Baking Cakes in Kigali by Gaile Parkin

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 betterthan 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