Nadine Gordimer “Once upon a Time”

Someone has written to ask me to contribute to an anthology of stories for children. I reply that I don't
write children's stories; and he writes back that at a recent congress/book fair/seminar a certain novelist
said every writer ought to write at least one story for children. I think of sending a postcard saying I don't
accept that I "ought" to write anything. And then last night I woke up — or rather was awakened without
knowing what had roused me.

A voice in the echo-chamber of the subconscious?

A sound.

A creaking of the kind made by the weight carried by one foot after another along a wooden floor. I
listened. I felt the apertures of my ears distend with concentration. Again: the creaking. I was waiting for it;
waiting to hear if it indicated that feet were moving from room to room, coming up the passage — to my
door. I have no burglar bars, no gun under the pillow, but I have the same fears as people who do take
these precautions, and my windowpanes are thin as rime, could shatter like a wineglass. A woman was
murdered (how do they put it) in broad daylight in a house two blocks away, last year, and the fierce dogs
who guarded an old widower and his collection of antique clocks were strangled before he
was knifed by a casual laborer he had dismissed without pay.

I was staring at the door, making it out in my mind rather than seeing it, in the dark. I lay quite still — a
victim already — the arrhythmia of my heart was fleeing, knocking this way and that against its body-cage.
How finely tuned the senses are, just out of rest, sleep! I could never listen intently as that in the
distractions of the day, I was reading every faintest sound, identifying and classifying its possible threat.

But I learned that I was to be neither threatened nor spared. There was no human weight pressing on the
boards, the creaking was a buckling, an epicenter of stress. I was in it. The house that surrounds me while I
sleep is built on undermined ground; far beneath my bed, the floor, the house's foundations, the stopes
and passages of gold mines have hollowed the rock, and when some face trembles, detaches and falls,
three thousand feet below, the whole house shifts slightly, bringing uneasy strain to the balance and
counterbalance of brick, cement, wood and glass that hold it as a structure around me. The mis beats of
my heart tailed off like the last muffled flourishes on one of the wooden xylophones made by the Chopi
and Tsonga 1 migrant miner who might have been down there, under me in the earth at that moment. The
stope where the fall was could have been disused, dripping water from its ruptured veins; or men might
now be interred there in the most profound of tombs.

I couldn't find a position in which my mind would let go of my body — release me to sleep again. So, I
began to tell myself a story, a bedtime story.

In a house, in a suburb, in a city, there were a man and his wife who loved each other very much and were
living happily ever after. They had a little boy, and they loved him very much. They had a cat and a dog
that the little boy loved very much. They had a car and a caravan trailer for holidays, and a swimming-pool
which was fenced so that the little boy and his playmates would not fall in and drown. They had a
housemaid who was absolutely trustworthy and an itinerant gardener who was highly recommended by
the neighbors. For when they began to live happily ever after they were warned, by that wise old witch, the
husband's mother, not to take on anyone off the street. They were inscribed in a medical benefit society,
their pet dog was licensed, they were insured against fire, flood damage and theft, and subscribed to the
local Neighborhood Watch, which supplied them with a plaque for their gates lettered Y OU HAVE BEEN
WARNED over the silhouette of a would-be intruder. He was masked; it could not be said if he was black or
white, and therefore proved the property owner was no racist.

It was not possible to insure the house, the swimming pool or the car against riot damage. There were
riots, but these were outside the city, where people of another color were quartered. These people were
not allowed into the suburb except as reliable.

1 Chopi and Tsonga: two peoples from Mozambique, northeast of South Africa

housemaids and gardeners, so there was nothing to fear, the husband told the wife. Yet she was afraid that
someday such people might come up the street and tear off the plaque YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED and
open the gates and stream in... Nonsense, my dear, said the husband, there are police and soldiers and
tear-gas and guns to keep them away. But to please her — for he loved her very much and buses were
being burned, cars stoned, and schoolchildren shot by the police in those quarto's out of sight and hearing
of the suburb — he had electronically controlled gates fitted. Anyone who pulled off the sign YOU HAVE
BEEN WARNED and tried to open the gates would have to announce his intentions by pressing a button
and speaking into a receiver relayed to the house. The little boy was fascinated by the device and used it
as a walkie-talkie in cops and robbers play with his small friends.
The riots were suppressed, but there were many burglaries in the suburb and somebody's trusted
housemaid was tied up and shut in a cupboard by thieves while she was in charge of her employers'
house. The trusted housemaid of the man and wife and little boy was so upset by this misfortune befalling
a friend left, as she herself often was, with responsibility for the possessions of the man and his wife and
the little boy that she implored her employers to have burglar bars attached to the doors and windows of
the house, and an alarm system installed. The wife said, She is right, let us take heed of her advice. So
from every window and door in the house where they were living happily ever after they now saw the trees
and sky through bars, and when the little boy's pet cat tried to climb in by the fanlight to keep him
company in his little bed at night, as it customarily had done, it set off the alarm keening through the
house.

The alarm was often answered — it seemed — by other burglar alarms, in other houses, that had been
triggered by pet cats or nibbling mice. The alarms called to one another across the gardens in shrills and
bleats and wails that everyone soon became accustomed to, so that the din roused the inhabitants of the
suburb no more than the croak of frogs and musical grating of cicadas' legs. Under cover of the electronic
harpies' discourse intruders sawed the iron bars and broke into homes, taking away hi-fi equipment,
television sets, cassette players, cameras and radios, jewelry and clothing, and sometimes were hungry
enough to devour everything in the refrigerator or paused audaciously to drink the whiskey in the cabinets
or patio bars. Insurance companies paid no compensation for single malt 2 , a loss made keener by the
property owner's knowledge that the thieves wouldn't even have been able to appreciate what it was they
were drinking.

Then the time came when many of the people who were not trusted housemaids and gardeners hung
about the suburb because they were unemployed. Some importuned for a job: weeding or painting a roof;
anything, baas 3 , madam. But the man and his wife remembered the warning about taking on anyone off
the street. Some drank liquor and fouled the street with discarded bottles. Some begged, waiting for the
man or his wife to drive the car out of the electronically operated gates. They sat about with their feet in
the gutters, under the jacaranda trees that made a green tunnel of the street — for it was a beautiful
suburb, spoilt only by their presence — and sometimes they fell asleep lying right before the gates in the
midday sun. The wife could never see anyone go hungry. She sent the trusted housemaid out with bread
and tea, but the trusted housemaid said these were loafers and tsotsis 4 , who would come and tie her and
shut her in a cupboard. The husband said, She's right. Take heed of her advice. You only encourage them
with your bread and tea. They are looking for their chance ... And he brought the little boy's tricycle from
the garden into the house every night, because if the house was surely secure, once locked and with the
alarm set, someone might still be able to climb over the wall or the electronically closed gates into the
garden.

You are right, said the wife, then the wall should be higher. And the wise old witch, the husband's mother,
paid for the extra bricks as her Christmas present to her son and his wife — the little boy got a Space Man
outfit and a book of fairy tales.

But every week there were more reports of intrusion: in broad daylight and the dead of night, in the early
hours of the morning, and even in the lovely summer twilight — a certain family was
2 Single malt: an expensive Scotch whiskey
3 baas: boss
4 tsotsis: hooligans

at dinner while the bedrooms were being ransacked upstairs. The man and his wife, talking of the latest
armed robbery in the suburb, were distracted by the sight of the little boy's pet cat effortlessly arriving
over the seven-foot wall, descending first with a rapid bracing of extended forepaws down on the sheer
vertical surface, and then a graceful launch, landing with swishing tail within the property. The
whitewashed wall was marked with the cat's comings and goings; and on the street side of the wall there
were larger red-earth smudges that could have been made by the kind of broken running shoes, seen on
the feet of unemployed loiterers, that had no innocent destination.

When the man and wife and little boy took the pet dog for its walk round the neighborhood streets they no
longer paused to admire this show of roses or that perfect lawn; these were hidden behind an array of
different varieties of security fences, walls and devices. The man, wife, little boy and dog passed a
remarkable choice: there was the low-cost option of pieces of broken glass embedded in cement along the
top of walls, there were iron grilles ending in lance-points, there were attempts at reconciling the
aesthetics of prison architecture with the Spanish Villa style (spikes painted pink) and with the plaster urns
of neoclassical facades (twelve-inch pikes finned like zigzags of lightning and painted pure white). Some
walls had a small board affixed, giving the name and telephone number of the firm responsible for the
installation of the devices. While the little boy and the pet dog raced ahead, the husband and wife found
themselves comparing the possible effectiveness of each style against its appearance; and after several
weeks when they paused before this barricade or that without needing to speak, both came out with the
conclusion that only one was worth considering. It was the ugliest but the most honest in its suggestion of
the pure concentration-camp style, no frills, all evident efficacy. Placed the length of walls, it consisted of a
continuous coil of stiff and shining metal serrated into jagged blades, so that there would be no way of
climbing over it and no way through its tunnel without getting entangled in its fangs. There would be no
way out, only a struggle getting bloodier and bloodier, a deeper and sharper hooking and tearing of flesh.
The wife shuddered to look at it. You're right, said the husband, anyone would think twice... And they took
heed of the advice on a small board fixed to the wall: Consult DRAGON 'S TEETH The People For Total
Security.

Next day a gang of workmen came and stretched the razor-bladed coils all round the walls of the house
where the husband and wife and little boy and pet dog and cat were living happily ever after. The sunlight
flashed and slashed, off the serrations, the cornice of razor thorns encircled the home, shining. The
husband said, Never mind. It will weather. T he wife said, You're wrong. They guarantee it's rust-proof. And
she waited until the little boy had run off to play before she said, I hope the cat will take heed ... The
husband said, Don't worry, my dear, cats always look before they leap. And it was true that from that day
on the cat slept in the little boy's bed and kept to the garden, never risking a try at breaching security.

One evening, the mother read the little boy to sleep with a fairy story from the book the wise old witch had
given him at Christmas. Next day he pretended to be the Prince who braves the terrible thicket of thorns to
enter the palace and kiss the Sleeping Beauty back to life: he dragged a ladder to the wall, the shining
coiled tunnel was just wide enough for his little body to creep in, and with the first fixing of its razor- teeth
in his knees and hands and head he screamed and struggled deeper into its tangle. The trusted housemaid
and the itinerant gardener, whose "day" it was, came running, the first to see and to scream with him, and
the itinerant gardener tore his hands trying to get at the little boy. Then the man and his wife burst wildly
into the garden and for some reason (the cat, probably) the alarm setup wailing against the screams while
the bleeding mass of the little boy was hacked out of the security coil with saws, wire-cutters, choppers,
and they carried it — the man, the wife, the hysterical trusted housemaid and the weeping gardener —
into the house.

Once upon A time First published in 1989. Nadine Gordimer was born in 1923 in a small town
near Johannesburg, South Africa, and graduated from the University of Witwatersrand. She
has taught at several American universities, but continues to reside in her native country. A
prolific writer, Gordimer has published more than twenty books of fiction (novels and short
story collections). In addition to England's prestigious Booker Prize for Fiction, she received
the Nobel Prize for literature in 1991.

QUESTIONS
1. The opening section of the story is told by a writer awakened by a frightening sound in the night. What
two causes for
the sound does she consider? Ultimately, which is the more significant cause for fear? How do these
together
create an emotional background for the "children's story" she tells?
2. To what extent does the story explore the motives for the behavior of the wife and husband, the
husband's mother, the
servants, and the people who surround the suburb and the house? What motives can you infer for these
people? What
ironies do they display in their actions?
3. Can you fix the blame for the calamity that befalls the child? What are the possible meanings of the
repeated phrase
"YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED"?