Baking Cakes in Kigali

by Gaile Parkin

  Her business with Prosper concluded, Angel went back up the stairs and out through the building’s entrance into the street. Modeste and Gaspard had now finished eating their pineapple and were sitting on the ground on the other side of the road with their backs up against the trunk of a mimosa tree. They acknowledged her wave as she turned down the dirt road and headed towards Leocadie’s shop, which was housed in a container at the side of the road about a hundred metres from the compound.

  On the way to the shop, she passed another kind of container, longer and lower, dark green in colour with a flatter shape and four hinged lids across its top. This was the Dumpster to which the neighbourhood brought its household rubbish in the expectation—sometimes unmet for extended periods of time—that a truck would eventually come and take it away and bring it back empty.

  Angel found Leocadie sitting in the dim interior of her shop, breast-feeding her baby. Short and solid, with small eyes set deep in a rather hard face, she was not an attractive girl until she smiled—at which point she would light up as if her cash-power meter had just been replenished, and she was suddenly quite beautiful. She looked up now as Angel’s frame blocked the natural light from the doorway, and beamed when she saw who it was.

  “Mama-Grace! Karibu! How are you?”

  “I am well, thank you, Leocadie. How is little Beckham?” The baby had been named long before his birth for his incessant kicking at his mother’s belly.

  “He’s fine, Mama-Grace. But he’s always hungry!”

  “Eh! There are babies who are like that. And how is Modeste?” Modeste was Beckham’s father. Angel knew very well how Modeste was, because she had just seen him. But that was not what she was asking.

  “Eh!” said Leocadie, as she transferred Beckham from her left breast to her right. “That other woman’s baby will come in one month. Modeste says if it is a girl he will choose me. He says a man must be with his son. But if it is a boy then we don’t know. He’ll try to decide.”

  Angel shook her head. “I hope that he’ll take the matter to his family. A family can always help a person to make the right decision.”

  “Eh, Mama-Grace, there is no family to help him to decide. Everybody died. It is only Modeste now. He must decide alone.”

  “That is very difficult,” said Angel. She meant that it was very difficult to lose your whole family, and that it was very difficult to make alone a decision that a family should make, and that it was very difficult to wait for a man to decide between you and another woman. “Let us hope and pray, Leocadie.”

  “That is all we can do, Mama-Grace.”

  “But I cannot stay and chat. Benedict still has malaria and I must go home and be with him. I have only come to buy sugar.”

  Stepping into the container, Angel helped herself to a small bag of sugar from the sparsely-stacked shelves lining its walls. It was more expensive to buy from Leocadie than from the market or one of the small supermarkets in town, but the shop was very convenient for things that had been forgotten on the family’s weekly shopping trip, or for things that had run out sooner than expected. The shop stocked essentials only: goods such as sugar, powdered milk, tea, eggs, tins of tomato paste, salt, soap, washing powder, toilet paper. A wire wound surreptitiously up the trunk of the jacaranda tree next to the container to join an overhead electrical cable; this powered the small fridge inside the container that kept bottles of Primus and soda cool.

  As Leocadie was trying to count out Angel’s change without disturbing Beckham, Faith appeared breathlessly in the shop’s doorway to report that a lady had come about a cake, and that Angel must come home at once.

  ANGEL found the lady seated in her living room, encouraging Grace as the child struggled with her few words of school French. The visitor rose to shake Angel’s hand.

  “Bonjour, Madame. Comment ça va?”

  “Bien, merci,” replied Angel.

  “Vous êtes Madame Angel?”

  “Oui, je suis Angel. But, Madame, we have now used up all the French that I know! Unasema Kiswahili? Do you speak Swahili?”

  “Ndiyo. Yes.”

  “Good. Then let us speak Swahili and we will understand each other. Please sit down, Madame. Girls, Safiya is waiting for you upstairs. Take your homework.”

  The girls had their homework books ready. They bid au revoir to their guest and hurried out of the apartment as Angel perched on the edge of the sofa and smiled at the woman who smiled back at her from across the coffee table. She was of medium build with long, delicate braids falling loosely around her pretty face, which was adorned with a pair of gold-rimmed glasses. Angel guessed that she could not be more than thirty years old.

  The woman introduced herself. “Madame Angel, my name is Odile. I am a friend of Dr Rejoice. She is the one who sent me here to you.”

  “I’m happy to meet you, Odile. If you’re a friend of Dr Rejoice you’re my friend too, so let’s not be formal with each other. Please call me just Angel; let’s forget about Madame.”

  “Okay, Angel,” said Odile, smiling widely.

  Angel stood up from the sofa. “Odile, you are very welcome in my home. But could I ask you to excuse me for just one minute? I have a child here with malaria, and I need to check on him.”

  “Eh!” Odile rose instantly to her feet, her face registering concern. “It’s lucky that I came to you when you have a sick child, Angel, because I’m a nurse.”

  “Eh! A nurse? Come with me then, Odile, we’ll check on him together. But really, I think the fever is almost over now.”

  Angel led Odile into the children’s bedroom, where Benedict lay asleep in one of the lower bunks. Quietly they took turns to place a hand on his damp forehead and, feeling that the fever had at last broken, they smiled at each other with relief.

  “He’s going to be fine,” whispered Odile.

  “Yes,” agreed Angel, as they made their way out of the room, pulling the door almost shut behind them. “Definitely after this weekend he’ll be back at school.”

  They took up the same seats as before, on opposite sides of the coffee table.

  “Obviously you’ve been keeping his fluids up?”

  “Yes, and fortunately he’s been thirsty, so I haven’t had to force him.” Angel clapped her hands together. “Eh! I feel blessed that a nurse has come to me today to help me to check on him!”

  Odile smiled. “Actually, I didn’t come to you as a nurse, Angel. I came to you as a person who is wanting to order a cake.”

  “Then I’m blessed twice today! But before we begin to talk business, let me make some tea for us to drink. While I’m doing that, you can look through my photo album and see some cakes that I’ve already made, and there is also one on the table over there that’s waiting to be collected.”

  When Angel emerged from the kitchen with two steaming mugs of milky tea, apologising for not having a slice of cake to offer her guest, Odile was at the work table looking admiringly at the cake that waited there. Angel put the mugs down on the coffee table and went to join her.

  “That cake is for a christening,” she explained. “The baby is the daughter of the sister of a neighbour’s driver.”

  “It is truly perfect!” declared Odile. The oblong, one-layer cake was coated in powder-pink frosting. Around the sides of the cake the pink was decorated with white frills resembling lace. Both the top left corner and the bottom right corner of the upper surface were adorned with lilac roses and white rosebuds tipped with strawberry pink. And across the centre of the cake, starting at the bottom corner on the left and sloping up towards the top corner on the right, was the baby’s name in lilac cursive script: Perfect.

  “That is a wonderful name for a girl,” said Odile.

  “Indeed,” beamed Angel. “I helped the mother to choose it myself. But come and sit, Odile. You know, I thought of becoming a nurse myself, but then I became a mother instead. But the world is different now. Now a woman can become a nurse and a mother.”

  The two women sat
and took a sip of their tea.

  “Are you perhaps a nurse and a mother, Odile?”

  “Oh, no, no.” Odile shook her head, putting her mug down on the table. “No, Angel, I’m just a nurse.” Her voice had become quieter, and a little sad. Angel watched as Odile’s eyes stared through and beyond her mug of tea, and saw a vertical furrow beginning to deepen just above where the young woman’s glasses met across her nose. It was clear that thinking about not being a nurse and a mother was making her guest feel uncomfortable.

  “And tell me, Odile,” she said, her voice as cheerful as she could make it, “where is it that you are a nurse?”

  To Angel’s relief, Odile’s smile returned. “I work at the Centre Medico-Social in Biryogo. Do you know it?”

  “No, I don’t know that place. But my husband and I have driven through Biryogo. Eh! The people in that part of town are too poor!” The tiny makeshift dwellings of wood, corrugated iron, cardboard and plastic sheeting that the people of Biryogo called home were not a new sight to Angel. Such places clung to the outskirts of most cities on the continent, providing shelter for those with nothing who had come to the city in the hope of something, only to find themselves contending instead with a different kind of nothing.

  “It’s not a beautiful place to work,” agreed Odile. “But it’s where God needs me. The centre is for people who are infected. We do testing and counselling, and we educate people, especially women. For example, we’re training sex workers to do sewing, then they can earn money from sewing instead of from sex.”

  “Eh! That is very good work,” said Angel, and her thoughts went to Jeanne d’Arc, the sex worker who did occasional business in the compound. She was a nice enough girl, but really, that was not a good job to have.

  “This disease is a very bad thing,” said Odile.

  “Eh! Uh-uh,” agreed Angel, shaking her head.

  “Uh-uh,” echoed Odile, and she shook her head, too.

  “One of the girls you met here today, Odile, the one you were talking with in French, Grace. She has two brothers who are also with me here. The disease you are talking about took their mother, and it would have taken their father, too. It’s only that robbers shot him instead.”

  “Eh! Grace mentioned her frères, she showed me the family photos,” Odile indicated the four framed pictures mounted on the wall, “but I thought they were all your children. I didn’t know that you had adopted orphans.”

  “In fact they’re my grandchildren. It’s my son who got shot.”

  “Oh, I’m very sorry, Angel, I didn’t know.”

  “Thank you, Odile. In fact there are five grandchildren who are now my children. Five! Because my daughter is late, too.”

  “Oh, that is very sad.” Odile shook her head. “May I ask … forgive me, Angel, as a nurse I’m curious about the late. May I ask about what took your daughter?”

  “Of course you can ask, Odile, and to tell the truth I don’t mind at all to talk about such a thing with somebody who is a nurse. It was stress that took her.”

  “Stress?”

  “Blood pressure. She drove herself too hard after her husband left her. Worked herself to death. Everybody knows that such a thing is possible.”

  Odile hesitated for a moment before saying, “It’s certainly not impossible, Angel. Was it her heart?”

  “No, no. Her head.” Angel pressed the palm of her right hand to her temple.

  “Her head?” Odile mirrored the gesture. “Something like a stroke?”

  “A very bad headache. That’s how her friend explained it to us. And really, Odile, that was not unexpected, because even as a child Vinas would get headaches sometimes, especially at the time of school exams and so on. Her friend said she’d been having a lot of headaches from working too hard, and also from her blood pressure.”

  “I see …” said Odile.

  “And of course everybody knows that stress and blood pressure go together with headaches.”

  “Yes. What exactly did the doctor say, Angel?”

  “Well, no, we didn’t speak to a doctor. By the time Pius and I got to Mount Meru Hospital, Vinas was already late.”

  “Mount Meru? In Arusha?”

  “Yes. Vinas fell in love with Winston in Dar es Salaam while she was studying to be a teacher, then when she qualified she went to live in Arusha with him because his family was there. Eh! She loved him so much, Odile! When he left her, we begged her to come back to us in Dar, but by then she was deputy to the Mwalimu Mkuu at her school, next in line to be Head herself, and she preferred to stay there. But she pushed herself too hard. Eh!” Angel closed her eyes and shook her head. “I wasn’t by her side, Odile. I didn’t see what she was doing to herself.”

  “That is very sad.”

  “I failed to recognise the signs of stress. The last few times I saw her I noticed that she was reducing nicely,” Angel patted the sides of her ample thighs, “but I didn’t know it was dangerous to be so stressed. I just hoped for myself that one day my business could grow big and keep me so busy that I could reduce like that.”

  Odile mirrored Angel’s sad smile, and they sipped their tea in silence for a while before Odile spoke again. “Angel, may I ask you another question? As a nurse?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “I’m wondering … bearing in mind … are all of your grandchildren well?”

  Angel knew at once what she meant and nodded her head. “When my son and his wife found out that they were positive, their doctor in Mwanza said the children should be tested, just to be sure. We were worried about Benedict,” she gestured towards the door of the children’s room where the boy lay, “because he sometimes doesn’t seem as strong as other boys, but all three are negative.”

  “That’s good. I’m sure that five grandchildren make a heavy enough load, even when they’re well.”

  “Actually, there could have been six. Six! My daughter had a third baby, but he never thrived and he was late within just a few months. There are babies like that, Odile.”

  “There are.”

  Angel forced a smile. “Eh, but five keep me busy enough! The two girls that you met are the oldest, and I must confess to you as a nurse that recently I’ve started to become afraid for them. They’ll start to become young women soon and boys will start to notice them. I think my heart will stop beating if the virus gets to one of them.”

  “Angel, that’s not going to happen,” assured Odile. “Obviously you’ve spoken to them about it?”

  “Eh! It’s difficult for somebody who is my age, Odile. We are the ones who did not talk to our own children about sex. That is how our own parents raised us. Now, how can we talk to our grandchildren about sex?”

  Odile was quiet for a while as she drank the last of her tea. Then she said, “Perhaps I can help you, Angel. At the centre we have a small restaurant. It provides jobs for women who are positive. They’re not sick, but they cannot find other jobs because some employers discriminate when they know that a person is positive. So they cook and serve in our restaurant, and that teaches the community that the food cooked by a positive somebody is safe to eat. It also brings in a little bit of money for the centre. Now, I’m thinking this: perhaps the girls can come and have lunch with me at our restaurant one day. I can tell them about the work of the centre and even show them the things that we do there. We can talk about the disease and about sex, and I can answer their questions. Do you think that is perhaps a good idea?”

  Angel’s eyes began to fill with tears, and she reached into her brassiere for a tissue. Odile’s idea was a very good one indeed. “Would it be okay with your boss?”

  “Yes, of course. It would be during my lunch break, so it wouldn’t take me from my duties. You can just tell me what day you’ll bring them. I’ve been on leave this week, but I’ll be back there from Monday.”

  “I’m very grateful, Odile! You’re lifting a big burden from my shoulders. But how can I repay you?”

  Odile smiled. “You can
give me a good price for my cake.”

  “Eh! Nobody will get a better price than you! But forgive me, Odile, you came to me simply to order a cake, meanwhile I’ve bothered you as a nurse. That is not a professional way for me to behave towards a customer!”

  “Oh, no, Angel, there’s nothing to forgive. In any case, I’m not simply your customer, am I? You’ve already said that you and I are friends because we’re both friends of Dr Rejoice.”

  “That is true.” Angel slipped her tissue back into her brassiere, smiling at Odile. “So tell me about this cake that I’m going to make for my friend.”

  “Actually, the cake is for a celebration party for my brother. The Belgian Embassy has awarded him a scholarship for further studies in Belgium.” Odile was radiant with pride.

  “Eh! Congratulations! What will he study there?”

  “Thank you, Angel. He’ll study for a Master’s in Public Health. He qualified as a doctor at the National University in Butare.”

  “Eh! He is a very clever somebody!”

  “Yes, but he will deny that. He says it’s only hard work and the help of God that have taken him so far.”

  “And you, Odile? Are you not also a clever somebody to be a nurse?”

  “Oh, no, Angel! For me also it was hard work and the help of God.” Then Odile was quiet for a moment before she said, “Actually, my brother and I are both survivors.”

  Angel knew what that meant: unlike the many Rwandans who had grown up outside the country and had come back home after the recent genocide was over, Odile and her brother had lived through it. They might have lost loved ones, they might have witnessed terrible things, they might have experienced terrible things themselves. But they had survived.

  “I’m sorry, Odile,” said Angel, knowing that this was not enough to say but also not knowing the words that could say enough. She shifted uncomfortably on the sofa, not knowing quite what to say next. Perhaps the best—the most professional—thing for her to do was to bring the conversation back to the much easier topic of the cake.

  But before Angel could say anything, Odile spoke again.

  “I feel I can tell you about it, Angel, because you’ve already told me something of your own pain and loss, and because we’re already friends through Dr Rejoice.” Angel gave her a small nod of confirmation. “Actually, we were lucky. They killed me, Angel, but I did not die. My brother saved me, even though he wasn’t yet fully qualified. And when they saw that he could be useful to them as a doctor they spared him and he protected me.” Odile was quiet for a few seconds before she continued. “After … Afterwards, I got a job with Médecins Sans Frontières, translating for them between Kinyarwanda and French. They saw that I worked well with patients. They encouraged me to train as a nurse, and they even found sponsorship for me.”