Baking Cakes in Kigali (27 page)

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 Françoise
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?” Françoise 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 Françoise
, 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 Françoise, 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
, Françoise, 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 Françoise, laughing and shaking her head. “Fanta
citron?”

“Thank you.”

Françoise 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.” Françoise 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, Françoise. Tonight her
Wazungu
friends will be spending their
Wazungu
salaries here at
Chez Françoise.”

“Yes.” Françoise 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.” Françoise 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 Françoise. “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
, Françoise! I knew that your husband was late, but I didn’t know that they had killed your firstborn, too!”

“You didn’t know?” Françoise looked surprised.

Angel shook her head. “You never told me, Françoise. 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, Françoise,” said Angel, sorry for Françoise’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 Françoise could, too.

But Françoise 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 Françoise 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.”

Françoise’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.” Françoise 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 Françoise did, without showing any emotion? Perhaps Françoise simply had no emotion left to show.

“What did you do after that, Françoise?”

“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
, Françoise, you have told me a very sad story,” said Angel, shaking her head. “But at least you survived.”

Françoise 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, Françoise had shown emotion—and that emotion was anger. “No, I’m sure you don’t feel blessed. Survival must be a very difficult thing, Françoise.”

“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, Françoise.” 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 Françoise meant. “Are you talking about … suicide?”

“Yes.”

“That is not a good idea, Françoise.” “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. Françoise 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.”