4
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 H?tel 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.”
“Do people need to see those bodies to be reminded?” asked Angel. “Are they not reminded every time they turn to talk to their loved ones and they find that their loved ones are not there?”
“I’m sure that’s true, Mrs T. But our children who are too young to remember will need that place to remind them, and our children’s children that follow them. And many visitors from other countries have already been there to see what happened. There were many Wazungu who had written in the visitors’ book.”
“By the way, Tungaraza,” said Dr Binaisa, “why did you not want to write in that book?”
“Eh!” Pius shook his head. “My thoughts were still lying dead with the people in those classrooms. I could not rouse them to form a sentence.”
“I know what you mean,” said Dr Binaisa. “While Gasana was writing, I looked over his shoulder and I saw that I was going to have to write my name and my country of origin. It was a struggle for me to remember that I am Dr Yoosuf Binaisa from Uganda. Eh, Gasana, what did you write? It looked like you were writing an entire essay on the history of Rwanda!”
Gasana laughed. “Do you think I even know what I wrote, Dr B? All the feelings inside me flooded out on to the page. They went straight from my heart to the pen without passing through my head. I think if you showed me my own words tomorrow, I would not recognise them.”
“And what about you, Binaisa?” asked Pius. “What did you manage to write?”
“You won’t believe me, Tungaraza, but I wrote only two words, the same two words that many of the Wazungu had already written. I’m embarrassed to say what they were.”
“Never again?” suggested Gasana. “I saw those words written over and over again in the book.”
“That is what they said when they closed the death camps in Europe,” said Angel. “Remember, Pius? There was a lot about never again at that museum we went to in Germany.”
“And if those words had meant anything then, there would not be places like the one we’ve just been to today, with books where people can write never again all over again,” said Pius.
“You’re right, Tungaraza, and those words that I wrote today mean as little as they did all those years ago. No doubt sometime in the future there’ll be some other slaughter somewhere, and afterwards somebody will write in a book never again—and again those words will mean nothing. Eh, but at least I wrote something, Tungaraza. That is better than the nothing that you wrote.”
“That is true, Binaisa.”
“Eh, Gasana, when will we arrive in Cyangugu? Mama-Grace, are you not ready to see this lake that is alleged to be more beautiful than the glorious Lake Victoria that our two countries share? Are you not ready to sit together beside the lake and share a nice bowl of ugali?”
“I’m ready for a cup of tea,” said Angel, who was dabbing at her hot face with a tissue and longing for the cooling breeze of lakeside air.
THE next morning she enjoyed just such a breeze as she ate breakfast with Pius and Dr Binaisa. They were seated on the hotel’s veranda, a wide concrete patio extending from the building right to the edge of the river, which it overlooked from the waist-high metal railing next to their table. The opposite bank, just metres from them, towered above both the river and the veranda, a steep incline dressed roughly in wild grass and rock. Between the breakfasters in Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo’s bank, a lone fisherman punted his hollowed-out pirogue along the river towards the lake’s open waters, where the two countries shook hands across a bridge. By unspoken agreement—and in the interests of national pride—the three breakfasters had not raised again the issue of the relative beauty of Lake Kivu and Lake Victoria.
Angel had spent a restless night, rising a number of times to open the window to let in some air and then rising as many times again to close it when she could no longer tolerate the whine of the mosquitoes that were coming in. And, as her wakefulness had continued, her anxiety about the task that she had agreed to perform today had grown. It would have been unnerving enough for anybody, but for Angel it was rendered even more uncomfortable by the fact that it obliged her to dwell on the silence that had come between her and her late daughter.
She felt that she had planted the seeds of that silence herself, sowing a row of them and covering them with soil when she failed to voice her disapproval of her daughter’s choice of husband. She had thought that Vinas could do so much better than Winston. Okay, he was an educated man, with a senior post at the college where Vinas was training. But Angel had heard rumours that he made a habit of taking his students as girlfriends. That was the kind of habit that made a man unreliable as a husband. Yet Vinas was in love, and happy, so Angel had said nothing—although Vinas must have felt her mother’s disapproval, even if she had not heard it.
Unlike Angel, Pius had considered Winston a good match for Vinas: Winston was a man of letters, a man capable of discussing intelligently many important topics. Most significantly, he was a man devoted to preparing students for a career in teaching, the very career that Pius himself had followed all those years ago before further studies in Germany had become a possibility for him.
They had married in Arusha for the sake of Winston’s widowed mother, whose poor health would not have permitted the journey to Dar es Salaam, and Winston’s sister, Queen, had insisted on arranging everything, including the cake.
Closing her eyes with a small shudder, lying awake in the bedroom of the H?tel du Lac, Angel could still see that cake. She supposed that it had been meant to match the colours of the bride’s dress—which Queen had got just right, stitching it for Vinas herself from bright white fabric scattered with a pattern of large blue and purple flowers—but the neighbour who had produced the cake was simply not a professional. The flowers patterned across it had been inexpertly made, and some of the purple ones were a noticeably different shade from the others, indicating that she had not mixed enough of the colour at first and had then been unable to mix exactly the same colour again. That was a common mistake amongst amateurs. Most upsetting of all, the icing on which the inferior blue and purple flowers had been arranged was not the background white of Vinas’s dress but the pale yellow of margarine: either the neighbour had not known to use egg-whites, or the price she had charged had not been sufficient to cover the cost of that many eggs. Had Angel’s tears, as she had stood before that cake, watered the row of seeds that she had planted?
Okay, perhaps she was exaggerating. Perhaps, as Pius had told her—often—it was normal for a girl to become less close to her parents when she married and had a family of her own. And perhaps it was normal for a girl to communicate less with her parents when she had a career to keep her busy, and when she was ambitious about getting ahead in her career. But perhaps the silence, the distance, between Angel and Vinas had not been normal, and perhaps it had been Angel’s fault. That possibility whined at her like the mosquitoes of Lake Kivu.
Pius had had no better a night, turning over and over again in his sleep and, at one point, suddenly sitting bolt upright, his eyes wide and fearful and his pyjamas damp with sweat. Alarmed, Angel had asked him what was wrong, but he was not in fact awake—or at least not awake enough to hear or see his wife—and he had fallen back on to the pillows and resumed his restless shifting.
AT the appointed hour that morning, the driver arrived at the hotel with Gasana—both having spent the night with relatives in the town—and they made their way around the potholes of Cyangugu’s roads and up to the top of the hill on which the prison squatted. While Pius, Gasana and Dr Binaisa went to their meeting, Angel co-opted the driver—who knew Swahili—to act as her translator. A guard at the prison gates sent someone to locate the prisoner she was looking for.
A great deal of time passed, during which Angel’s anxiety mounted further. She was uncertain about how she would feel when she came face to face with someone who stood accused as a génocidaire—although, in truth, she was probably looking at thousands of them right now. Large numbers of inmates milled about the crowded courtyard, some being marshalled from the chaos into lines that the guards marched down the hill to perform manual labour somewhere in the town. Their prison uniforms—Angel could not help noticing—were almost the exact shade of powder pink of the icing on Perfect’s christening cake.
At last a thin, under-nourished young man in pink appeared at the guard’s elbow and said something to him in Kinyarwanda.
“The one you are looking for is here, Madame,” said the guard. “This man has brought the prisoner you want.”
The thin young man pushed forward another prisoner, as under-nourished as he was, and with something familiar about the eyes—small and set deep in a face that was hard—although the eyes looked right through and past Angel without acknowledging her presence.
Angel cleared her throat before speaking. “Are you Hagengimana Bernadette, the mother of Leocadie?”
The woman gave no answer; in fact she appeared not even to register that she had been addressed. The guard said something to her, which she ignored, and then the prisoner who had found her tried speaking to her, but got no response. He said something to the guard, who shook his head and spoke to the driver, who translated for Angel.
“This man says he knows that this woman is Hagengimana Bernadette; he is sure of that because he knew her before. He says that she has not been right since being brought here to this prison. She is here but she is not here.”
Angel felt sure that this was indeed Leocadie’s mother, even though she struggled to imagine the face before her breaking into a smile that would light it up in the way that Leocadie’s did. The eyes were most definitely empty replicas of the ones set deep in Leocadie’s face. Through the driver, she asked the guard if someone might read to her—for Leocadie had told her that her mother was unable to read—the letter that she had brought from her daughter in Kigali.
“I’ll read it to her myself, Madame,” said the guard, and he took the envelope from Angel and tore it open. The envelope itself was nothing special—lightweight and white, edged with red and blue bands and bearing the words par avion—but the single sheet of lilac-coloured paper that the guard withdrew was thick and expensive, a testament to Leocadie’s affection for her mother. Angel knew what the letter said: that Leocadie was well, that she had given birth to a baby boy called Beckham, and that she hoped one day her mother could meet, and hold, this grandchild. A friend had written it exactly as Leocadie had dictated it.
Bernadette betrayed no reaction to her daughter’s words as the guard read them out; nor did she show any sign of having heard. The guard folded the letter, re-inserted it into the torn envelope, and tried to persuade the woman to take it. Hagengimana made no move to do so. Eventually the guard had to take her hand, place the envelope in it and close her fingers around it. The prisoner who had brought her led her away again. She had not walked more than three metres back into the throng of prisoners before the envelope drifted unnoticed to the ground and was trampled into the red earth.
WHILE she waited with the driver for the others to finish their meeting, Angel thought about Leocadie’s mother, who had been charged—Leocadie had not specified the exact nature of the charges—but had not yet been tried. Guilty or not, something had driven her away from herself and she had not come back. Perhaps, Angel considered, it was easier—or safer—not to. But what would she tell Leocadie? The truth—that her mother had not listened to her words and had discarded her letter—would not be comfortable. But perhaps Leocadie was not expecting comfortable news of a woman allegedly complicit in mass killings.
Angel tried to think of more cheerful things. It would not do to display her unease to the others; they would press her for details and she did not want to be disloyal to Leocadie by telling them about the encounter. But in any event, they returned to the vehicle in such a buoyant mood that Angel felt they might not have noticed had they found her actually weeping. Their meeting had gone extremely well, and as their minibus weaved its way through the busy streets of Cyangugu and on to the main road back towards Kigali, they joked about whether they could attribute this success to Pius’s excellent negotiating skills, Gasana’s very fine translation or Dr Binaisa’s passion for human excrement.
They were still joking, revisiting key moments of the meeting, when they caught up with an armed UN convoy that was travelling in the same direction. Two four-wheel-drive vehicles followed an open van that had been fitted with two long benches back to back down its middle. On the benches sat six armed soldiers who could watch for trouble on either side of the road.
“Should we follow or overtake?” asked their driver.
“Let’s overtake,” said Dr Binaisa. “I’m sure there’s no danger. We came this way yesterday with no soldiers to guard us, and I think we’re still alive. There’s no reason for a convoy; the UN likes to pay soldiers just for the sake of spending its budget.”
“And besides,” added Gasana, “if their staff could travel freely about Rwanda without an armed escort then they couldn’t justify their daily danger-pay.”
“But we may as well follow for a while,” suggested Pius. “Personally I don’t like guns, but in this case they’re for protection, even if there’s nothing to be protected from. If we attach ourselves to this convoy, then it’s a way to get protection for free.”
“That’s true,” Gasana agreed. “Let us not say no to something for free out of the UN’s budget. And apparently there are sometimes rebels in the Nyungwe Forest. We can overtake after we’ve passed through there.”
It proved to be a good decision—not because the soldiers were necessary, but because they provided plenty of entertainment. The soldier sitting on the left-hand side closest to the tail end of the van was asleep. The occupants of the KIST vehicle got a good view of him every time the lead vehicle climbed a hill, and every time it did so they held their breath, convinced that, this time, the soldier might slide right off the back of the vehicle. As soon as they had cleared the forest area they overtook the convoy.
“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.