The Copenhagen Papers

by Michael Frayn

  “What are you doing?” said my wife in alarm.

  It was obvious what I was doing. I was being shown that there was a picture of Atatürk on this one as well.

  “Mehr Geld,” said my fellow Germanist. I got out another banknote.

  “Michael!” cried my wife.

  “Atatürk,” said the man.

  Eventually he was holding all my Turkish banknotes, and had established to my entire satisfaction that there was a picture of Atatürk on every single one of them, from the lowest denomination to the highest.

  “Now get them back,” ordered my wife urgently, but then of course her lack of German prevented her from sharing the bond of mutual trust that my Turkish friend and I had established.

  In any case he had more information about the world’s currency to impart to me. “Englisches Geld,” he demanded. I handed him a five-pound note. He pointed at the portrait of the Queen. “Nicht Atatürk,” he said. He was right again, as I was happy to confirm. “Nicht Atatürk,” I agreed, with effortless fluency. “Mehr englisches Geld,” he replied.…

  When finally he was holding all my Turkish and all my British currency, he pointed to a tiny figure in the distance. “Mein Freund,” he explained. He indicated by gestures that he was going to take all the banknotes over to this friend and demonstrate to him as well the ubiquity of Atatürk on the Turkish notes and his total absence from the British ones. This seemed to me a small but helpful move toward increasing international understanding, but here my wife dissented with such vehemence that for the sake of marital harmony I was regretfully obliged to decline.

  The hot burn, yes. I had felt a touch of it then, after I had reviewed the incident at leisure with my wife and come to see the force of her reservations. I felt it now in full strength—the same great blush spreading not only over my body but down into my very bones.

  Then again, life was mockingly imitating not only the events in my novel but the ones in the play as well. Matthew Marsh, it occurred to me, had been put in rather the same position as his character. Like Heisenberg, he had found himself torn between keeping a secret and revealing it—between the demands of loyalty and those of common humanity. Like Heisenberg (if we are to believe his own account of his actions), he had preferred the latter. Like Heisenberg again, he understandably didn’t wish to advertise his choice.

  It also raised the same questions of motivation. Why had David done it, I wondered, just as Bohr and Heisenberg in the play wonder why Bohr should once have risked his life on a game of throwing stones at a washed-up mine, and why Heisenberg had risked his by balancing on one foot on top of a Japanese pagoda. It even raised the same questions of explaining a failure to do something. Why, asks the play, did Heisenberg fail to do the crucial and obvious equation for the diffusion of neutrons in uranium 235? Why, I now asked myself, did I fail to raise any of the crucial and obvious questions about the documents I had been sent? Heisenberg suggests that his failure was explained by his unconscious reluctance to know the answer, in case it opened the way, as it would have done, to building an atomic bomb. What unwelcome knowledge was I trying to keep from myself?

  In the taxi on the way back from the restaurant, I broke the news to Michael Blakemore. At least I was able to share my astonishment with him, and also some of my discomfiture—though since he’d relied on me for the translation of the German I felt a certain responsibility for bringing him down with me. We phoned each other a lot in the days that followed to marvel and laugh yet again at the skill and insulting cheek with which David had caught us. And each time, after we’d marveled and laughed, we couldn’t help falling silent yet again as we remembered the details of what we’d believed, and the lengths our belief had carried us to.

  For both of us the ground had shaken—and went on shaking. I got a phone call from someone I didn’t know but who claimed, implausibly, as it seemed to me, to be the son of a friend; it’s David Burke, I thought at once. Michael received an unwelcome letter from Inland Revenue, and for a moment dismissed it furiously as another of David Burke’s forgeries.

  There are a range of questions that have worried philosophers down the ages about how we know that other people have minds and feelings, and how we can be sure that we are living in a real world, and not in a dream, or in a shadowland of mere appearances. Turing’s proof of the possibility of a universal computer may bring these ancient worries to life again, because the universal computer is now interpreted by some physicists as being tantamount to a universal virtual-reality generator, which could in theory surround us with a virtual world indistinguishable from a real one. I began for the first time to feel the force of these venerable metaphysical anxieties. Maybe, it seemed to me at times, we are living in a universal virtual-reality generator already, and its name is David Burke.

  At this point, possibly, even you—yes, you reading this, who are far too shrewd to be taken in by stunts like the one I fell for, who have never been hoaxed in all your life—perhaps even you begin to feel a faint shadow of unease. Up to now you have assumed that I, at any rate, was telling the truth, and that this was a factual account. You have felt as superior to my ridiculous naïveté as I did to Mrs. Rhys-Evans’s. What you’re thinking now is that I have been at some pains to remind you of the kind of writing I usually do, which is fiction. Have I said this in the spirit of David Burke’s reminding Michael Blakemore in the rehearsal room of the possibility that the documents might be a hoax? Is this all a fiction as well?

  And this “David Burke” who has apparently been making such a fool of me, and who is now allegedly writing the account of it with me—is even he an artfully suggested fiction, my own private version of the real David Burke, just as my Niels Bohr is of the real Niels Bohr?

  Be honest with yourself. You did actually believe it, didn’t you, when I told you that I’d believed all that nonsense about table-tennis tables and Little Nell. You did! You believed that a grown man who writes plays about quantum mechanics was taken in by such childishness! That is the most ludicrous implausibility so far! And yet you managed to believe it! The joke was on you all the time!

  No, of course not. I was telling the truth before. It’s all fact. Up to the last paragraph. And now it’s fact again. It is! I assure you! Honestly! Believe me!

  Your moment of unworthy doubt is over. I hope. But perhaps you can feel the ground still shifting very slightly under your feet.

  DB:

  Why did I do it?

  Was it some kind of actor’s revenge on Them (directors and writers) for various unspecified grievances over the years? Was it an exercise in metaphysics? (What is Reality? What is Truth?)

  I’m afraid not. The real reason is simpler, and perhaps duller. I did it for a laugh. It was a joke.

  I think it is partly the retarded child in me. I have always been late in doing everything: passing exams, understanding jokes (yes!), losing my virginity, getting married, having a child. So it seems consistent that I should be indulging in the kind of prank that anyone else might have got out of his system before his fifteenth birthday.

  Then again, I suspect that I have been trying to make up for a rather solemn childhood—always looking at the ground, or with my head in a schoolbook. I was a grind. I believe I still project a grave presence. It comes in useful in the acting. But it means I don’t get offered the comedy that I adore.

  My duplicitous correspondence with Frayn, I have to confess, was not my first transgression—or my second, either. This kind of thing has happened before. I must ask for a number of previous offenses to be taken into consideration.

  My career as a forger began many years ago, when I was playing a small role in John Osborne’s The Hotel in Amsterdam with Paul Scofield. Going home on the train to Hay-wards Heath one night after the performance, Scofield told us, he had met Jimmy Edwards and Sir Laurence Olivier and fallen so deep into conversation with them that the train was drawing out of the station at Haywards Heath before he realized he had arrived; whereupon he had pulled
the emergency cord and walked off into the night before anybody could stop him.

  The next day, Scofield received a letter from a Sgt. Blenkinsop of the Railway Police. He was wanted for questioning, said Sgt. Blenkinsop, in connection with an incident at Haywards Heath station. Two witnesses aboard the train had insisted on giving their names as “Jimmy Edwards” and “Sir Laurence Olivier,” as a result of which they had been taken into custody and held overnight at Brighton police station.

  Scofield saw through this immediately, and just as quickly identified me as the culprit. But it gave me some sort of thrill, a small rush of adrenaline, and that was what started me off. Not that I have ever become a serial prankster; the habit has always been under control. Years would sometimes go by between one episode and the next. When the urge came upon me, it would usually take me by surprise.

  It struck once when my wife and I were rehearsing and previewing Gorki’s Philistines for the RSC at the Barbican. Clive Russell, a huge Scots actor, built like Ben Nevis, who was in the production with us, went out and bought himself a wide-brimmed velour hat with which he was so pleased that he kept it on all the time, even during lunch. Then one day he came in hatless and unhappy. At the Shaw Theatre the previous evening, he said, he had for once taken the great hat off while he bought a drink. When he came back, it had vanished. We all did our best to cheer him up, but I decided to offer a little practical help as well, because I remembered the name of the shop where he had bought it.

  Two days later, Clive walked into rehearsal with a box under his arm and a letter in his hand, scarcely able to contain himself for excitement.

  “Listen to this,” he said.

  Dear Mr. Russell,

  I am returning the splendid hat I stole from you at the Shaw Theatre the other night.

  I wanted to add this wonderful specimen to the collection of hats, all 234 of them stolen, which I keep in a special room in my ranch in Texas. I have stolen hats from all over the world: an orthodox archbishop’s hat from Cyprus, a French gendarme’s hat taken at great personal risk during the student revolt of 1968, a German general’s hat taken while he was toying with his mistress. And so on. Yours was only the latest conquest.

  But an extraordinary thing has happened. The night after I stole your hat, I visited the Barbican—wearing your hat, of course. Imagine my astonishment when the very man I have stolen the hat from strides on to the stage: you! You speak and reveal that your fictitious father is a singer. So was my real father. That he was a drunkard. So was mine! And finally that his name was Igor Petrovich. My father’s name precisely.

  The tears are streaming down my face. I realise that my father is sending me a message—from wherever he is. I must return your hat! I must reform my ways! I have been a sinner!

  So here is your beautiful hat, with my profound apologies. Enjoy it, and spare a thought sometimes for

  The Lover of Hats

  Clive looked at us all. I could see that he was deeply moved.

  “Clive,” I said, “you do realize that it’s April first today?”

  But nothing could shake his conviction or lessen his emotion. In the days and weeks that followed, he never tired of telling the story and showing the letter to anyone who would listen. My wife often urged me to tell him the truth, but I replied that I shouldn’t dream of spoiling the pleasure it all gave him.

  A year later, in fact, when we were due to finish the run, the Lover of Hats wrote Clive another letter, with some nonsense or other about flying in from Texas in his private jet to catch Clive’s last performance. Clive read it aloud to everyone in the large makeup room at the Barbican—and would believe the story to this day if he hadn’t glanced up to savor our appreciation and caught the reflection of my wife in one of the mirrors, stuffing a handkerchief into her mouth, her shoulders heaving. The same old problem—accomplices!

  An early prototype for Celia Rhys-Evans called Doreen Brown came into existence when we were rehearsing Richard Nelson’s New England in the Pit, the small studio theatre at the Barbican. Angela Thorne had to sit in a rocking chair at the edge of the stage, almost in the laps of the front row of the audience, idly turning the pages of a family photo album. The stage management had found a real album in a junk shop, full of photographs of a real family at different moments of their lives: weddings and birthdays and parties on the beach, in short pants and long pants, nappies and long dresses. As I looked at it during breaks in rehearsal, I began to wonder about this family, just as I did later about the people who must have lived at Farm Hall. I found myself rather touched by the pictures. Other people’s families seem to affect me this way.

  After the play had opened, Angela Thorne received a surprising letter. She read it aloud to all of us in the green room:

  Dear Miss Thorne,

  I came to see your play the other night with my sister Mabel. We had been expecting to see Cats, but the agency got it wrong. Anyway, your play was much cheaper, so we didn’t mind, though we’d have liked a few songs. We had good seats, in the front row, very close to your rocking chair. Mabel suddenly whispered to me—“That’s our family album!” And it was! Turned up again after all these years! We were so close we could see it ever so clearly. There was our youngest sister, Tina, in the tutu she wore on her twelfth birthday. She wouldn’t take it off, even in bed! Our John was there, dirt all over his face as ever. And Grannie Harbottle—she was a card—loved her Ovaltine. And Horace. He’s the one with the wooden leg. He was our uncle but he came to a bad end. I’m quite surprised he’s in the album—I said to Mabel. They were all there—all of us. Except Ethel of course. Mabel and I had a little cry over it in the interval.…

  We’ve booked eleven seats in the front row for your Saturday matinee. All the family. Grannie Edgerton is coming up from Margate. They’ve let her out of the home specially. She thinks we’re all going to be stars. So would you mind terribly turning the pages really slowly that day—so we can all have a look?

  Yrs, Doreen Brown

  The whole company was as moved as Doreen and Mabel had been. The only dissenting voice was mine, once again.

  “It’s a hoax,” I told them confidently. No one paid any attention to my skepticism. If it hadn’t been for Angela’s nervousness at the approaching matinee and the proximity of eleven members of the Brown family trying to see over her shoulder from Row A, I might not have relented, and told them who the hoaxer was.

  It takes two to tango. Without the eager belief of the hoaxee, the hoaxer could achieve nothing.

  MF:

  The problems that had been preoccupying me for the past couple of months, of how to make sense of the documents and how to extract the rest of them from Mrs. Rhys-Evans and the appalling Micheal, had now vanished like burst bubbles, in the way that apparently intractable problems sometimes do. But now another, and perhaps even trickier, problem took their place: how on earth to extract myself from the situation I had got myself into.

  This was the difficulty: I couldn’t see how to tell David that he had been blown without also telling him who had blown him, which would plainly be a betrayal of Matthew’s confidence. I couldn’t leave him to think it might have been Petra, and it couldn’t have been Sara because she said she had no recollection of David’s ever mentioning it to her. I didn’t have the cheek to pretend I’d seen through the deception myself—and even if I had, how would I have explained my guessing that the perpetrator was David Burke?

  Quite apart from the ethics of respecting Matthew’s confidence, there was a practical consideration. How would David react to discovering that Matthew had grassed him? He might take it amiss—he might take it very much amiss—and the two of them had to go on working together. It was now April, and they were contracted until September. All evening every evening except Sunday, and all afternoon as well on Saturday, if the business held up, they had to occupy the stage together, reenacting the old friendship of Bohr and Heisenberg, reliving the old father-son relationship, reanimating the old conflicts an
d reconciliations. It was hard enough even if they were on the best of terms. I didn’t want to make it any harder.

  On the other hand, I couldn’t not tell him. It wasn’t possible for me to pretend to go on taking the thing seriously. Nor, in common humanity, could I let him go on laboriously forging away to no purpose.

  Michael Blakemore and I phoned each other back and forth, working our way through the moral and practical complexities of the situation. One way or another, we decided, we should have to lure David into stepping out of his role as Mrs. Rhys-Evans, and into taking a bow in propria persona. Or, if we couldn’t lure him, then perhaps we could panic him into it. Either way would no doubt involve his making rather a fool of himself, which was unfortunate. Not perhaps all that unfortunate, though, it seemed to us, in the circumstances.

  There was a third possibility: to do both—to lure him and to panic him. A ghost of an idea began to take shape, like the first suggestion of a play or a novel coming on.

  To carry it out I should need one or two unfamiliar faces and unfamiliar addresses. I enlisted the help of my children and stepchildren, and read them selected passages from the documents and correspondence to explain the case to them. Daughters and stepdaughters alike—sons-in-law and grandchildren, for that matter—all had the same reaction. They laughed and laughed. “Michael!” they gasped. “Dad! You didn’t really believe any of this, did you?”

  A serious question. Had I really believed it?

  I’m not quite sure. I hadn’t not believed it. Does one go around believing all the various bits of information that cross one’s path in life? Not in any very active sense, surely. The question doesn’t arise; it doesn’t usually occur to one to examine things in that light. If you look at a list of train times to Manchester, it’s not like being a conscientious young candidate for holy orders faced with the Thirty-nine Articles. You don’t have to examine your soul and wrestle with doubt. If the timetable says that’s when the trains arrive, that’s when they arrive.