The Copenhagen Papers

by Michael Frayn

  Which, as I concluded tersely, was a little discouraging.

  DB:

  The transfer to the Duchess was a success, and within a few weeks Michael Codron and his fellow backers had recouped their investment. Trevor Ritchie, our company manager, popped his head round my dressing-room door.

  “Michael Codron wants to take us all out to dinner to celebrate,” he said.

  “That’s nice. When?”

  “April first. Okay?”

  April first…? At once alarm bells rang. A dinner party where Frayn and I would come face-to-face, on April Fools’ Day? He had obviously found out; the game was up. The biter was going to be bit.

  I went round to Matthew’s dressing room.

  “He knows!” I told him. “He’s worked it out!”

  “It was obviously going to happen sooner or later,” said Matthew. “What do you think he’s going to do?”

  “Make some kind of speech about it, probably. Or trick me back somehow. Leave me with the bill for dinner, perhaps.”

  “Oh, good. In that case I’ll let myself go on the wine list.”

  I had mixed feelings. Perhaps it was just as well that the game was over. I hoped that my activities had proved entertaining to both of us—though obviously for quite different reasons—and I wouldn’t have wanted it to turn sour.

  But then again I was sad. I had been enjoying myself—particularly in the strange new relationship with Frayn. It was a fictitious one, and totally different from that of actor-writer, but it had something of the odd compelling quirkiness of the relationships that can arise between detective and suspect, say, or kidnapper and kidnapped. I felt a wonderful freedom, to offer advice, to patronize, to poke fun. Personalities are different on paper. It’s like putting on a mask. You can use a different tone of voice from your own, but one that may actually be more comfortable, perhaps even more truthful, than your usual voice—more attractive, more vulnerable, or more powerful. It’s like a woman trying out different lipsticks, and making faces in the mirror as she does so: Now I’m demure, now I’m a tramp! Bernard Shaw and Ellen Terry (writer and actress) had such a relationship. They communicated entirely by letter, and it gave them a freedom and a frankness that a face-to-face relationship might have destroyed. They kept the correpondence up for twenty years, and each grew quite fearful of meeting the other.

  Now my correspondence with Frayn was over. The face-to-face confrontation was at hand.

  On the morning of April Fools’ Day my fears were confirmed. A frigid little note from Frayn (as much as to say, “You think you can be brief. Well, try this!”) informed me that the scrap of newspaper I had used had been published only after 1963, and that the Russian was all wrong. So this is what had finally finished me—opening the Russian front. I had made the same mistake as Hitler, and Napoleon before him.

  The zip code was my mistake. Peace and Freedom News had come from Arthur Calder-Marshall’s effects once again, but I’m just not very good on dates. The Russian was Tony Neville’s fault. Or was it? I had assumed that he was as fluent in Russian as Frayn—he had a Russian mother, after all. Now I found out that though he understands it well enough, he speaks and writes it only imperfectly.

  So hubris had been followed by nemesis once again, and we had reached the dénouement of the story, the great public unmasking that comes at the end of so many comedies. The scene was to be set in a restaurant just round the corner from the theatre, housed in a building that Michael Codron said had once been a notorious brothel. It seemed a rather appropriate setting for the stripping away of illusion and false identities.

  MF:

  I recounted the latest twist in the story to everyone at Michael Codron’s grand recoupment dinner on April first. Either they asked me, or else they didn’t and I told them anyway. I’d already told almost everyone I knew in London; I couldn’t see any reason for not sharing the pleasure with the people most closely associated with the story. One after another I amazed them with the news about the little snatch of impossible Russian on the little scrap of anachronistic American newpaper. I told Michael Codron himself, I told Michael Blakemore. I told the stage management and the front-of-house people. I didn’t get a chance to tell Petra, our new German ASM, who would probably have been particularly interested, nor for some reason did I manage to find myself face-to-face with David Burke. But I think I told Sara Kestelman, and I certainly told Matthew Marsh.

  I had by now developed a tentative theory to explain the apparent anomalies. According to the introduction to the transcripts, before Farm Hall had housed the German physicists it had served as a safe house for Intelligence purposes. I surmised that it had reverted to Intelligence after the Germans had been released, and that the scrap of newspaper represented the coincidental overlap of an operation in the sixties to maintain surveillance on the peace movement and another to train agents for surveillance on Russia—much as I had been trained myself during my National Service a decade earlier. I envisaged some of the language trainees writing notes for one another in (perhaps humorously) bad Russian, and doing it on scraps of paper left lying around by their colleagues in the other department.

  The question remained, of course, as to how any materials arising like this had come to be found with documents concealed under the floorboards in 1945. But the irreconcilable ambiguities of the historical record were something I had got very used to while I was researching the play. As Bohr says in my text of the apparently inexplicable anomalies that confronted him and Heisenberg when they were studying the structure of the atom in the twenties, they offered a fascinating paradox. Bohr was a great believer in the suggestiveness of paradox.

  The only one of my hearers who seemed less than fascinated by all this was Matthew Marsh, when I found myself sitting next to him after Michael Codron made us change places for the pudding. I had expected the problems to have a particular appeal to him. He had embodied the ambiguity and deviousness of Heisenberg as totally as David Burke had the innocence and openness of Bohr, and during rehearsals, to my embarrassment, had spotted a number of errors and inconsistencies in the text. But he didn’t seem to be much interested in the ambiguities of the German documents, or the errors and inconsistencies they contained. He watched me with what seemed like growing sadness, and eventually he gave up listening altogether and went off to talk to David Burke.

  I was evidently becoming a bore on the subject. That didn’t stop me, though. I turned to David Baron, who was David Burke’s understudy at the time, and told him all about it instead.

  DB:

  I kept out of Frayn’s way all through the great April Fools’ dinner, and still the blow had not fallen. Still he had not risen to his feet and pointed the accusing finger at me. I was beginning to relax a little when I became aware that Matthew, who had been sitting next to him, was at my elbow, murmuring something. At once I was on my guard again; he had come to warn me that Frayn was about to begin the great unmasking.

  “David,” said Matthew. “I’ve had Michael Frayn going on and on at me about this Rhys-Evans woman and table-tennis tables and keys and birthdays and zip codes and Gerlach and Heisenberg until I think I’m going mad—and I think he may have gone mad already! He’s totally obsessed by it all!”

  I could scarcely believe my ears.

  “You mean … he doesn’t know? He hasn’t tumbled it?”

  “No, but, David, this can’t go on! You can’t let him get madder and madder! Look, it’s April first—you can make a joke of it. Just say something to him to put him out of his misery!”

  But I’d stopped listening. My brave Frayn was still a believer, a true zealot. Don Quixote was still on his horse, his trusty lance rampant, ready to chase windmills—my windmills!—all over the beautiful landscape!

  It was as much as I could do to stop myself from brushing Matthew aside and rushing up to Frayn to hug him. And thank him, with tears in my eyes. The show could go on!

  What a waste it would have been if it had had to stop! I had a
ssembled a star cast, who were fully rehearsed, nay, were already performing to packed houses! And these were only the previews! Celia and Micheal had as yet shown only a fraction of what they could do; I had all sorts of plans for them. Celia was going to reveal a past rich in all manner of famous boyfriends. As for Micheal, there were no depths to which I would not send him. I had a headlong fall planned for him unmatched since Milton took Lucifer by the scruff of his wings and hurled him down to Hades!

  And I’m just talking about what was going to be happening in Celia’s covering letters. In the parched and yellow pages of the anonymous chronicler’s manuscript, meanwhile, my German cast were rehearsing for a long season at the Whitehall—the old Whitehall that Frayn and I both fondly remembered—with Walther Gerlach playing the Brian Rix part. Then there was my novel (sorry—Celia’s novel!), based on the excellent literary model of Enid Blyton’s Famous Five, with dear little Hans braving all sorts of perils to win through in the end and prove himself a second Einstein by discovering an antidote to war! And now it could all go ahead! Their brave, silly, tragic, funny stories could all be told!

  “Put him out of his misery?” I replied to Matthew. “What misery? He’s having the time of his life! And so am I! This show could run and run!”

  Matthew went away, looking more worried than ever. What had become of my scruples? Was I not being cruel in prolonging the thing in this way? Did I really care twopence if Frayn was wasting his precious time barking (an apt word) up the wrong silly tree? Clearly I did not care twopence.

  It dawned on me that I had become addicted—like an alcoholic who has to have one more drink. Except that I knew it was not going to be one more. I had chasers lined up to the end of the bar. I had become a jokaholic! Someday I would have to pull myself together and seek out the local chapter of Jokers Anonymous. But not tonight! The show must go on!

  And I can truthfully say that I felt more fond of Frayn than ever. We were in this thing together, after all. We were Morecambe and Wise, Rodgers and Hammerstein. We were the Marks & Spencer of false documents.

  MF:

  Matthew came back to the table and sat down again. He looked preoccupied, but I at once resumed explaining my theory of the bad Russian.

  He at last had a contribution of his own to make to the proceedings, though.

  “It was David Burke,” he said.

  I can’t remember now whether I took time to grasp the shattering implications of those four words—whether I had to ask for them to be repeated, and put supplementary questions to Matthew—or whether their meaning burst on me at once, as if it had been hidden inside my head all the time, waiting only to be released.

  One way or another, though, everything at last fell into place.

  Matthew just hadn’t known what to do about it, he said unhappily. He had been deeply uneasy about letting the joke go on, and watching me get ever more entangled, but he felt like a Quisling toward David for telling me.

  I don’t recall what I said. Nothing very profound, I’m afraid. I could have remarked upon the fascinating interplay of history and fiction, of deception and credulity, but I didn’t. I think I managed a few rueful exclamations. A few rueful smiles, laughs, and shakes of the head. Perhaps a word of thanks. I hope a word of thanks.

  I do recall, though, that one even more unsettling thought flashed into my head. I suddenly remembered that it was April first. It couldn’t be Matthew who had hoaxed me, could it? Or who was hoaxing me even now, by telling me that I had been hoaxed…? Once the ground has shaken beneath your feet, you feel it go on shaking for a long time afterward.

  After the pudding, Michael Codron made us change places yet again, and I found myself opposite David Burke. I couldn’t think what to say to him. I couldn’t even look at him.

  He was as friendly as ever.

  “So what’s happening about all those papers under the floorboards?” he asked me, plainly as fascinated as everyone except Matthew had been. “I gather something’s turned up in Russian now!”

  I agreed briefly that this was so, but didn’t expand on the matter. I found myself quite unable to meet his innocently smiling gaze, as if I were the guilty one.

  “What do you think the explanation is?” he persisted.

  I didn’t put my theory to him. I didn’t say anything. I just did my best to smile back and then changed the subject. I felt bad about my surly unresponsiveness. He sounded so interested, so genuinely eager to know.

  ACT TWO

  MF:

  The hot burn of shame.

  That’s what my character Martin Clay feels in the novel when he suddenly jumps to the conclusion that the painting he is trying to buy is a forgery, and that he is the victim of a complex confidence trick. I’d got the reaction absolutely right, I noted with a certain professional satisfaction. The hot burn of shame was exactly what I was feeling now—the almost physical sensation of a blush spreading over the whole surface of my body.

  I thought of all the people across London I’d told the story to. I remembered all the narrative flourishes I’d employed: the way I’d humorously introduced it with Mrs. Rhys-Evans’s disappointment at finding that the play was not a farce about the city where she had so implausibly spent her honeymoon, and then the way I’d dramatically stilled the laughter with my evocation of the mysteriousness of the document she enclosed.

  I recalled my earnest, careful letters to Weizsäcker and Powers.

  DB:

  My first hint that something had changed came when I received an early-morning call from Celia—the real Celia. She sounded less than ever like her ficitious counterpart. Her voice was tight and panicky.

  “David! I’ve had a letter from the Ministry of Defence! It’s not very nice. They’re saying I could go to prison!”

  “Calm down, Cissy,” I told her. “Just read it to me.”

  “It says ‘Confidential. Dear Sir/Madam…’”

  … sofort tisiguiniat das ist ekoj: “rorrein egauqual.” Sat it?

  I had misread the cramped and faded handwriting, I realized. With the high-diopter lenses of hindsight I now saw that the relevant words read:

  … tisigniniar … ekoj … “rorrim egaugnal.” Get it?

  I did at last get it. “Rorrim egaugnal”—we were going backward, as Heisenberg complains in the play about Schrödinger’s attempt to explain quantum phenomena in terms of classical wave mechanics.

  “Joke.” Yes. Though why it was raining I still didn’t understand.

  Another thing I could now see with great clarity was the peculiar justice of my punishment. I had spent my life inventing plots and characters, and expecting others to suspend their disbelief. Now here was somebody else inventing them for a change—and an actor, at that, who was supposed to be performing one of my characters in one of my plots. And what was I doing? I was suspending my disbelief! No, not just suspending my disbelief—hanging it by the neck and jumping on its corpse. The biter had indeed been bit.

  How could I have fallen for such a preposterous farrago? Precisely, it seemed to me as I went over everything that had happened, because of its sheer preposterousness. I thought—I hoped—that I might have been a little more cautious if the instructions had openly purported to be for building an atomic bomb, or if the journal had recorded sinister tears at the death of Hitler. But the instructions for putting up a table-tennis table? The record of grown men being reduced to tears by the death of Little Nell? No hoaxer could possibly have been idiot enough to try persuading anyone of such nonsense! It could only have been genuine!

  Perhaps all successful hoaxes and confidence tricks evoke belief partly by appearing to defy it. The heights of implausibility that have to be scaled serve only to deepen the mystery concealed behind them. In any case, the sheer sense of there being a mystery, of something being hidden beneath the surface, waiting to be revealed, is immensely alluring. I had enjoyed the mystery very much. Everyone to whom I had told the story had enjoyed it.

  I certainly recognized,
even more ruefully, that the scheme had had the two other classic elements of such tricks. It had appealed to my vanity, and it had aroused my hopes of reward. My vanity was of being able to read the German. I am not a natural linguist, and I was secretly rather proud of having slowly improved my German over the years. And the reward that seemed to dangle before me was the professional satisfaction I should get from the modest but intriguing book that I might perhaps be able to make out of it.

  Another pang: it was not the first time that my credulity had been exposed. An earlier occasion came to mind, for instance, that also turned on my knowing a little German. My wife and I had once been approached in the streets of Istanbul by a criminal-looking man with sinister blue lips. I had accepted his entirely unnecessary offer to guide us to the Blue Mosque, in spite of my wife’s very plainly expressed misgivings, because he spoke a few words of German, which he had learned as a Gastarbeiter at the BMW works in Munich, and I was so delighted at being able to communicate with someone in Turkey at last. When we reached the surprisingly desolate and empty piece of waste ground in front of the mosque, he rubbed his finger and thumb together and said: “Geld.” Thinking he wanted a small tip for his trouble, I got out my wallet and extracted a low-denomination banknote. He made it clear with gestures that nothing was further from his mind than any monetary gain. All he wanted to do was to show me the picture on the banknote.

  “Atatürk,” he explained

  “Atatürk,” I readily agreed, since even I by this time could recognize the founder of the modern Turkish state.

  “Mehr Geld,” demanded our new friend. I handed him another banknote.