The Copenhagen Papers

by Michael Frayn

  Perhaps these new documents would turn out to cast a little more light on their lives at Farm Hall. By this time Frayn had been working on them for an hour or more. I suggested that Michael Blakemore should ring him and find out what he had discovered. Sara had a mobile phone (there’s always someone in a company who has). We all stood around while Michael made the call, trying to guess from the look on his face what Frayn was telling him.

  “He says it’s very difficult to decipher,” Michael reported at last. “It’s written in a very strange, dislocated, almost dysfunctional way. But he thinks it’s instructions for putting up a table-tennis table.”

  There was a silence in the rehearsal room.

  “A table-tennis table?” repeated someone, sounding almost as disconcerted as Lady Bracknell was by the handbag.

  “Very strange,” said Blakemore. “But Michael thinks that it could be a code for something.”

  This was extremely difficult to take in. There was obviously a much more prosaic explanation for it all that no one had mentioned yet.

  “Michael,” I said, “you don’t think it could be simply a hoax?”

  Blakemore, though, was able to reject this possibility out of hand. “David,” he said, “you haven’t seen these papers. I have.”

  There was no arguing with this. Actors are, after all, quite used to directors who have their own personal vision of a text.

  Work came a little hard that day. Curiously enough, I found my mind turning more to the Welsh lady with the double-barreled name. Why had she hung on to the papers all these years if she didn’t think they were important? What sort of a person was she?

  MF:

  I think I’ve had more letters about Copenhagen than about anything else I’ve ever written. There have been letters from scientists, historians, and philosophers, mostly interested and supportive, occasionally critical, or suggesting improvements to the physics, the mathematics, or the historical record. There have been moving letters from people who knew Heisenberg or the Bohrs, or who had experienced at first hand the agonizing dilemmas of life in a totalitarian state. There have been poems from poets, plays from playwrights, enthusiasms from enthusiasts, madnesses from madmen. But as I worked on it that morning, then asked people for help with it over the next few weeks, and told everyone I met about our mystifying discovery, it became plain that this document from Mrs. Rhys-Evans was by far the oddest communication yet.

  It was not only the syntax that was bizarre. There were a lot of simple misspellings: bedeken for bedenken, Mitspeiler for Mitspieler, zofort for sofort—with some words (zilliespiel, for instance) so malformed as to be incomprehensible. The pages seemed to have been written by someone who had been brought up to write German (and who could write quite naturally the cursive ß, the double s that English students of German stumble over) but who had either never managed to become fully literate in the language or was quite markedly dyslexic. Could any of the physicists have survived in his profession with this degree of handicap? It plainly wasn’t written by Heisenberg himself, at any rate; besides being a physicist and a gifted pianist, he was a classical scholar and a highly literate writer. I imagined some kind of idiot savant—which might help to explain the clumsiness of the humor—but on the whole it seemed to me more likely that the author was not one of the internees. I began to formulate a theory that he had been one of the British staff—a German exile, employed because he was a native German speaker, who had come to England as a child and never learned to write the German language properly.

  I hoped the sense of it all would become clearer as I struggled on. It became not more but less comprehensible, though. The tangles of the prose gave way to baffling lists:

  Sofort: aus zwei Seitenteilen der Aufnahme

  Führung

  Plattenhalften

  Verbindungsrohre

  Ur

  Stabilisiert

  Seitenteile

  Lenkrollen 13 …

  Laboriously I looked up the technical terms, but without a context it was impossible to make much sense of them:

  Immediately: from two sidepieces of the take-up

  guideway

  surface sections

  connection tubes

  [?] Ur

  stabilized

  sidepieces

  steering rollers 13

  locking device

  tubular braces

  [?] Ausschweichen

  locking mechanism

  stirrup 3

  securing—on

  steering rollers 32

  locking device? or ?P

  stirrup 9

  supporting arms

  sidepieces of the transport vehicle …

  The tick next to “stabilized” was reassuring. But the hypothesis that the “table-tennis table” might actually be a table-tennis table seemed to be becoming increasingly unlikely. Could any imaginable table-tennis table involve as many components as this, or such complications in setting it up and using it safely? And what was Ur? The German for uranium is Uran, and the chemical symbol is U. A lot of words in German begin with the syllable Ur to indicate something primeval, original, or simply very old (Urwald, Ur-Faust, uralte brandy, etc.), but none of them stops at that point.

  Unless, it occurred to me, Ur of the Chaldees had the same name in German. I looked up Genesis in the Lutheran translation:

  Da nahm Tharah seinen Sohn Abram und Lot, seines Sohnes Harans Sohn … und führte sie aus Ur in Chaldäa, daβ er ins Land Kanaan zöge, und sie kamen gen Haran und wohnten daselbst.

  So in German, too, Terah took Abram and Lot, and the rest of his family, and they “went forth with them from Ur of the Chaldees, to go into the land of Canaan; and they came unto Haran, and dwelt there.” Could some reference be intended to the way in which Heisenberg had taken the rest of the team, together with their prototype reactor, and gone forth with them from Berlin and the British air raids, to go into the land of Swabia; and how they had come unto Hechingen, and dwelt there?

  Or for that matter to the way in which Major Rittner had taken Heisenberg and the rest of the German team, and gone forth with them from Rheims of the Champagnes (where they were first held), to go into the land of Huntingdonshire; and how they had come unto Godmanchester, and dwelt there?

  I could see that this interpretation was a little far-fetched. But then so was every other interpretation.

  On the next page was another list:

  The handwriting became harder and harder to read, the syntax more and more confused, the untranslatable words and my despairing question marks more and more frequent:

  The Kettler table is [?] with a view to the most up-to-date safety technology information and the pocket of the table which for [?den Stichtungfaht destaβ]> can show one two three > in the first place [?tisiguiniat] that is [?ekoj: “rorrein egauqual.” Sat it?]. [Die des] must and [?] should become. Guarantee [or: “Take possession.”]

  By the time I reached the last page I was reduced to:

  [?] Assessment—[?]—[?] [?] [?] [?] [?] [?] >[?] for the

  game [?] for [?]Tennis-places.

  Can

  step [?occur]

  by Rittner—for [?] clasp shoes

  [?]

  Children’s TTT 7161-000/7121-000

  Possible—[?]—possible

  Table T.T. must carefully

  [?]

  strengthen the surface section retaining stirrups for that

  is too [?] under ff.

  In the first place a

  [?]

  Michael Blakemore and I agreed that he would write back to Mrs. Rhys-Evans to acknowledge receipt of the document while I studied the text in greater detail; I was beginning to feel that making sense of all this might require the kind of time and effort that was put into cracking the German Enigma codes at Bletchley Park. I showed the text to a young German academic and his girlfriend who happened to be in London. They studied it carefully and at length, and I was gratified to find that they were as baffled as
I was. They found it difficult to believe that any German, however dyslexic, however early his native education had been interrupted, could write as confusedly or spell as badly as this, but agreed reluctantly that the mistakes were not of the sort made by foreigners struggling to learn German, and that the fluency of the cursive β was convincing evidence of real native roots.

  They produced one helpful piece of information, though. There was no mystery about the word Kettler—it was the name of a well-known German firm that manufactured sporting goods. So perhaps a “table-tennis table” was, after all, simply a table-tennis table.

  But if it was a German table-tennis table that was being so elaborately set up and maintained, and if, as that list of model numbers suggested, the internees had access to not just one but a whole range of German tables, then the mystery merely deepened. The physicists were interned at Farm Hall from June 1945 until the following January. How could anyone in England—even the War Office, even the most buccaneering of Intelligence operations—have obtained table-tennis tables from the still smoking wreckage of the Reich? In any case, why should they have wanted to? Just to help the Germans feel more at home?

  Life at Farm Hall, according to the published transcripts, was certainly made as pleasant for the interned physicists as it could be in the circumstances. But now it was beginning to seem as if indulgence was being carried to almost insane lengths. Table tennis with the commanding officer’s children, favorite brand-names of sporting goods flown over from home in the midst of postwar austerity …

  One of the people who had written to me about Copenhagen was Professor Dr. Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker, the distinguished German physicist who had accompanied Heisenberg to Copenhagen on the notorious trip in 1941, and who had been interned with him at Farm Hall. He was now in his nineties, and living near Munich—so far as I knew, the only surviving member of the team. I sent him a copy of the strange document, and an account of its provenance. “I can’t imagine that there is anything very serious at the bottom of this mystery,” I told him. “But I do find it intriguing, and if you felt interested enough to offer any comments, or any help of any sort, I should be very grateful.”

  My German friends had mentioned one other, rather more tentative, possibility, which I tried out on Professor Weizsäcker. From somewhere at the back of their minds they had dredged up a dim memory that there was a word Ur in German, and that it was an archaism designating a now extinct ancestor of the cow.

  The time had come, it seemed to me, to have a little talk with Mrs. Rhys-Evans. I called Directory Inquiry; she was ex-directory.

  Nothing very surprising about this, I suppose, but it meant that I should have to write, and that she could, if she chose, write back instead of phoning. A pity. I was beginning to feel that written communication was not always as informative as it might be.

  DB:

  I was still in bed when Celia phoned.

  “The post’s just arrived,” she said, “and there’s a reply from Michael Frayn! David, I think he believes it! Shall I read it to you?”

  Celia Rhys-Evans is my wife’s cousin. In real life she is a teacher, and not at all given to the chatty inanities of her fictitious counterpart. As she read Frayn’s letter aloud, I could scarcely believe my ears.

  The papers, said Frayn, were “immensely intriguing.” He then cataloged a list of errors and anomalies almost as long as the document itself, and said he couldn’t imagine that there was “anything very serious at the bottom of this mystery.” Nevertheless he had sent a copy to Professor Dr. Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker (!), and would be extremely grateful, he declared, if there was anything more that Celia could tell him about exactly where the papers were found. He sounded almost beside himself with excitement. “Were they loose,” he demanded, “or in some kind of container? Roughly how many papers were there altogether? Can you remember anything about the other pages? Were they all apparently in the same handwriting? All written on similar pages of the log? Is there any chance that any of them are still somewhere in your possession?”

  Hook, line, and sinker. And begging for more.

  The idea of a hoax had first come to me during a performance of the play. If anyone is shocked by this, all I can say is that I know of no actor who is so pure onstage that he thinks only what his character thinks. If he did, he would presumably become the character: a form of madness. This may of course be what happens to Hamlet—he puts on an antic disposition, and gets stuck in it. Something rather like this seems to have happened once to an actor who was playing the Prince. Daniel Day-Lewis, as was widely reported in the press at the time, suffered a breakdown in the middle of the performance, and the explanation most commonly offered was that he came to believe that the actor playing opposite him as the Ghost of his father was his own father, who had been dead many years; whereupon he abruptly left the stage, never to return, and never to play the role again.

  This was not a warning that I am ever likely to forget; I was the Ghost.

  Acting is mostly a twin-track mental activity. In one track runs the role, requiring thoughts ranging from, say, gentle amusement to towering rage. Then there is the second track, which monitors the performance: executing the right moves, body language, and voice level; taking note of audience reaction and keeping an eye on fellow actors; coping with emergencies such as a missing prop or a faulty lighting cue. These two tracks run parallel, night by night. If one should go wrong, then it is likely that the other will misbehave too.

  I had a painful illustration of this just before we finished our run in the West End. After nearly three hundred performances I was tired, and I suppose that the sight of the finishing tape made me relax. At some point I failed to make one of my moves. Sara told me later that a mobile phone had just gone off in the audience. A second or two later I was standing on the stage not knowing where I was or what I had to say. A black hole had opened up around me. Niels Bohr had vanished from Track One, and an alarmed David Burke on Track Two had to take a prompt from the equally alarmed prompter. The move I had failed to make was tied to the thought and the words; when one went, they all three went.

  But there is a third and wholly subversive track that intrudes itself at intervals, full of phantom thoughts and feelings that come and go of their own volition. This ghost train of random musings is, of course, to be discouraged, but it can never be entirely denied. As Bohr and his wife, Margrethe, say in the play: “So many things we think about at the same time. Our lives and our physics.… All the things that come into our heads out of nowhere.” I have been guilty during a performance of dwelling on everything from shopping lists to food fantasies, and I have one particularly alarming idée fixe that afflicts me from time to time. It is the temptation to do or say something so outrageous that it would stop the play, empty the house, and end my career. The specter will appear without warning, like the Ghost itself, and beckon me to follow it over the beetling brow of the cliff: urging me to drop my trousers, or shout obscenities at the leading lady.

  So far my guardian angels have succeeded in hauling me back from the brink in the nick of time. But perhaps the thoughts that crept into my head one evening during Copenhagen were leading me obliquely in the same direction.

  They began innocently enough, during Heisenberg’s long speech about Farm Hall. For some reason I found myself thinking this time not about the scientists interned there but about the house itself and the folk who might have lived in it postwar, after the scientists and the British Intelligence officers had long gone and it had returned to a life of humdrum domesticity. I envisioned an ordinary family living there in the sixties without any suspicion of its previous cloak-and-dagger function. Suddenly, without any bidding from me, a couple of plumbers had entered. Before I knew what was happening they were prying up the floorboards, and discovering an old tin box …

  Then Matthew came to the end of his speech, it was my turn to speak, and the play rolled on. But I had left my subversive notion parked in a siding, and it was st
ill there the next night—to be shunted a little farther along the track.

  Gradually, over a number of performances, my ideas evolved until at last I believed I had a viable plot. Now, who to target? The obvious victim was the author. But I didn’t feel I knew him well enough. There is a certain natural distance between an actor and a writer, a mutual shyness. You will meet him at the read-through on the first day of rehearsal, and possibly shake hands, but it is an occasion fraught with nerves and not conducive to the formation of any great intimacy. He will probably reappear when you do your first run-through, by which time you will be so paranoid about his reaction that you will avoid him completely. Michael Frayn himself is the soul of tact, I hasten to add—if only because I now find myself on the other side of the keyboard with him. Nevertheless, a certain hesitation lingers.

  It’s different with the director. The director one sees on a day-to-day basis, and with Michael Blakemore I had enjoyed a pleasantly teasing relationship as we took turns being rude to each other: the revival of a shared dressing-room partnership in Bristol thirty-six years earlier, when he too had been an actor. Michael has a dry, self-deprecating sense of humor, enjoys a joke, and gives as good as he gets. He, I thought, was my man. I would address Celia’s letter to him.