Baking Cakes in Kigali (4 page)

The cake on Angel’s work table today was for Ken Akimoto’s
dinner party that would take place that night. Ken was by far her best customer, ordering cakes from her two or three times a month. He loved to entertain, and it was well known that he was very good at preparing dishes from his native Japan, even though he had lived most of his life in the United States.

Angel enjoyed baking cakes for him because he allowed her the freedom to decorate them exactly as she pleased. There was only one time when he had ordered a specific design: when he was entertaining some visitors from the Japanese government who had come to Kigali to see if they might want to sponsor something at KIST. On that occasion, he had commissioned Angel to make a cake that looked like the Japanese flag, which was a very boring flag indeed: white with a big red circle in the middle. Angel had thought at the time that the cake was extremely ugly—though now she recognised that it was not quite as ugly as the Wanyikas’ wedding cake—but Ken’s guests had apparently found it beautiful enough to photograph from many angles.

Today, though, Angel had free rein. She had baked a simple round vanilla sponge cake in two layers with crimson icing between the layers. Then she had coated the cake with a vibrant turquoise blue icing. Across the top she had created a loose, open, basket-weave design in bright yellow bordered with piped yellow stars alternating with crimson stars, and she was now finishing off by piping scrolls of crimson around the base of the sides. It would be a handsome cake: beautiful, but at the same time masculine. As she refilled her plastic icing syringe with the last of the crimson, she heard a knock at the front door and a man’s voice calling,
“Hodi!”

“
Karibu!”
she answered, looking up from the table as the door opened and Bosco, the gangly young man who worked as Ken Akimoto’s driver, came into the living room. She wiped her hands on a cloth and greeted him with a handshake, in the traditional Rwandan way.

“You are welcome, Bosco,” she said, speaking in Swahili. “But I hope you haven’t come to collect Mr Akimoto’s cake. As you can see, it isn’t quite finished yet.”

“Ooh, Auntie!” exclaimed Bosco, his lean, youthful face breaking into a wide smile. “That is a very, very fine cake! The colours are very, very good. Mr Akimoto will be very, very happy.
Eh!
But, Auntie, what is that?” Bosco’s eyes had slid away from Ken’s cake and his expression was registering distaste.

Angel saw that he had noticed the cake which sat at the back corner of her work table, waiting to be collected that afternoon by Mrs Wanyika’s driver.

“That’s an anniversary cake for some big people,” said Angel, adding—quickly—in her defence, “That’s exactly how they want it to look.”

“
Wazungu?”
asked Bosco.

“
Wazungu
taste.
Wazungu
thinking.” She did not want to say more; it was not professional to gossip about her customers, and as a businesswoman she was obliged to remain professional at all times. “But I’m happy that you like Mr Akimoto’s cake, Bosco.”

“He’ll come for it later himself, Auntie. I’m not here for Mr Akimoto; I’ve come to you about a personal matter. Well … two personal matters, Auntie.”

“
Sawa
, Bosco,” said Angel. “Why don’t you go into the kitchen and make tea for us while I finish decorating Mr Akimoto’s cake? Then we’ll sit and drink tea while you tell me your personal matters.”

BOSCO
glanced with admiration at the finished cake as he and Angel settled into their chairs with their cups of sweet, milky tea.

“Auntie, it is about a cake that I’ve come to see you,” he began.

“You’ve come to see the right person, Bosco. Are you perhaps bringing me news of your marriage?”

Since returning from Uganda, where his family had fled many years ago, Bosco had been pursuing—at first rather vaguely and now with greater single-mindedness—the idea of settling down and raising a family of his own. But despite his having identified a small succession of women to propose to, he had not yet had any success in securing a wife.

“No, Auntie.” Bosco lowered his eyes and gave an embarrassed laugh. “Not yet. No, Auntie, it’s my sister Florence. She has delivered her firstborn.”

“Congratulations! A boy or a girl?”

“She’s a girl, Auntie. She’ll go for her baptism next weekend, and Florence would like a cake for the christening party. I told her that you are the one to make the best cake.”

“Thank you, Bosco. I’ll be very happy to make the cake for your sister. I’ll give her a good price.”

“Oh, no, Auntie,” said Bosco quickly, “you can charge
Mzungu
price. Mr Akimoto will pay for the cake. He says it will be his gift.”

“
Eh!
Your boss is a very generous somebody!” declared Angel.

This was true. Ken frequently made his driver and Pajero available to friends—although, strictly speaking, both the vehicle and the driver belonged not to Ken himself, but to his employer, the United Nations. Angel herself had benefited from this generosity a number of times when she had needed to deliver cakes to customers who lived on roads where no ordinary
taxi-voiture
was able to travel. And, of course, Ken also helped her by buying supplies for her business whenever he went home to America, where his job gave him a week’s leave every two months. Her supplies came into the country in his unsearched luggage along with his own big bottles
of soy sauce, tubes of wasabi paste and sheets of processed seaweed—and he would never accept any payment for them from Angel. But despite his constant generosity towards her, she felt no guilt in charging him an exorbitant rate for every cake. When Sophie had found out exactly how high Ken’s salary was, she had come to Angel in a state of high emotion, ricocheting between rage and exasperation. Angel had made tea for her and had tried to calm her down, suggesting that perhaps these big organisations needed to pay big salaries if they wanted to attract the right kind of people; but Sophie had said that they were the wrong kind of people if they would not do the work for less. Ultimately they had concluded that the desire to make the world a better place was not something that belonged in a person’s pocket. No, it belonged in a person’s heart.

Angel rose to fetch her photo album from her work table, and brought it over to her guest. “Let me show you other christening cakes that I’ve made, Bosco. Perhaps they’ll help you to decide exactly how you want your cake to look.”

Bosco looked carefully at each photograph.
“Eh
, Auntie, these are all very, very fine! How will I be able to choose one?”

Angel laughed. “You don’t have to choose one; you can design a different one. I’m only showing you these for some ideas. But always for a christening, the name of the baby must be written across the top of the cake.”

Angel thought of her new
Gateau Graffito
pens. It would surely be easier to write a name on a cake with one of those than with her bulky icing syringe—although, of course, the colours of the three pens that she had were not suitable for a baby’s cake.

“Goodenough,” said Bosco.

“Good enough?” queried Angel. “What is good enough?”

“The baby’s name, Auntie. She’s called Goodenough.”

“Goodenough?
Goodenough?
What kind of name is Goodenough?”

“It’s because they wanted a boy very, very much, but the baby is a girl. She’s not what they wanted, but she’s good enough.”

Angel removed her glasses and began to polish the lenses with the corner of her
kanga.
“Do you think that is a good name for a girl to have, Bosco?”

“It is not a bad name, Auntie.”

Angel was silent for a time as she polished her glasses vigorously. Then she said, “Do you know what, Bosco? I think perhaps it is not you who should choose the cake for Goodenough. You are only the uncle. Really, it’s the baby’s mother who should choose the cake for the baby’s christening. Do you think it will be possible for you to take me with my photo album to meet Mama-Goodenough?”

Bosco’s face lit up. “Oh, Auntie, that is a very, very good idea! I wouldn’t like to choose the wrong cake. I’ll ask Mr Akimoto if I can drive you there on Monday. We can’t go now; I have to fetch him soon from the office and bring him home to prepare for his party tonight. You know he likes me to help him by carrying the TV from the bedroom to the living room and connecting up all the wires for the speakers and the microphone for the singing machine.”

“Eh, we will have another night of noise, then!” said Angel, putting her glasses back on. The whole compound knew when Ken Akimoto’s parties included karaoke. As the night wore on and alcohol increasingly loosened inhibitions, even those guests who should never be allowed to sing into a microphone would be persuaded to do just that. But nobody ever complained. Neighbours were often guests themselves, and those who were not invited had usually received some favour or another from Ken.

Angel picked up her diary and a pen from the coffee table. “On Monday we’ll decide about the cake with Florence. But now I must write the day and time of the christening party in my diary so that it cannot be forgotten.”

She made the entry in her diary as Bosco gave her the details. She was careful to record all her orders in her diary so that she could keep track of them. That was the professional thing to do—and besides, Dr Rejoice had warned her that sometimes the Change could make a woman forget things. Angel knew that forgetting to make somebody’s cake would be a shame from which she would never recover.

“Now, Bosco,” she said, replacing the diary and the pen on the coffee table, “your sister’s cake is one personal matter. You said that you were coming to me with two.”

“Yes, Auntie,” said Bosco. Then he said a loud
eh!
and looked away disconsolately.

“Bosco?”

“
Eh!”

“What is in your heart, Bosco?”

He sighed deeply. “It’s Linda, Auntie.”

“Ah, Linda,” said Angel, immediately picturing the young British human rights monitor who lived in the compound. Men tended to regard her as very beautiful, but Angel wondered how they had formed that opinion. As far as she understood it, the beauty of a woman rested in her face, but Angel had never seen a man look at Linda’s face; there were always other parts of her body that were asking more urgently to be observed. Really, that was not a polite way to dress in a country where women were modest. Even Jeanne d’Arc—the sex worker who occasionally came to see customers in the compound—did not advertise her body like that.

Bosco looked embarrassed and remained silent. Angel did her best to move the conversation on. “Bosco, I know that you used to like Linda. But that time when you drove me with a
cake to that house far on the other side of the golf course, you told me then that you had stopped liking her.”

“Yes, Auntie,” said Bosco. Then he was silent again.

“You told me then that you could see that there was a problem with Linda and drink.”

“Yes, Auntie.”

Silence.

“So what is it now, Bosco? I hope you’re not going to tell me that you’ve decided to like her again.” Bosco remained silent.

Taking off her glasses again and giving them a good clean, Angel continued. “Have you forgotten the stories that you told me about her? I haven’t forgotten the story of the time you saw her outside Cadillac night club and you greeted her, but all the drink in her made you a stranger and she said something to you that was not polite. I haven’t forgotten the story of the morning when you went to Mr Akimoto’s house to help him clean up after a party and you found Linda asleep on the carpet and she had vomited there, and she simply got up and left you to clean up her vomit. Bosco, please tell me that you have not forgotten those stories yourself.”

Bosco rose from his chair and moved towards the window, from where he could see the children in the yard below. Then he turned to Angel and, shifting his weight from one leg to the other, he spoke at last.

“Auntie, I haven’t forgotten those stories.” He began to pace. “But now I have another story to tell Auntie. It is a story that gives me pain in my heart, even though it is many weeks since I decided not to like Linda.”

“
Eh!
Bosco! It’s making my head feel confused to watch you walking up and down, up and down. But I can see that you don’t want to sit. Come into the kitchen and we’ll make more tea together.”

Putting her glasses back on, she led Bosco into the kitchen. It was a small room, made smaller by the presence of two ovens: the electric one that belonged to the apartment, and the gas one that the Tungarazas had brought with them from Tanzania. Kigali’s unstable electricity supply meant that Angel would have lost a lot of business had it not been for her gas oven.

Bosco washed the mugs from which they had drunk their tea, and measured two mugs of water into a saucepan. Angel spooned in some Nido milk powder and a great deal of sugar and added a few cardamom seeds.

“Now, Bosco, I am going to watch this milk, and before it has boiled you are going to tell me your new story. You’re going to tell me about this new pain in your heart before it eats you up like a worm inside a mango.”

“Eh, Auntie!” said Bosco, and his story came tumbling out. “I’ve just seen Linda. Mr Akimoto sent me to Umubano Hotel to pay his tennis fees. After I paid, I saw Linda in the car park, but she didn’t see me. She was with a man, and they were kissing. Kissing like in a film, Auntie. They were leaning against her vehicle, and he was touching her body.
Eh!
I got into Mr Akimoto’s Pajero and I watched them. At first I didn’t recognise the man because I saw only his back, but after they finished kissing he put Linda in her vehicle and then he went to his own vehicle and I saw who it was.
Eh!”

Angel stopped looking at the milk and looked up at Bosco. “Who was it?”

“Auntie, it was the CIA.”

“Eh? The CIA?”

Bosco nodded.

“The CIA from here in this compound?” Bosco nodded again. “Ooh, that is bad.”

“It is very, very bad, Auntie. The CIA!” “Uh-uh,” said Angel, shaking her head. “Uh-uh,” agreed Bosco.