by Gaile Parkin
“Of course, of course, it is there, next to the kitchen.”
He rushed back into the kitchen while Amina carried the cake over to the coffee table. Dr Rejoice and Odile came back from the bathroom and sat down just as Vincenzo came back with a tray filled with steaming cups of coffee, some small plates and a knife.
“This cake looks so beautiful,” he said. “It’s almost a pity to cut it.”
“But it must be cut, Baba,” said Safiya, smiling sweetly at her father as she perched right on the edge of her chair trying to look uncomfortable. “That is what a cake is for.”
The women did not dare to look at one another.
“You’re right,” declared Vincenzo, leaning over and kissing Safiya on her forehead. “Amina, would you like to cut it?”
“No, no, Vincenzo.” Amina busied herself with the coffee so that she did not have to look at her husband. “You cut it. I think the rest of us have already finished with cutting.”
Throwing back his head, Vincenzo let out a loud laugh. With relief, the women joined in. “That’s very good, Amina,” he said. “Okay, I’ll cut for everyone.”
“Yes, let’s see this special surprise that Angel has put in the cake for us, between the layers,” said Dr Rejoice.
With a dramatic gesture, Vincenzo plunged the knife into the cake and pushed it down all the way through to the board. Then he moved the knife a few centimetres and did the same again. As he slid the blade of the knife under the slice, everybody watched in silent anticipation. He drew the slice sideways out from the cake. Between the two layers was a thick layer of bright green icing. Then it was deep red. Then green again. Then red.
Vincenzo placed the slice on a plate and tipped it on to its side so that everyone could see the squares of red alternating with green that filled the space between the layers.
“Eh, Angel,” said Amina, “that is very clever. How did you do it?”
“Do you think I’m going to tell anybody my secrets?” demanded Angel.
“It’s beautiful,” said Odile. “Everybody has heard of decorating the outside of a cake, but I’ve never seen something like this inside a cake.”
“No,” said Dr Rejoice, “when you look at the outside, this is not what you expect to find inside. It’s a nice surprise, isn’t it, ladies?”
“It’s really nothing,” said Angel, although she was very happy to be complimented.
In truth, she had been so confused about her feelings about what the cake was for that she had felt the need to apply the principle of Ken Akimoto’s yin-yang symbol to the idea. Recalling the red and green yin-yang cake that she had made for Ken, she had mixed up some red and green icing—which were in any case the colours that she was going to use to make the roses and leaves for the top of the cake. But she had recognised two things: first, that she could not put a yin-yang symbol inside Amina’s cake, because some people would get slices with green in the middle and others would get slices with red in the middle, which would have been difficult for her to explain; and second, that her feelings about the issue were too complicated to separate into yin and yang. So, starting with a red dot in the middle of the lower layer, she had piped concentric circles of green alternating with red. As she piped each green circle she had tried to think of positive things, such as the loyalty that she felt towards her friend Amina, and the importance of preserving cultural traditions. And with each red circle she had allowed herself to fret about things such as the oppression of women and the pain that Safiya was going to suffer. She had found the concentric design more interesting than the yin-yang symbol—and also more confusing, because each new red circle was bigger than any of the circles that it enclosed and could therefore outweigh all the green circles inside it. She had been relieved—though not totally comforted—that the last circle to fit on the cake had been a green one.
“This coffee is from Italy,” Vincenzo boasted as he handed a cup to Angel. “The finest coffee in the world.”
Angel added some milk and a large amount of sugar. “I’m sure it’s very fine coffee,” she said, “but I know without tasting it that it’s not the finest in the world. That is the coffee that comes from my home town of Bukoba, on the shores of Lake Victoria.”
As they drank their coffee and ate their cake, the conversation flowed freely and the mood was light. Every now and then a sharp look from Amina reminded Safiya to look uncomfortable on her chair. When Safiya and Amina started to talk about the coming Ramadan and Dr Rejoice got trapped in a conversation with Vincenzo about road-building, Angel took the opportunity to speak to Odile.
“I want to thank you, Odile,” she said quietly. “You’ve been very kind and slow with me, helping me to be ready to see what was already clear to you about my daughter.” Odile acknowledged her words with a quick nod of her head and a sympathetic smile. Angel continued, keeping her voice low. “But this is not the time for that particular conversation. People are saying that you have a boyfriend, Odile.”
“Eh!” Odile looked down, embarrassed. “Are people really talking about me?”
“You know this country better than I do, Odile. Pius says that gossip is the national sport.”
Odile smiled and shrugged. “He’s right, Angel, and I think we could probably win a gold medal at the Olympics. But, yes, I’ve been seeing your friend Dieudonné.”
“I’m very happy to hear that. I knew that you two would like each other.”
“Eh, I was a bit angry when you planned for us to meet at Terra Nova. But now I forgive you!”
“Good.”
“Oh, I meant to tell you. Your friend Jeanne d’Arc came last week to have the confirmation dress altered. I did as you asked, Angel. I explained to her that the sewing classes were for sex workers, to help them to earn a living in a safer way.” “Was she interested?”
“She seemed to be. She had her two sisters and a little boy with her, but she said she would come back again another time. Eh, that little boy is a darling! Have you met him?”
“No.”
“He’s very small; he looks only about six years old. But he must be older, because he was already walking when Jeanne d’Arc found him.”
“What’s his name?”
“They call him Muto; it means ‘small.’ When they found him, he didn’t know his given name.”
“Is he okay? I mean, I think he’s small from not getting enough food.”
“Physically he’s fine, and there seems to be no damage mentally. In fact, Dieudonné thinks he’s a bright child.” “Dieudonné has met him?”
“Yes, he came to eat lunch with me at our restaurant when Jeanne d’Arc was there. We looked after Muto while Jeanne d’Arc and her sisters were sorting out the alterations.”
Hope shot through Angel’s body like the pain of treading on a sharp stone with bare feet: it was sudden and intense, but it faded rapidly.
She must not allow herself to hope for too much.
ON THE MORNING of the day before the wedding, Angel stood at her work table decorating the wedding cake. There were six pieces: one very large and five smaller, all of them round. Thérèse had come the day before to help her with all the mixing and beating, and that had given her the time that she had needed to finish making the scores of sugar-paste flowers—bright yellow petals with orange centres—that she had been working on all week. Now she concentrated on positioning those flowers perfectly on the white tops of the five smaller cakes. The sides were iced in the same bright orange colour as the flowers’ centres, and pale lemon-yellow piped stars surrounded the rim of each cake where the white tops met the orange sides.
She had already finished decorating the larger cake. The top was the same bright orange as the sides of the smaller cakes, and its sides were decorated in a basket-weave design of white and the same bright yellow as the petals of the flowers. To match the smaller cakes, the rim where the top met the sides was studded with pale lemon-yellow stars. Towards the outer edges of the orange surface circled a pattern that Ange
l had created by repeating the knot-of-reconciliation design from the fabric of Leocadie’s dress, in lemon yellow outlined with bright yellow. And right in the centre of the cake stood the plastic figures of a bride and groom, the pink of their skin coloured dark brown with one of the children’s watercolour paints.
The next day, Angel would assemble the six pieces on the special metal stand that had been manufactured to her specifications by one of Pius’s colleagues, a professor of Appropriate Technology. From the heavy base rose a central rod about half a metre high, on top of which was a round metal platform with a small spike in the middle. This would hold the board on which the large cake would stand. Fanning out around the central rod, angled down at about 45 degrees, were five more rods of the same length, each ending in a horizontal platform with a small spike in the middle. The five smaller cakes would go on those.
Angel glanced out towards the balcony where the cake-stand stood. As soon as she had finished positioning the flowers on the smaller cakes, she would go out there and check if it was dry yet. Bosco had managed to find some tiny tins of gold paint at an Indian shop on Avenue de la Paix, and he had spent an hour or so the previous afternoon transforming the dull grey aluminium of the stand into glistening gold.
Angel smiled to herself as she worked, sure that this wedding cake was going to look spectacular—and that she was going to look equally spectacular standing next to it—in the photographs that Elvis would take for True Love magazine in South Africa. Noëlla had done her hair for her earlier in the week: black extensions braided back from her forehead to the crown of her head, from where black and gold extensions hung loosely to her shoulders. The style was glamorous, without being inappropriate for a grandmother, and was similar to the looser, longer, more youthful style that Agathe had braided for Leocadie. Angel had been reluctant to spend any money on having her hair styled, because she had been planning to wear an elaborate head-dress, but Leocadie had persuaded her to opt for a smaller head-covering beneath which braids could hang that would echo her own.
“I want people to see that we are mother and daughter,” Leocadie had said—and of course it had been impossible for Angel to object to that.
In Angel’s wardrobe hung the dress that Youssou had created for her from the soft Ghanaian fabric with the pattern that said, Help me and let me help you. Titi had gone with her for the taking of the measurements, and had stood behind her, secretly inserting two fingers between Angel’s body and the tape measure at every point where Youssou had measured. The result was a dress that fitted perfectly: a well-tailored, fitted bodice with cap sleeves tapered out over her hips and continued to flare out to create a wide, flowing skirt that fell softly to her feet. A strip of the same fabric tied ornately around her head, plus the gold pumps that she had bought on the street, would complete the ensemble.
It had been a hectic week for Angel: a week of organising caterers and florists and what seemed like a hundred other people, each of whom would be required to perform a particular function to ensure that the wedding and the reception went smoothly. The florist and the people who hired out tables, chairs and canopies had tried to charge her inflated prices—until she had returned to their premises with Françoise.
“Does this woman look like a Mzungu to you?” Françoise had demanded of them in Kinyarwanda, her left hand firmly on her hip as she gestured with her right. “Of course not! Our sister here is from Bukoba, just the other side of the border, a border that is only there because, long ago, Wazungu drew a line and said here is Rwanda and here is Tanzania. Now, if you want to say that people from that side of the line must pay more, then you are saying that you are happy that those Wazungu drew those lines all over Africa long ago, that they were right to take our land and cut it up however they wanted. Is that what you want to say? Is it? Of course not! No, our sister will pay what Banyarwanda pay.”
And every night, at the end of each hectic day, Angel and Pius had talked in the way they always used to talk before the circumstances of their daughter’s death had given them something not to talk about. AIDS had been a difficult word to speak about their son, but the bullet that had taken him had taken away their need to speak it. Now they spoke it about their daughter, together with another word: suicide. During the past week, both of those words had passed between them so often that they had lost their power, in the way that an old coin that has lost its shine seems to have less value. They were just words now, words that they were able to speak with understanding rather than dread.
It had hurt them both that Vinas had not felt able to tell them that she was ill—although, in truth, they did understand her motives. After all, Joseph had waited to tell them until his wife was very ill and he needed their help with the children. He had done that to spare them the worry, just as Vinas had. And both Pius and Angel had to admit that, should either of them—God forbid—find themselves with frightening or devastating news about their own health, love might well persuade them to put it away at the back of the top shelf of the highest cupboard for some time before fetching it down and showing it to each other. Really, it was not too hard to understand.
“But I still wish that Vinas had let me be closer to her after her marriage, Pius.”
“And I still wish that Joseph had chosen to follow an academic career. But each bird must fly on its own wings, Angel.”
Pius was still not fully convinced that Vinas had not condemned herself to an eternity in Hell. It was a complicated muddle of doctrine and ethics, he felt, a muddle that he needed to work through and clarify in his own mind even though he longed to be able to accept the more straightforward conviction at which Jeanne d’Arc had helped Angel to arrive.
“Eh, Angel, if I could re-dream my dream about looking for Joseph amongst the dead on that hilltop at Gikongoro, I want to believe that he would say to me, “Vinas is here, Baba.” And he’d lead me to her, and our son and daughter would both be there together, in the same place.”
Last night, Pius had come home from work looking more at peace than he had in a long while. Instead of eating lunch in the staff canteen, he had joined Dr Binaisa in his fast and told him the full story of what had happened to Vinas.
“One of my brothers did the same thing,” Dr Binaisa had said matter-of-factly. “Soon after he was diagnosed, he drove his car into the back of a truck full of matoke. People said it was a tragic accident, but of course we knew it wasn’t. And another brother simply disappeared when he began to get sick. Eh, we suspect the fish in Lake Victoria have eaten well off him!”
Pius had been shocked by this attitude. “But what does Islam say about suicide?”
“Eh, it’s a terrible sin! If you suicide yourself, you’ll be roasted in the fires of Hell.”
“Then do you not worry yourself about those brothers of yours who are roasting in Hell?”
“Tungaraza, there are more important things on this Earth to worry myself about. My worry will not change what anybody else has already done. I’m alive and I have children to raise, and that is where I need to focus my attention.”
On the afternoon of the day before the wedding, Angel kept the boys and their friends the Mukherjee boys occupied with the video of Gorillas in the Mist that she had borrowed from Ken Akimoto. No longer the quiet one, Benedict was the star of the afternoon: the one who had seen gorillas; the one who recognised Ruhengeri on the screen because he had been there; the one to whom the other boys deferred.
The girls and Titi were dispatched to their bedroom to style one another’s hair for the wedding. They wanted Safiya to come down and help them, but she needed her rest because she was fasting for Ramadan for the first time.
As the video played, Angel sat at her work table and went through her list of things to do, checking and re-checking for anything that might not have been confirmed and reconfirmed. The ceremony itself had been arranged: a short and simple Catholic service in the Sainte Famille church. Angel would walk down the aisle with Leocadie and present her to Modeste, who would
be waiting at the altar in his brown suit that had been made for him by a tailor in Remera, and his tie that the women at the centre in Biryogo had sewn for him from the same fabric as Leocadie’s dress. Next to Modeste would be his best friend and fellow security guard, Gaspard. Their guard duties at the compound would be performed tomorrow by two KIST security guards who were happy to make some extra money on their day off. Angel checked that she had re-confirmed with them, and that she had explained to them the situation regarding Captain Calixte, who was on no account to be allowed into the building with his gun.
Ken Akimoto had offered his Pajero as the wedding car; Bosco would take it to the florist tomorrow morning to have it adorned with flowers and ribbons, and in the afternoon he would drive Leocadie and Angel to the church. After the ceremony he would drive them, together with Modeste and Gaspard, to the reception in the compound’s yard.
Early tomorrow morning, people would come and protect the yard from any possible rain showers by securing an enormous tarpaulin to the railings of the first-floor balconies at one side, and to the top of the boundary wall at the other. Patrice and Kalisa had already removed the last of the builders’ rubble from the corner of the yard by taking a small wheelbarrow-load each night to a building-site a few streets away where they had come to an arrangement with the night security guard. The Tungarazas’ trailer had been taken away and left for safe-keeping in Dr Binaisa’s yard. Tomorrow, people would deliver round plastic tables and chairs for the guests, as well as a long high table to go under the washing lines for the bride and groom; the lines themselves would be draped with loose folds of white muslin, and the posts supporting them would be adorned with flowers and ribbons. Angel had re-confirmed all of those arrangements.
She had also re-confirmed with the students from KIST who would be helping out: Idi-Amini, an earnest young returnee from Uganda who owned a PA system, would be in charge of sound and music; Pacifique, who was using his camera to pay for his studies, would be the official photographer at the service and the reception; and the institution’s troupe of traditional dancers would perform for the guests’ entertainment.
