by Gaile Parkin
“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 Hôtel 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 dictate
d 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?”