here, but they had all been taken and buried in a mass grave somewhere. All I could do was clean up this place and begin again.”
“Eh, Fran?oise, you have told me a very sad story,” said Angel, shaking her head. “But at least you survived.”
Fran?oise rolled her eyes up in her head, slid down from her bar stool and drained her glass. Then she took a deep breath, and with one hand on her hip and the other on the bar counter, she said, “Let me tell you something about surviving, Angel. People talk about survival as if it’s always a good thing; like it’s some kind of a blessing. But ask around amongst survivors, and you’ll find that many will admit that survival is not always the better choice. There are many of us who wish every day that we had not survived. Do you think I feel blessed to live in this house with the ghosts of everyone who was killed here? Do you think I feel blessed to go in and out through that gate where my husband and my child were killed? Do you think I feel blessed to see what I saw that night every time I close my eyes and try to sleep? Do you think I feel blessed not knowing where the bodies of my husband and my firstborn lie? Do you think I feel blessed in any way at all, Angel?”
Angel looked at her friend. For the first time ever, Fran?oise had shown emotion—and that emotion was anger. “No, I’m sure you don’t feel blessed. Survival must be a very difficult thing, Fran?oise.”
“I tell you, Angel, if I’d been alone that night, if I hadn’t had Gérard on my back, I would have come out from behind that wall and said to the soldiers, I am that man’s wife, I too am guilty of protecting inyenzi, I too must die. I did not do that. But there are many, many times when I wish I had. If I had known then what survival was going to be like, I would not have chosen it.”
“Eh! It’s a very sad thing that you’re telling me, Fran?oise.” Angel reached into her brassiere for a tissue, removed her glasses, and dabbed at her eyes.
“I’m telling you because you’re my friend, Angel—and because you’re not from here, so I can be honest with you. It’s difficult for us to say these things amongst ourselves. But what I’m telling you is not something unusual. There are many survivors who feel like I feel. There are many who regret surviving, who would like to make the other choice now.”
Angel thought about what Fran?oise meant. “Are you talking about … suicide?”
“Yes.”
“That is not a good idea, Fran?oise.” “I know. As Catholics we know that we will go to Hell if we suicide ourselves.”
Angel looked away, unable to speak. She closed her eyes and pressed her tissue to them. Fran?oise went on.
“And what’s the point of going to Hell after we die? Because we already live there now. It wouldn’t make things any better for us—and in fact it would make things worse because we’d be stuck there for eternity. At least if I stay alive I can hope for Heaven. I will certainly not miss the opportunity to die if it comes my way again.”
Angel shook her head and was silent for a while before she spoke. She put her glasses back on. “Fran?oise, my friend, you have educated me today. These things have not been easy for me to hear, but now I understand better. Thank you for telling me.”
“No, Angel, I am the one who must thank you. Thank you for being someone who has ears that want to hear my story and a heart that wants to understand it. And thank you for sending a big group of Wazungu to Chez Fran?oise.” Fran?oise flashed her teeth in a wide smile, and Angel found herself smiling back. What they had spoken about had already been put away, like potatoes that have been brought home from the market and placed inside a cupboard in the kitchen.
“I’m sure it will be a very good party, Fran?oise. Those Wazungu will enjoy themselves, and they’ll tell others to come here.”
“Eh, and when they see your beautiful cake they’ll tell others to come to you.” “Let us hope.” “Yes. Let us hope.”
IT was shortly before noon when Angel eased herself out of a packed minibus-taxi at Kigali’s central station. The sun was extremely hot now, but Angel did not have to meet Odile until twelve forty-five, so there was no need to make herself any hotter by hurrying. She walked slowly up to the traffic circle at Place de la Constitution and headed in the direction of the post office, looking for a place where the road was safe to cross. She passed the row of men who sat on chairs placed on the unsurfaced roadside, each behind a small desk and typewriter, preparing documents for the clients who stood over them dictating or issuing instructions. Beyond them she was approached by a few money-changers, the overflow of the large crowd who operated outside the post office. “Change, Madame?”
“Non, merci.” Actually, she did want to change some money—the hundred-dollar note that the Canadian had given her—but she wanted to do that at the bank, even though she would get a much better rate from the money-changers on the street.
She crossed the road and made her way back around another section of the outer perimeter of the traffic circle, turning right into Boulevard de la Révolution. On the corner was the Office Rwandais du Tourisme et des Parcs Nationaux, where people went for permits to visit the gorillas in the rainforest in the north. She was not sure why anybody would want to do that, but it was popular enough amongst Wazungu.
The Boulevard was wide and shady, lined with tall eucalyptus trees, and Angel appreciated its coolness as she approached another, smaller traffic circle, the Place de l’Indépendance. Here she found a young man sitting at the roadside selling secondhand shoes. She greeted him in Swahili and he returned her greeting, jumping to his feet. The shoes were laid out neatly in pairs on the ground. Angel scanned them keenly, searching for the perfect shoe to complement her dress for Leocadie’s wedding. Alas, there was nothing here that would do.
“Are you looking for something special, Auntie?”
“Yes, but I don’t see it here. It must be yellow or orange, or at least white. Smart-smart.”
“Wait here, Auntie,” instructed the young man. Shouting instructions in Kinyarwanda to a boy who stood on the other side of the road, he raced up the road on his bare feet, whistling, shouting and gesturing frantically.
The boy on the other side of the road eyed Angel and then, bending to pick up what lay at his feet, he crossed to where she stood. He bent again, and placed his bathroom scale at her feet.
“Deux cents francs, Madame,” he said.
“Non, merci,” said Angel.
“Cent francs, Madame.”
Angel shook her head. “Non, merci. Non.” The degree to which her skirt strained across her buttocks and thighs already told her as much as she wanted to know. Why should she pay a hundred francs to stand on that scale and find out a number that would only add to the weight that she carried? The boy moved his scale away and squatted down sulkily next to it, eyeing Angel to make sure that she did not try to make off with any of his friend’s shoes.
Within minutes, the shoe-seller was back, panting towards her with two other men in pursuit, each carrying a large sack over one shoulder. They rushed towards her, each desperate to be the first to reach her, and spilled the contents of their sacks at her feet, talking non-stop in Kinyarwanda. Scrabbling amongst his wares, one retrieved a white shoe with a high heel and a strap across the top secured at the side with a gold buckle. Angel could see at once that it would be too small for her. She shook her head.
The other man produced a bright yellow sandal that would fit Angel well enough. She took it from him and examined it thoughtfully. The colour was good, but the heel was very flat, making it too casual for the wedding. She handed it back, shaking her head.
As both men continued to scrabble about for the perfect shoe for her, Angel became aware of a child’s high-pitched shouting, rapidly gaining in volume. Looking to her right, she saw a very small boy hurtling towards her, clutching something gold and shiny to his chest. Reaching her, the boy drew to a halt and, gasping for breath, held up what he had been carrying. It was a pair of gold pumps, clearly second-hand but still smart, with a heel that was not too high and not too flat, in a size that would fit Angel and look beautiful with her wedding outfit. Having regained his breath, the small boy was now babbling ceaselessly up at her in Kinyarwanda.
“What is he saying?” she asked the original shoe-seller in Swahili.
“He says his mother is selling that shoe for a very good price, Auntie. He wants you to go with him to pay his mother. She is selling on the street just before the pharmacy.”
“Thank you. Please thank these other gentlemen for me and tell them that this boy has brought me exactly what I’m looking for. I’m sorry that I cannot buy from all of you.”
The young man smiled. “No problem, Auntie. Maybe next time.”
Angel took the small boy’s hand and allowed herself to be led to where a woman sat at the side of the road with a few pairs of shoes laid out before her. They negotiated a reasonable price, and Angel handed over some money from her brassiere while the woman placed the shoes in an old plastic bag. Seeing somebody with money to make a purchase, several sellers of pirated music cassettes approached Angel, but she waved them off with a smile and crossed the road to the entrance of the Banque Commerciale du Rwanda, where a bored security guard checked that her plastic bag did not contain a gun before allowing her to enter.
Once inside the plush modern building, she made her way around to the foreign-currency section of the bank. As usual, there was a large queue of people waiting at the Western Union money transfer section, but the other cashiers were not too busy. She stood behind the stripe on the floor where people were supposed to wait until the cashier was free. There was just one customer busy at the window ahead of her, a large man in West African attire who was waiting patiently for paperwork to be completed. At last he signed, took his own copy and, thanking the cashier, walked away.
Angel approached the window, removing the hundred-dollar note from its place of safety inside her brassiere. The cashier was still busy putting the previous client’s paperwork together with a paper-clip and had not yet looked up at her. When he did, his eyes lit up above his reading glasses and a large smile spread across his face.
“Angel!”
“Hello, Dieudonné. How are you?”
“Eh, I’m very well, Angel. And how are you?”
“Fine, fine. How are your mother and your sister?”
“Oh, everybody is very well, thank you. And how are your children and your husband?”
“Everybody is well, thank you, Dieudonné.”
“Eh, I’m happy to see you. You’re lucky that you came just at this time, because in a few minutes I’ll be on lunch.”
“Yes, I thought so. I’ve just brought some dollars to change into francs, and then I’m meeting a very good friend for lunch, a lovely Rwandan girl.”
“That is very nice.” Dieudonné took Angel’s single banknote and began counting out a large pile of Rwandan francs.
“Dieudonné, it would make me very happy if you would join us for lunch. I like my friends to know one another, and I’m sure that you two will like each other.”
Dieudonné laughed as he handed the money over to Angel.
“Then I would like to meet her! But I have only one hour for lunch.”
“No problem. I’m meeting her nearby, at Terra Nova, opposite the post office. They have a buffet, so we can get our lunch quickly.”
“In fact I go there quite often. Shall I meet you there in ten minutes?”
“Perfect.”
Angel tucked the wad of francs into her brassiere and headed out of the bank with her gold shoes in their plastic bag. She made her way back down the shady Boulevard, greeting the shoe-seller with a smile as she passed him, and then rounded into Avenue de la Paix before crossing the road at the post office, where the crowd of money-changers assailed her.
“Change, Madame?”
“Madame! Madame! Change?”
“Non, merci.”
She entered the yard of the outdoor restaurant where a waiter was settling Odile at a white plastic table in the shade. She smiled when she saw Angel, standing up to kiss her left cheek, then her right, then her left again.
“How are you, my dear?”
“I’m well, Angel. Thank you for suggesting that we meet here for lunch. Usually I just eat at the restaurant at work, but it’s nice to take a break like this, especially at the end of the week.”
“It’s nice for me, too. Usually I eat at home with the children, but I thought it would be nice to spend some time with my friend away from her work—and away from my work, too. The children are safe without me because Titi is there.”
A waiter brought a cold Coke for Odile, levered open the bottle and poured it into a glass. Angel asked him for a cold Fanta citron.
“Odile, I hope you don’t mind. I’ve just bumped into another friend of mine, and I invited him to join us for lunch. He’s a very nice young man. Very nice indeed.”
Odile smiled nervously. “Angel! What are you trying to do?”
Angel smiled back. “I’m trying to introduce two of my friends to each other. I want them to know each other; that’s all. They are under no obligation to like each other.”
In any event, though, Odile and Dieudonné had liked each other, and Angel found that extremely satisfying as she sat in her cool living room later that afternoon, fanning her face with a Cake Order Form and appreciating the looseness of her kanga and T-shirt. Her bare feet were up on the coffee table, her ankles swollen from the heat and the busyness of her day. The girls were working on their homework with Safiya upstairs while the boys were out in the yard with Titi, kicking their ball around half-heartedly in the heat.
Half dozing, Angel assessed that, overall, it had been a successful day: people had admired her prison-escape cake; she had gained a new perspective on the matter of survival; she had found exactly the right pair of shoes for Leocadie’s wedding; and, best of all, Odile and Dieudonné had found plenty to talk about over their plates of delicious matoke, rice, fried potatoes, cassava leaves, carrots, beef and chicken.
There were two troubling aspects of the day, however, and it was these that now prevented her from succumbing fully to sleep. The first was the unsettling comment that Fran?oise had made about living life in Hell and then being stuck there again after death. That was an idea that would not simply lie down and sleep. The second troubling thing was what had happened when Angel had returned to the compound after lunch. As she had slid down from the back of the pikipiki where she had sat sideways with one arm around the rider’s waist and the other clutching her gold shoes in their plastic bag to her breast, she had noticed immediately that Modeste was holding a semi-automatic rifle.
“Modeste,” she had said, paying the driver of the pikipiki, “what are you doing with that gun?”
“It is not mine, Madame. It belongs to Captain Calixte.”
“Eh! Captain Calixte?”
“Yes, Madame.”
“Where is he?” Panic had begun to pound at the walls of Angel’s heart.
“Inside, Madame.”
“But did I not tell you that if he came here looking for Sophie, you must tell him that she is out?” “Yes, Madame.” “So why is he inside now?”
“He is not visiting Mademoiselle Sophie, Madame. Mademoiselle Sophie is out. He is visiting Mademoiselle Linda.”
“Eh? Linda?”
“Yes, Madame.”
“Is Linda at home?”
“Yes, Madame.”
“I see. It’s good that you didn’t let Captain Calixte into the building with his gun, Modeste.”
“Yes, Madame. Madame said that I must not if he came again.”
“I’m glad that you remembered. But now I’m worried about Linda. How long has Captain Calixte been inside?”
Modeste shrugged his shoulders. “Not long, I think.”
Angel was debating with herself whether she should ask Modeste to leave the gun with Gaspard and come upstairs with her to knock on Linda’s door, when Captain Calixte himself emerged from the building’s entrance. When he saw Angel, he pointed at her angrily.
“You!” he shouted. “This is your fault!”
Modeste moved closer to Angel in a protective gesture, and out of the corner of her eye she saw Gaspard detach himself from the shadows of the trees on the other side of the road and cross towards them.
“Hello, Captain Calixte.” Angel kept her voice calm. “What is it that is my fault?”
“That Mzungu upstairs refused me!” The soldier spat the words out between his chocolate-coloured teeth. “If I had taken a cake, she would have accepted my proposal, I’m sure of it. It’s your fault that she refused me.”
Very quietly, seemingly unnoticed by the soldier, Gaspard had now taken up position immediately behind him, ready to seize him if necessary.
“Sophie is out this afternoon, Captain Calixte. How can a Mzungu who is out refuse you?”
“Not Sophie!” He stamped one of his Wellington boots on the ground. “That other Mzungu! The one who is just divorced.”
“Do you mean Linda?”
“Yes. Linda.”
“But, Captain, you didn’t ask me to make a cake for your proposal to Linda! Now how can it be my fault that she refused you when you didn’t take a cake?” Angel’s tone was soft, reasonable.
The Captain looked confused, and then—quite visibly—his anger left him in the way that breath leaves a party balloon when the hold on its stem is released. In a sulky tone, he said, “She wouldn’t even look at my certificate.”
“That is very sad, Captain Calixte. But you know, Linda is very happy that her marriage is over. She is even celebrating her divorce with a party tonight. A girl like that is not going to accept a marriage proposal at this time. Not from anybody.”
The Captain thought for a while. “You’re right, Angel. It is only that I’ve proposed marriage to her at the wrong time.” He shook his head. “I’m sorry that I said it was your fault.”
“No problem, Captain Calixte.”
The soldier had taken his weapon and left, and Angel had come inside, her mind troubled. Okay, nothing bad had actually happened. But really, Captain Calixte was not a stable man. It was not right that he should be walking around with a gun. And yet he was. This—and Fran?oise’s troubling comment about Hell in this life and eternally—made Angel anxious, preventing her from dropping off to sleep now with her feet up on the coffee table.
But had she fallen asleep, she would very soon have been woken by a heavy knock on the open door of her apartment.
“Hello?” called a deep male voice. “Angel?”
Angel took her feet off the coffee table and stood up, calling as she did so for the visitor to come in. The head that looked around the open door was bald on top with a band of black hair from ear to ear at the back and a neatly-trimmed black beard from ear to ear at the front.
“Hello, Angel,” said the Egyptian, talking through his alarmingly big, hooked nose.
“Mr Omar!” said Angel.
“Just Omar,” he said, shaking Angel’s hand. “I hope I’m not disturbing you?”
“Not at all, Omar. Please come and sit. You know, I’ve called at your apartment a few times this week, but you’ve always been out.”
“Yes, Eugenia told me.” Omar sat down heavily opposite Angel. “I believe you’re collecting money for a special wedding?”
“Yes. One of our security guards is going to marry the girl who runs the shop in our street. I’m organising the wedding for them because they have no family except for us in this compound.”
“Of course I’ll contribute.” Omar stood to retrieve his wallet from the back pocket of his trousers and then sat down heavily again. He took a few notes from his wallet and handed them to Angel, then left his wallet on the coffee table. “And I’d like you to make a cake for me, Angel.”
Angel smiled as she stood up. “Then I’ll give you my album of cakes to look through while I make tea for us to drink. We cannot discuss business without tea!”
Angel gave Omar her photo album and went into her bedroom to put his contribution with the rest of the wedding money in the envelope that she was keeping on the top of the wardrobe for safety. Then she went into the kitchen to make tea.
When she came back into the living room carrying two steaming mugs, Omar was admiring her photos.
“You’re very clever, Angel. Something of an artist, in fact.”
“Thank you, Omar.” Angel put the mugs on the coffee table and sat down, patting her hair with her hand. “I’m sorry I can’t offer you cake to eat with your tea. I wasn’t here at lunchtime, and the children ate all the cake instead of eating their rice and beans.”
Omar suddenly made an alarming sound through his enormous nose, rather like the sound of hippos mating in the shallows of Lake Victoria. But he was smiling and his belly was moving up and down, so Angel that it must be his way of laughing. She smiled nervously.
“That’s children for you,” he said. “Mine would do just the same.”
“Oh, you have children?”
“Yes, yes. A son of sixteen and a daughter of thirteen. They’re both in Paris with their mother. My daughter, Efra, she’s coming to visit me here next week. That’s why I want a cake. She’s been angry with me, but I think we’ve negotiated a kind of peace.” Omar took a sip of tea. “Oh, this is very good, Angel. What’s the spice?”
“Cardamom. It’s how we make tea in my home country.”
“Cardamom?”
“Yes.”
Omar put down his tea and sank his head into his hands. “Omar?”
When he looked up, his pale brown complexion had turned slightly red. He shook his head. “This will not do,” he said. “I’ve been trying to forget an unfortunate incident, but it seems I cannot.”
“Omar, you’re not making sense to me. Please tell me what’s bothering you. It may be that I can help you.”
Omar made the alarming sound of mating hippos again, but this time it was much quieter, as if the hippos were in the distance—perhaps as far from Mwanza on the shore of the lake to Saa Nane Island—and he looked embarrassed. “Perhaps you can, Angel. Some time back I was preparing fattah …”
“What is fattah?”
“It’s a dish that we cook in Egypt, very well known. I’ll cook it for you one day. Anyway, I had just started when I realised that I had no cardamoms left. So I sent Eugenia to my upstairs neighbours to ask for some.” Omar stopped talking and took a sip of tea. He put the mug down on the coffee table. “But she came back with condoms instead.”
Angel could not stop herself from laughing. Omar looked at her and began to laugh as well, great blasts of mating grunts exploding from his nose. The more he made his hippo noise, the more Angel laughed, and the more she laughed the more he did, too.
Several minutes passed before either was capable of speech.
“I suppose it is quite funny,” said Omar, wiping tears from his eyes with the handkerchief that he had retrieved from the pocket of his trousers. “But I’ve been so very embarrassed about it.”
Angel was dabbing at her eyes with a tissue. “Eh, Omar, your story is very funny to me—more so because I’ve already heard part of it from Sophie.”
“Oh, no! Please tell me, Angel, what does she think of me that I send my servant to get condoms from her?”
“She’s very embarrassed, Omar. In fact, she’s been trying to avoid meeting you on the stairs.”
“I’ve been doing the same! I don’t understand why Eugenia got it so wrong! All right, her English is limited, but we were in the kitchen, I was busy cooking, I needed cardamoms. How could she think I wanted condoms?”
Angel was still battling to control her laughter. “I suppose to be sent for condoms is not a new thing for her. And perhaps a condom is a more familiar thing to her than a cardamom,” she suggested. “But tell me, Omar, how did this fattah of yours taste when you added the condoms?”
Again the mating bellow blasted from Omar’s nose, and Angel doubled up with laughter. Having heard the noise from the yard, Titi came up to check that everything was okay. She left again when Angel waved her away.
“No,” said Omar, struggling to get his breath, “I had to go out to buy some cardamoms. I didn’t want to risk sending Eugenia to any other neighbours. I wish I’d known that you had some here.”
“Always,” said Angel, dabbing her eyes again. “You can always get them from me. But I think that is one spice that you will not run out of again.”
“True, true. But, Angel, what should I do about Sophie? How should I explain the mistake to her?”
“I can explain it to her if you like,” Angel offered. “Then perhaps you can talk about it together afterwards. I think she’ll be nervous if you go and knock on her door before she understands what happened.”
Omar looked as though a weight had been lifted from his shoulders. “I’d be very grateful if you’d do that for me, Angel. Thank you.”
“No problem. I’ll tell you as soon as I’ve explained what happened, and then you can go and talk to her.” Angel sipped her tea. “Now. You said that you want a cake for your daughter.”
“Yes. She’ll be here for just over a week and I want to make her feel welcome, because things have been difficult between us since her mother and I split up.”
“And do you have an idea of how you want the cake to look or what you want it to say?”
“Yes. I saw one in your album shaped like a heart. I think it should be like that.”
“That’s a very good shape for a situation like this,” agreed Angel. “What colour do you think it should be?”
“Oh, red, definitely. It’s her favourite colour. And perhaps it can have her name on the top. Efra. I’ll show you how it’s written in Arabic and you can copy it.”
“That would be good,” said Angel.
They spent a few minutes completing the formalities of the Cake Order Form and making arrangements for delivery before sitting back to finish their tea.
“You know, Omar, I’ve heard that some of the first Wazungu that came here thought that the Tutsi people had originally come from Egypt.”
“Oh, that’s a misconception that’s driving us mad! I think you know I’m a lawyer for the genocide trials here?” Angel nodded. “Many of the accused try to use that as an excuse. Some half-brained colonial explorer thought the Tutsis looked more Arab than African, so he speculated that they must have come from down the Nile. That gave the génocidaires a perfect excuse to get rid of them.” Omar hooked the index and middle fingers of each hand and waved them in the air to indicate quotation marks. “They don’t belong here, so let’s send them back down the Nile to where they came from!”
“Yes, they put all those bodies into the Kagera River and the river carried them to Lake Victoria.”
“The source of the Nile.”
“But they look nothing like somebody from Egypt!”
Omar pointed to himself with both hands. “How many Tutsis have you seen who look like me?” A loud snort of derision blasted from his nose. “Whoever the half-blind colonial was who made that observation should be charged with genocide, even though he’s long dead. His words lit the fire in which the genocide would be cooked up—and the Belgian administration added fuel to the flames by exaggerating the differences.” Again Omar made quotation marks in the air. “Tutsis are superior, so let’s privilege them. And let’s make everyone carry a card saying if they’re Hutu or Tutsi—just so that we can tell the difference. But of course the very perpetrators who are using what the colonials said as an excuse for their killing, they are the ones who are quick to reject everything else that the colonials ever said.”
Angel thought for a minute. “I wonder if those colonials had any idea back then what the consequences of their actions would be today.”
“Oh, I’m sure they couldn’t have known. I doubt if they would have cared, either.” Omar drained his mug and cradled it in his large hands. “It’s the same today. Government leaders don’t think twice about borrowing money from the big financial institutions because they’ll only have to pay it back in forty years’ time—and in forty years’ time it’ll no longer be their responsibility because a different government will be in power. And who cares about polluting the atmosphere and destroying the planet? We’re not the ones who’ll have to live with the long-term consequences. And how many of us ever stop to think about the consequences of our own actions on a daily basis? Look at me. I fooled around. It was fun. So I fooled around some more. Now my marriage is over and my son refuses to speak to me, and my daughter and I are struggling to be friends.”
Angel tried not to think about struggling to be friends with her own daughter. “I suppose you’re right, Omar. Perhaps it isn’t human nature to think very far ahead.”
The two said nothing for a while as they contemplated this. It was Angel who broke the silence.
“But now you have an opportunity to make things better with your daughter, Omar. What do you plan to do while she’s here?”
“Oh, I’ve deliberately not made any plans. I don’t want her to accuse me of making decisions without consulting her; whenever I do something like that she shouts: Objection!” Omar’s quotation marks shot up into the air around this word. “I’ll put a few options to her and then she can make up her own mind.”
“That’ll be good. You know, Efra is not much older than my girls. Perhaps they can spend some time together while she’s here.”
“Good idea. Thank you, Angel.” Omar put his empty mug down on the coffee table and stood up, tucking his wallet back into his back pocket. “And thank you in advance for speaking to Sophie for me.”
“No problem,” said Angel, beginning to laugh again.
Omar smiled broadly and said goodbye, trying hard to suppress his laughter. He managed until he had made it up one flight of stairs, and then the sound of hippos mating in the shallows of Lake Victoria reverberated throughout the stairwell and blasted out of the building.
Gaspard and Modeste looked up from the bananas that they were eating outside and exchanged a knowing glance: the sun was not yet down and the Egyptian had already started having sex.