“Once Upon a Time” by Nadine Gordimer [abridged text]

(1) Someone has written to ask me to contribute to a book of stories for children. I reply that I don’t write children’s stories; and he writes back that at a recent book fair, a certain author said every writer should write at least one story for children. I think of sending a postcard saying I don’t accept that I “should” write anything.

(2) And then last night I woke up—or was wakened without knowing what I heard.

(3) A voice in my mind?

(4) A sound.

(5) A creaking of the kind made by one foot after another along a wooden floor. I listened with concentration. Again: the creaking.

(6) I was staring at the door in the dark.

(7) The house I sleep in is built on broken ground; far under the house, tunnels of gold mines have hollowed the rock below. The misbeats of my heart faded like the last sounds of the wooden xylophones made by Chopi and Tsonga migrant miners who might have been under me in the earth. Those men might be buried there now in the deepest of tombs.

(8) I couldn’t find a position in which my mind would let go of my body—let me go to sleep again. So I began to tell myself a story; a bedtime story.
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(9) 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 van for holidays, and a fenced swimming pool so the little boy and his friends would not fall in and drown. They had a trustworthy housemaid and a 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 people off the street. Their pet dog was licensed, they were insured, and the local Neighborhood Watch gave them with a sign for their gates lettered YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED over the figure of a robber. He was masked; it could not be said if he was black or white, and showed the home owner was no racist.

(10) 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 lived. These people were not allowed into the suburb except as housemaids and gardeners, so there was nothing to fear, the husband told the wife. Yet she was afraid that some day such people might come up the street and tear off the sign YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED and open the gates and come 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 broken into, and schoolchildren shot by the police in neighborhoods out of sight and hearing of the suburb—he put electronically controlled gates around the house.

(11) The riots were stopped, but there were many robberies in the suburb and somebody’s housemaid was tied up by thieves. The housemaid of the man and wife and little boy was so upset by this that she asked her employers to have bars attached to the doors and windows of the house, and an alarm system put in. The wife said, She is right, let us listen to her. 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.

(12) The alarm was often answered—it seemed—by other burglar alarms, in other houses, set off by pet cats or mice. The neighborhood soon became used to it. Under the noise thieves broke into homes, taking away television sets, cameras and radios, jewelry and clothing, and they stopped to drink the whiskey. Insurance companies did not pay back for whiskey.

(13) Then people who were not trusted housemaids and gardeners hung around the suburb because they were unemployed. Some asked for a job: weeding or painting a roof; anything, boss, madam. But the man and his wife remembered the warning about taking people off the street. Some drank liquor and trashed the street with bottles. Some begged, waiting for the man or his wife to drive the car out of their home. They sat with their feet in the streets, under the jacaranda trees of the beautiful suburb and sometimes fell asleep lying in front of the gates in the afternoon sun. The wife could never see anyone go hungry. She sent the trusted housemaid out with bread and tea, but the housemaid said these were loafers and hooligans, who would come and tie her up. The husband said, She’s right. Listen to her. You only encourage them with your bread and tea. They are looking for their chance.

(14) 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.

(15) But every week there were more reports of break-ins: in daylight and the middle of the night, in the early hours of the morning, and even in the lovely summer twilight.

(16) When the man and wife and little boy took the pet dog for its walk around the neighborhood they no longer looked at the houses hidden behind security fences and walls. While the little boy and the pet dog raced ahead, the husband and wife decided only one security system was worth buying. It was the ugliest but the most honest. Placed the length of walls, it was a long coil of shining metal blades, so there would be no way of climbing over it and no way through without getting stuck 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 shook to look at it. You’re right, said the husband, anyone would think twice. And they noticed a small sign on the wall: Call DRAGON’S TEETH The People For Total Security.

(17) The next day, workmen came and put razor-bladed coils around the walls of the house. The sunlight flashed and slashed, off the blades, the razor thorns circled the home, shining.

(18) 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. The next day he pretended to be the Prince who braves the thorns to enter the palace and kiss the Sleeping Beauty back to life: he set a ladder next to the wall, the shining coiled tunnel was just wide enough for his little body to crawl 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 gardener, whose “day” it was, came running, the first to see and to scream with him, and the 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 set off against the screams while the bleeding mass of the little boy was hacked out of the security coil with saws and wire cutters, and they carried it—the man, the wife, the hysterical trusted housemaid, and the weeping gardener—into the house.