Baking Cakes in Kigali (29 page)

Very quietly, seemingly unnoticed by the soldier, Gaspard had now taken up position immediately behind him, ready to seize him if necessary.

“Sophie is out this afternoon, Captain Calixte. How can a
Mzungu
who is out refuse you?”

“Not
Sophie!”
He stamped one of his Wellington boots on the ground. “That other
Mzungu!
The one who is just divorced.”

“Do you mean Linda?”

“Yes. Linda.”

“But, Captain, you didn’t ask me to make a cake for your proposal to
Linda!
Now how can it be
my
fault that she refused you when you didn’t take a cake?” Angel’s tone was soft, reasonable.

The Captain looked confused, and then—quite visibly—his anger left him in the way that breath leaves a party balloon when the hold on its stem is released. In a sulky tone, he said, “She wouldn’t even look at my certificate.”

“That is very sad, Captain Calixte. But you know, Linda is very happy that her marriage is over. She is even celebrating her divorce with a party tonight. A girl like that is not going to accept a marriage proposal at this time. Not from anybody.”

The Captain thought for a while. “You’re right, Angel. It is only that I’ve proposed marriage to her at the wrong time.” He shook his head. “I’m sorry that I said it was your fault.”

“No problem, Captain Calixte.”

The soldier had taken his weapon and left, and Angel had come inside, her mind troubled. Okay, nothing bad had actually happened. But really, Captain Calixte was not a stable man. It was not right that he should be walking around with a gun. And yet he was. This—and Françoise’s troubling comment about Hell in this life
and
eternally—made Angel anxious, preventing her from dropping off to sleep now with her feet up on the coffee table.

But had she fallen asleep, she would very soon have been woken by a heavy knock on the open door of her apartment.

“Hello?” called a deep male voice. “Angel?”

Angel took her feet off the coffee table and stood up, calling as she did so for the visitor to come in. The head that looked around the open door was bald on top with a band of black hair from ear to ear at the back and a neatly-trimmed black beard from ear to ear at the front.

“Hello, Angel,” said the Egyptian, talking through his alarmingly big, hooked nose.

“Mr Omar!” said Angel.

“Just Omar,” he said, shaking Angel’s hand. “I hope I’m not disturbing you?”

“Not at all, Omar. Please come and sit. You know, I’ve called at your apartment a few times this week, but you’ve always been out.”

“Yes, Eugenia told me.” Omar sat down heavily opposite Angel. “I believe you’re collecting money for a special wedding?”

“Yes. One of our security guards is going to marry the girl who runs the shop in our street. I’m organising the wedding
for them because they have no family except for us in this compound.”

“Of course I’ll contribute.” Omar stood to retrieve his wallet from the back pocket of his trousers and then sat down heavily again. He took a few notes from his wallet and handed them to Angel, then left his wallet on the coffee table. “And I’d like you to make a cake for me, Angel.”

Angel smiled as she stood up. “Then I’ll give you my album of cakes to look through while I make tea for us to drink. We cannot discuss business without tea!”

Angel gave Omar her photo album and went into her bedroom to put his contribution with the rest of the wedding money in the envelope that she was keeping on the top of the wardrobe for safety. Then she went into the kitchen to make tea.

When she came back into the living room carrying two steaming mugs, Omar was admiring her photos.

“You’re very clever, Angel. Something of an artist, in fact.”

“Thank you, Omar.” Angel put the mugs on the coffee table and sat down, patting her hair with her hand. “I’m sorry I can’t offer you cake to eat with your tea. I wasn’t here at lunchtime, and the children ate all the cake instead of eating their rice and beans.”

Omar suddenly made an alarming sound through his enormous nose, rather like the sound of hippos mating in the shallows of Lake Victoria. But he was smiling and his belly was moving up and down, so Angel that it must be his way of laughing. She smiled nervously.

“That’s children for you,” he said. “Mine would do just the same.”

“Oh, you have children?”

“Yes, yes. A son of sixteen and a daughter of thirteen. They’re both in Paris with their mother. My daughter, Efra,
she’s coming to visit me here next week. That’s why I want a cake. She’s been angry with me, but I think we’ve negotiated a kind of peace.” Omar took a sip of tea. “Oh, this is very good, Angel. What’s the spice?”

“Cardamom. It’s how we make tea in my home country.”

“Cardamom?”

“Yes.”

Omar put down his tea and sank his head into his hands. “Omar?”

When he looked up, his pale brown complexion had turned slightly red. He shook his head. “This will not do,” he said. “I’ve been trying to forget an unfortunate incident, but it seems I cannot.”

“Omar, you’re not making sense to me. Please tell me what’s bothering you. It may be that I can help you.”

Omar made the alarming sound of mating hippos again, but this time it was much quieter, as if the hippos were in the distance—perhaps as far from Mwanza on the shore of the lake to Saa Nane Island—and he looked embarrassed. “Perhaps you can, Angel. Some time back I was preparing
fattah …
”

“What is
fattah?”

“It’s a dish that we cook in Egypt, very well known. I’ll cook it for you one day. Anyway, I had just started when I realised that I had no cardamoms left. So I sent Eugenia to my upstairs neighbours to ask for some.” Omar stopped talking and took a sip of tea. He put the mug down on the coffee table. “But she came back with
condoms
instead.”

Angel could not stop herself from laughing. Omar looked at her and began to laugh as well, great blasts of mating grunts exploding from his nose. The more he made his hippo noise, the more Angel laughed, and the more she laughed the more he did, too.

Several minutes passed before either was capable of speech.

“I suppose it
is
quite funny,” said Omar, wiping tears from his eyes with the handkerchief that he had retrieved from the pocket of his trousers. “But I’ve been so very embarrassed about it.”

Angel was dabbing at her eyes with a tissue. “Eh, Omar, your story is very funny to me—more so because I’ve already heard part of it from Sophie.”

“Oh, no! Please tell me, Angel, what does she think of me that I send my servant to get condoms from her?”

“She’s very embarrassed, Omar. In fact, she’s been trying to avoid meeting you on the stairs.”

“I’ve been doing the same! I don’t understand why Eugenia got it so wrong! All right, her English
is
limited, but we were in the kitchen, I was busy cooking, I needed cardamoms. How could she think I wanted condoms?”

Angel was still battling to control her laughter. “I suppose to be sent for condoms is not a new thing for her. And perhaps a condom is a more familiar thing to her than a cardamom,” she suggested. “But tell me, Omar, how did this
fattah
of yours taste when you added the condoms?”

Again the mating bellow blasted from Omar’s nose, and Angel doubled up with laughter. Having heard the noise from the yard, Titi came up to check that everything was okay. She left again when Angel waved her away.

“No,” said Omar, struggling to get his breath, “I had to go out to buy some cardamoms. I didn’t want to risk sending Eugenia to any other neighbours. I wish I’d known that you had some here.”

“Always,” said Angel, dabbing her eyes again. “You can always get them from me. But I think that is one spice that you will not run out of again.”

“True, true. But, Angel, what should I do about Sophie? How should I explain the mistake to her?”

“I can explain it to her if you like,” Angel offered. “Then
perhaps you can talk about it together afterwards. I think she’ll be nervous if you go and knock on her door before she understands what happened.”

Omar looked as though a weight had been lifted from his shoulders. “I’d be very grateful if you’d do that for me, Angel. Thank you.”

“No problem. I’ll tell you as soon as I’ve explained what happened, and then you can go and talk to her.” Angel sipped her tea. “Now. You said that you want a cake for your daughter.”

“Yes. She’ll be here for just over a week and I want to make her feel welcome, because things have been difficult between us since her mother and I split up.”

“And do you have an idea of how you want the cake to look or what you want it to say?”

“Yes. I saw one in your album shaped like a heart. I think it should be like that.”

“That’s a very good shape for a situation like this,” agreed Angel. “What colour do you think it should be?”

“Oh, red, definitely. It’s her favourite colour. And perhaps it can have her name on the top.
Efra.
I’ll show you how it’s written in Arabic and you can copy it.”

“That would be good,” said Angel.

They spent a few minutes completing the formalities of the Cake Order Form and making arrangements for delivery before sitting back to finish their tea.

“You know, Omar, I’ve heard that some of the first
Wazungu
that came here thought that the Tutsi people had originally come from Egypt.”

“Oh, that’s a misconception that’s driving us mad! I think you know I’m a lawyer for the genocide trials here?” Angel nodded. “Many of the accused try to use that as an excuse. Some half-brained colonial explorer thought the Tutsis looked more Arab than African, so he speculated that they must have
come from down the Nile. That gave the
génocidaires
a perfect excuse to get rid of them.” Omar hooked the index and middle fingers of each hand and waved them in the air to indicate quotation marks.
“They don’t belong here, so let’s send them back down the Nile to where they came from!”

“Yes, they put all those bodies into the Kagera River and the river carried them to Lake Victoria.”

“The source of the Nile.”

“But they look nothing like somebody from Egypt!”

Omar pointed to himself with both hands. “How many Tutsis have you seen who look like me?” A loud snort of derision blasted from his nose. “Whoever the half-blind colonial was who made that observation should be charged with genocide, even though he’s long dead. His words lit the fire in which the genocide would be cooked up—and the Belgian administration added fuel to the flames by exaggerating the differences.” Again Omar made quotation marks in the air.
“Tutsis are superior, so let’s privilege them. And let’s make everyone carry a card saying if they’re Hutu or Tutsi—just so that we can tell the difference.
But of course the very perpetrators who are using what the colonials said as an excuse for their killing, they are the ones who are quick to reject everything else that the colonials ever said.”

Angel thought for a minute. “I wonder if those colonials had any idea back then what the consequences of their actions would be today.”

“Oh, I’m sure they couldn’t have known. I doubt if they would have cared, either.” Omar drained his mug and cradled it in his large hands. “It’s the same today. Government leaders don’t think twice about borrowing money from the big financial institutions because they’ll only have to pay it back in forty years’ time—and in forty years’ time it’ll no longer be their responsibility because a different government will be
in power. And who cares about polluting the atmosphere and destroying the planet? We’re not the ones who’ll have to live with the long-term consequences. And how many of us ever stop to think about the consequences of our own actions on a daily basis? Look at me. I fooled around. It was fun. So I fooled around some more. Now my marriage is over and my son refuses to speak to me, and my daughter and I are struggling to be friends.”

Angel tried not to think about struggling to be friends with her own daughter. “I suppose you’re right, Omar. Perhaps it isn’t human nature to think very far ahead.”

The two said nothing for a while as they contemplated this. It was Angel who broke the silence.

“But now you have an opportunity to make things better with your daughter, Omar. What do you plan to do while she’s here?”

“Oh, I’ve deliberately not made any plans. I don’t want her to accuse me of making decisions without consulting her; whenever I do something like that she shouts:
Objection!”
Omar’s quotation marks shot up into the air around this word. “I’ll put a few options to her and then she can make up her own mind.”

“That’ll be good. You know, Efra is not much older than my girls. Perhaps they can spend some time together while she’s here.”

“Good idea. Thank you, Angel.” Omar put his empty mug down on the coffee table and stood up, tucking his wallet back into his back pocket. “And thank you in advance for speaking to Sophie for me.”

“No problem,” said Angel, beginning to laugh again.

Omar smiled broadly and said goodbye, trying hard to suppress his laughter. He managed until he had made it up one flight of stairs, and then the sound of hippos mating in
the shallows of Lake Victoria reverberated throughout the stairwell and blasted out of the building.

Gaspard and Modeste looked up from the bananas that they were eating outside and exchanged a knowing glance: the sun was not yet down and the Egyptian had already started having sex.