Baking Cakes in Kigali (9 page)

“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
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 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.