Free Baking Cakes in Kigali by Gaile Parkin

Maybe he left her because she drinks.”
    “Then why is he sitting there with her now? No, after a man has gone, he’s gone. I like Oprah’s shoes today.”
    “Mm, they’re nice.”
    A short while later, a sudden change of channel to CNN signalled that the Egyptian had arrived home upstairs. It was fortunate for Amina that his cleaner, Eugenia, preferred more interesting channels during the day. But in any case it was time for Angel to go home.
    As she descended the stairs, she was aware of an unfamiliar lightness about her; not about her body, of course—that would have been too much to hope for—but about her spirit. She did not begin to understand it until later that night, when she looked at Grace and Faith asleep in their double bunk. It was then that she recognised that part of her new lightness was the relief that Odile had brought her in providing a solution to one of her biggest worries: these girls were going to learn about the virus and how to keep themselves safe from it.
    But it was only as she sat on the sofa watching the late news with Pius, and when she glanced up from the TV—as she had come to do very often—at the photo of their late children, that she fully understood what the rest of the lightness was about. In Odile she had witnessed proof that it was possible to endure a great deal of pain and still manage to survive and go on. They had killed her, Odile had said, but she had not died.
    Angel was beginning to feel that she was going to be all right. Reaching for her husband’s hand, she rested her head on his shoulder.

DR YOOSUF BINAISA followed Pius Tungaraza out of the university’s minibus, then turned back to address Angel, who remained resolutely seated in the rear of the vehicle.
    “Mama-Grace, are you sure you won’t join us?”
    “Very sure, thank you, Dr Binaisa. Why would I want to go inside a school and look at dead bodies?”
    “There may not be dead bodies,” said Dr Binaisa. “There may be just bones. I’ve been to the memorial site at the church in Nyamata; there are only bones there.”
    “Why do you want me to look at bones?” asked Angel.
    “Do you not want to understand what happened here, Mama-Grace? That is why Gasana brought us on this detour: so that we can understand his country better. Your country and mine are both neighbours of this place; we slept peacefully and safely in our homes for those hundred days while violence was tearing this country to pieces like a chicken on a plate. Do you not think we need to look now at what we did not see then?”
    “Dr Binaisa, I’m not going in there,” said Angel, shaking her head. “I don’t need to look at bones or bodies to know that people died here; that is something I can see in the eyes of the living. Look, Pius and Gasana are waiting for you.”
    With a shrug of his shoulders, Dr Binaisa turned and went to join his colleagues, leaving Angel alone in the minibus, which the driver had parked in the shade of some trees for her. The driver himself stood chatting to a man a short distance away.
    Leaning forward, Angel flipped up and to the side the seat by the open sliding door of the vehicle, and stepped out into the fresh—but unusually quiet—air of the hilltop. To her right, the hill sloped away steeply down towards the small town of Gikongoro, where people worked at their desks, haggled in the market or bustled in the streets, choosing either to gaze at the hazy blue-green hilltops further away or to look up at this one, in whose shadow they lived and on whose crest Angel now stood. To her left stood the classrooms of the technical school where, Gasana had told them, sixty thousand people had been lured by the promise of protection, only to find themselves surrounded and systematically slaughtered.
    Angel’s body shuddered involuntarily; the past was not a safe place to visit in this country. It would be more comfortable to think ahead to this evening—though not as far ahead as tomorrow, when a rather