Baking Cakes in Kigali (6 page)

Another of the rooms under the building housed the water meters that had been installed just one month earlier, and that now made it possible for the compound’s owner to present a bill for water to each of the apartments. The next room was nothing more than an empty space defined by three walls and open across the front. This would apparently house the diesel-powered generator for the compound that had been promised but had not yet materialised. Finally, tucked underneath Ken Akimoto’s flat at the far end of the building was a room which housed toilet facilities for Prosper and the guards.

Angel heard her name being called from above where she
stood. Looking up, she saw Amina leaning over the small balcony of the apartment just above her own.

“Angel! What are you doing there?”

“Hello, Amina. I’m waiting for Prosper.”

“Prosper? Have you sent Modeste for him?”

“Yes. He should be here soon.”

“Safiya’s waiting for the girls to come and do homework.”

“They’ll be there soon, Amina. While I’m here they’re at home with Benedict. He’s still sick with malaria. Titi has taken Moses and Daniel to play with their friends down the road, so the girls must stay with Benedict until I’ve finished with Prosper.”

“Oh, okay. Come and look at TV with me if you can this evening. Vincenzo has a late meeting.”

“Thanks, Amina. I’ll come if I can.
Eh
, here is Prosper now!”

Prosper was making his way unsteadily down the stairs into the yard.

“
Madame
Tungaraza!” he declared, extending his hand and shaking Angel’s hand enthusiastically. “I’m sorry to have delayed you. There was some urgent business outside the compound that I had to attend to.”

“
Eh
, Prosper! You are always a very busy somebody,” said Angel with a smile. “But I can see that you don’t have your Bible with you today, so it wasn’t God’s business that you were attending to.”

Prosper glanced at Angel uncertainly as he unlocked the door to his office.
“Madame!
You should not have waited for me in the yard! I could have come to your apartment. But come in, come in.”

“Thank you, Prosper,” said Angel, following him into the gloomy little room that accommodated a table and one wooden chair, “but in my apartment the business is cakes. Your office is the place for compound business. No, no, Prosper, that
chair is yours. I’m happy to stand. I must be quick because I have a sick child at home.”

Prosper seated himself behind the table and attempted to convey an air of efficiency by rearranging the file, the notebook, the ballpoint pen and the Bible that lay upon it.

“Now, Prosper,” said Angel, taking two pieces of paper from where her
kanga
was tied at her waist, unfolding them, and placing them on the table for Prosper to look at. “I’ve come about these.”

Prosper glanced at the pages. “Yes,
Madame
, these are bills for water. It is a new thing. I myself put a letter under every door one month ago to say that bills for water were going to start coming.”

“Mm-hmm. But what I want to ask is, how are you calculating these water bills?”

“There are meters,
Madame.
The meters tell us how much water an apartment has used. They are new.”

“Yes, I know about these new meters, Prosper. And I also know the story about Mr Akimoto’s meter. I heard the story from his own mouth. I know that he came to you yesterday, and he asked you to show him his meter in the room down here that is always locked. And I know that when you showed him his meter, the needle was busy going round and round, even though nobody was in Mr Akimoto’s apartment, and nobody was using his apartment’s water then.”

Prosper’s eyes did not meet Angel’s. “That was a mistake,
Madame.
We were looking at the wrong meter.”

Angel persisted. “But that meter had the same number as Mr Akimoto’s apartment. How can we know that there has not been the same kind of mistake with our bills?”

“
Madame
, I assure you,” said Prosper, trying now to assert his authority by meeting Angel’s eyes, “after we found that mistake yesterday, I myself checked every bill and every meter. There are no more mistakes.”

“Then, Prosper, please look at these two bills and help me to understand.” Angel moved around the desk and stood over Prosper so that she was not blocking the light from the doorway—for the office had neither electric lighting nor a window—and so that he could not look up directly into her eyes. The smell of Primus threatened to overwhelm her. “First, this is the bill for my family. See here, Prosper, it says 15,000 francs.”

“Yes, I see that; it is clear. I myself wrote that number there,” said Prosper.

“And now this one. This is the bill for Sophie and Catherine. It says here 30,000 francs.”

“Yes,” said Prosper. “It is all very clear. What is it that you need me to explain,
Madame?”

“I am confused, Prosper,” said Angel, laying the two bills side by side on the table. “In my apartment we are eight.
Eight!
We all wash, we all use the toilet, we cook for eight people, we wash clothes and sheets and towels for eight people. But in that other apartment they are two.
Two!
How can it be right that two people use twice as much water as eight people? How can it be right that two people must pay twice as much as eight people?”

Prosper shifted his chair sideways, and by twisting his body around, managed to look up at Angel. The expression on his face implied that she was a foolish woman who understood nothing.
“Madame
, of course they must pay more!”

Angel held his gaze. “Because why?”

He sighed and shook his head. “Because,
Madame
, they are
Wazungu.”

“
Eh!”
cried Angel, looking at Prosper as if he had shocked her to the core. “Those girls are not
Wazungu
, Prosper!”

“
Madame?”
It was Prosper’s turn to register shock and confusion. “They are not
Wazungu?”

“No, Prosper. They are
volunteers!”

“
Volunteers?”

“Yes, volunteers. A volunteer is not a
Mzungu.
A volunteer does not earn a
Mzungu’
s salary. A volunteer cannot pay what a
Mzungu
can pay. Those girls can look like
Wazungu
, Prosper, but they are not.”

“
Eh!”
said Prosper, picking up the bill for Sophie and Catherine’s apartment and examining it carefully. Then he looked up at Angel, who was still towering above him. “They are not
Wazungu?”

Angel shook her head.

Prosper thought for a while, and then he asked, “How much does
Madame
think volunteers can pay?”

“I think they can pay 5,000 francs,” suggested Angel, having agreed upon the sum with Sophie and Catherine the previous evening.

“Okay,” said Prosper, and he took his pen and altered the amount on the bill. “I did not know,
Madame.
I thought they were
Wazungu.”

“Thank you, Prosper.” Angel reached inside her brassiere and removed several banknotes. “Here’s the money for my bill. I’ll give this other bill to Sophie and Catherine. I think they can pay 5,000 francs each and every month. Please explain that to the meter.”

“Yes,
Madame.
See, I myself have signed here on your bill to say that you have paid.”

Her business with Prosper concluded, Angel went back up the stairs and out through the building’s entrance into the street. Modeste and Gaspard had now finished eating their pineapple and were sitting on the ground on the other side of the road with their backs up against the trunk of a mimosa tree. They acknowledged her wave as she turned down the dirt road and headed towards Leocadie’s shop, which was housed in a container at the side of the road about a hundred metres from the compound.

On the way to the shop, she passed another kind of container,
longer and lower, dark green in colour with a flatter shape and four hinged lids across its top. This was the Dumpster to which the neighbourhood brought its household rubbish in the expectation—sometimes unmet for extended periods of time—that a truck would eventually come and take it away and bring it back empty.

Angel found Leocadie sitting in the dim interior of her shop, breast-feeding her baby. Short and solid, with small eyes set deep in a rather hard face, she was not an attractive girl until she smiled—at which point she would light up as if her cash-power meter had just been replenished, and she was suddenly quite beautiful. She looked up now as Angel’s frame blocked the natural light from the doorway, and beamed when she saw who it was.

“Mama-Grace!
Karibu!
How are you?”

“I am well, thank you, Leocadie. How is little Beckham?” The baby had been named long before his birth for his incessant kicking at his mother’s belly.

“He’s fine,
Mama-Grace.
But he’s always hungry!”

“
Eh!
There are babies who are like that. And how is Modeste?” Modeste was Beckham’s father. Angel knew very well how Modeste was, because she had just seen him. But that was not what she was asking.

“
Eh!”
said Leocadie, as she transferred Beckham from her left breast to her right. “That other woman’s baby will come in one month. Modeste says if it is a girl he will choose me. He says a man must be with his son. But if it is a boy then we don’t know. He’ll try to decide.”

Angel shook her head. “I hope that he’ll take the matter to his family. A family can always help a person to make the right decision.”

“Eh, Mama-Grace, there is no family to help him to decide. Everybody died. It is only Modeste now. He must decide alone.”

“That is very difficult,” said Angel. She meant that it was very difficult to lose your whole family, and that it was very difficult to make alone a decision that a family should make, and that it was very difficult to wait for a man to decide between you and another woman. “Let us hope and pray, Leocadie.”

“That is all we can do,
Mama
-Grace.”

“But I cannot stay and chat. Benedict still has malaria and I must go home and be with him. I have only come to buy sugar.”

Stepping into the container, Angel helped herself to a small bag of sugar from the sparsely-stacked shelves lining its walls. It was more expensive to buy from Leocadie than from the market or one of the small supermarkets in town, but the shop was very convenient for things that had been forgotten on the family’s weekly shopping trip, or for things that had run out sooner than expected. The shop stocked essentials only: goods such as sugar, powdered milk, tea, eggs, tins of tomato paste, salt, soap, washing powder, toilet paper. A wire wound surreptitiously up the trunk of the jacaranda tree next to the container to join an overhead electrical cable; this powered the small fridge inside the container that kept bottles of Primus and soda cool.

As Leocadie was trying to count out Angel’s change without disturbing Beckham, Faith appeared breathlessly in the shop’s doorway to report that a lady had come about a cake, and that Angel must come home at once.

ANGEL
found the lady seated in her living room, encouraging Grace as the child struggled with her few words of school French. The visitor rose to shake Angel’s hand.

“
Bonjour, Madame. Comment ça va?”

“
Bien, merci,”
replied Angel.

“Vous êtes Madame Angel?”

“
Oui, je suis Angel.
But,
Madame
, we have now used up all the French that I know!
Unasema Kiswahili?
Do you speak Swahili?”

“
Ndiyo.
Yes.”

“Good. Then let us speak Swahili and we will understand each other. Please sit down,
Madame.
Girls, Safiya is waiting for you upstairs. Take your homework.”

The girls had their homework books ready. They bid
au revoir
to their guest and hurried out of the apartment as Angel perched on the edge of the sofa and smiled at the woman who smiled back at her from across the coffee table. She was of medium build with long, delicate braids falling loosely around her pretty face, which was adorned with a pair of gold-rimmed glasses. Angel guessed that she could not be more than thirty years old.

The woman introduced herself.
“Madame
Angel, my name is Odile. I am a friend of Dr Rejoice. She is the one who sent me here to you.”

“I’m happy to meet you, Odile. If you’re a friend of Dr Rejoice you’re my friend too, so let’s not be formal with each other. Please call me just Angel; let’s forget about
Madame.”

“Okay, Angel,” said Odile, smiling widely.

Angel stood up from the sofa. “Odile, you are very welcome in my home. But could I ask you to excuse me for just one minute? I have a child here with malaria, and I need to check on him.”

“
Eh!”
Odile rose instantly to her feet, her face registering concern. “It’s lucky that I came to you when you have a sick child, Angel, because I’m a nurse.”

“
Eh!
A nurse? Come with me then, Odile, we’ll check on him together. But really, I think the fever is almost over now.”

Angel led Odile into the children’s bedroom, where Benedict lay asleep in one of the lower bunks. Quietly they
took turns to place a hand on his damp forehead and, feeling that the fever had at last broken, they smiled at each other with relief.

“He’s going to be fine,” whispered Odile.

“Yes,” agreed Angel, as they made their way out of the room, pulling the door almost shut behind them. “Definitely after this weekend he’ll be back at school.”

They took up the same seats as before, on opposite sides of the coffee table.

“Obviously you’ve been keeping his fluids up?”

“Yes, and fortunately he’s been thirsty, so I haven’t had to force him.” Angel clapped her hands together.
“Eh!
I feel blessed that a nurse has come to me today to help me to check on him!”

Odile smiled. “Actually, I didn’t come to you as a nurse, Angel. I came to you as a person who is wanting to order a cake.”