The Copenhagen Papers

by Michael Frayn

  Of course, it’s often rubbish. Tedious, boring, over the top. But then you hit your stride for a few yards, and you feel wonderful! You find a phrase that exactly expresses what you want to say about something. You read it back to yourself again and again. It feels good. You read it again the next day; it still feels good.

  And perhaps you didn’t want the performance to stop, either—your good friend Jürgen said he didn’t expect me to drop my mask. “Rhys-Evans” I was and would remain. And he had a bone to pick with Frayn over his work on Copenhagen.

  I have to say frankly that I was a tiny bit angry to find no remark of all my help to Michael, neither in the theatre programme nor in the printed book, and I should be glad to get a little comeback at him.

  So he had “a little proposal” to make.

  If you might continue the game, until you should have a good collection of these “documents,” and also letters from Michael with his interesting responses to them, I believe you might get a rather nice book. Well, of course, if I am right about “Mrs C Rhys-Evans” she doesn’t need an introduction to a British publishing house, but I think I might be helpful to publish this book in Germany. I can more or less promise you that it would find a good response here. We are a little sensible to the accusation that we have no sense of humour, and the sight of Werner Heisenberg, not to say “O,” so to speak “getting his own back” from beyond the grave upon a British humour-writer would certainly be rather satisfying.

  He listed his connections with German publishing houses and TV companies, and also offered to help Frayn translate any further documents I sent, “when perhaps I should be able to find all kinds of strange hidden meanings which should make him continue to be excited.” He concluded:

  In Germany we say: “Wer zuletzt lacht, lacht am besten.” This I will leave your present collaborator to translate for you!

  Thank you, Jürgen. In England, too, you may like to know, we say “He who laughs last…” I wrote back. I wasn’t Tom Stoppard, I said, and I wasn’t interested in the publishing venture Jürgen had suggested. “If this business is a hoax,” I told him, “then someone else is doing the hoaxing.… My son, Micheal, is the likeliest candidate.”

  And I enclosed a long new chapter from my novel, in which Hans visited Stonehenge, where he realized that it was a prehistoric attempt to record the workings of the atom, and made friends with a German shepherd dog called Fritz. I introduced some excellent jokes (I thought) into the German manuscript. Well, Petra laughed.

  I so much didn’t want to stop writing! And Frayn didn’t want to stop reading. Did he? This was what he meant? Wasn’t it?

  MF:

  “Wer zuletzt lacht is, at this moment, me,” my wonderful German agent, Ursula Pegler, had written when I sent her a copy of my treacherous friend’s letter and asked her permission to adopt the address of her office as Jürgen’s. Now she forwarded Mrs. Rhys-Evans’s reply to him.

  I read it hopefully. Hope faded. I seemed to be the only one in this relationship who could work up any normally respectable level of gullibility.

  Well, at least Jürgen had raised a reply, which was more than the MOD had managed. It seemed unlikely, though, that David had any real belief in the poor fictitious creature’s existence—particularly since Mrs. Rhys-Evans had also written to me to tell me about his proposal.

  On the other hand, Mrs. Rhys-Evans went on to tell Jürgen that she would be interested in the publication of her novel, Mystery at Farm Hall, and in both her letter to him and her letter to me she enclosed a further installment of it. I found this puzzling. Did it suggest that David had some slight, provisional belief? Or that his creature, Celia Rhys-Evans, did on his behalf? Or that he was covering himself in case Jürgen actually existed, like an atheist offering up a furtive prayer?

  Or did it mean that he was pretending to believe, in the hope that I would believe he believed, and would scale fresh heights of credulity?

  In which case why was he pretending only to half-believe, or only half-pretending to believe, whichever it was? Why didn’t he go the whole hog and offer to cooperate fully with Jürgen so as to draw me in? Was he covering himself against any possible accusation of appearing to believe, as the atheist might be careful to dissociate himself from his prayer by saying it in an ironic tone of voice?

  Or was he simply suspending disbelief, like a spectator at a play, in order to allow the play to continue?

  It was like a game of chess. Our initial strategies had both gone astray. Now I was counterattacking, and he was on the defensive.… Wasn’t he? But how? What kind of position was he trying to develop?

  I looked at the letters again. What struck me this time were the installments from Mystery at Farm Hall—not the content of them, but the fact that they had now expanded to cover five closely typed pages. This was surely a rather heavy investment of effort in a spoof. Particularly since David now knew, from the MOD letter if not from Jürgen’s contribution, that the hoax was blown. The story seemed to be taking on a life of its own, quite independent of my belief or disbelief.

  He did know the game was up, didn’t he? I tried to put myself in his place. He knew already, from the MOD letter, that I knew that the “documents” were a joke. He now knew, if he had seen through Jürgen, that I knew that the Mrs. Rhys-Evans of the covering letters was also a joke. So why did he carry on writing letters in her persona? Presumably becase he didn’t know that I knew who it was who was actually writing them.… Or was Mystery at Farm Hall not the only story that was taking on a life of its own? Did the entire structure of deception now have some kind of enduring hold over both of us, as if the pages of a novel had opened to swallow us, or as if we had been sucked out of the darkness of the auditorium and absorbed into the action onstage?

  Perhaps much the same confusion and alarm was beginning to seize David as well. “Where will all this end?” asked Mrs. Rhys-Evans plaintively in her letter to me. “I am beginning to wish that I’d never seen your play. I don’t mean that unkindly. It’s just that I am no longer young, and I feel as if I’ve fallen down a rabbit-hole.”

  A silence fell upon all of us. David was presumably waiting for some kind of response to his last few letters. But the MOD, after all their threats, took no further action, and Jürgen failed to follow up his ambiguous response from Mrs. Rhys-Evans. I didn’t prompt either of them, or offer any further comment of my own. It was an unsatisfactory end to the story, but I simply couldn’t think how to go on—or, to be honest, find the interest or energy to try. The thing would simply be left hanging, unresolved, like a late-night game of chess when both players finally become too exhausted and confused to continue.

  Then, a month later, to my amazement, another letter arrived from Mrs. Rhys-Evans. “Here is the latest German bumph,” she said. “Of course it is all Greek to me. I don’t have anyone to translate it. I don’t know any Germans personally, except Helmut Kohl.…” Enclosed was another laboriously handwritten installment of the journal, in which the author reported that he had been kept awake by terror after Major Rittner’s reading of the murder of Nancy by Bill Sykes, and in which Heisenberg, unable to calculate the change from a two-shilling piece he had offered in the dining room for a cup of tea and a pancake costing one-and-sixpence, revealed that he couldn’t do simple arithmetic. There was even a thumbnail sketch of Gerlach putting his hand up to ask a question, and making the author think that he was about to shout “Sieg Heil!”:

  And another of Heisenberg playing them all the “Appassionata”:

  This was disconcerting enough. But then a few days later came a second letter, this time addressed to Jürgen Hoechst and forwarded by Ursula Pegler. “I am a little worried about Frayn,” Mrs. Rhys-Evans told him. “I have not heard from him for several weeks.” She mentioned the call I had reported getting from the MOD. “I do hope nothing unpleasant has happened to him. I’ve kept an eye on the obituary columns. I would be sad not to hear from him again.…”

  And she enclosed yet an
other carefully crafted installment of the journal, in which the earlier mistake about the date of Otto Hahn’s birthday was supposedly explained when he broke down and confessed that he had lied about it because he had felt so sad over the death of Little Nell and needed something to cheer himself up. Also enclosed, to both Jürgen and myself, were another five densely typed pages of Mystery at Farm Hall.

  My heart sank under the weight of all this, and under the burden of my guilt for apparently failing to alert David to the fact that I now knew this was all a hoax, and leaving him to go blindly struggling on. But I had alerted him! Hadn’t I? He had plainly understood the implications of the bogus MOD letter! So why was he going on? Who was fooling whom, and how? What in heaven’s name was happening? I was completely lost. We seemed to be getting ever farther down the rabbit-hole. If this was chess, it was of the school known as “exotic”—a style developed, as I dimly recalled from my chess-playing days as a schoolboy, by the Soviet grandmaster Tal, who pursued strategies of such baffling complexity and opacity that his opponents couldn’t begin to understand what he was trying to do.

  I wondered whether I should have believed even these latest more baroque extravagances if Matthew hadn’t rescued me. What—Helmut Kohl? Heisenberg’s failure to solve the change equation? The explanation for the wrong date of Hahn’s birthday? Surely I should have begun to balk by this time! Or perhaps I shouldn’t have done. Though even I should have been stopped in my tracks by Major Rittner’s joke about a German batman who failed to salute being “an insubordinate Klaus.”

  Oh, I don’t know. I could probably have taken that in my stride like everything else.

  I felt rather wistful in some ways for the irreversible loss of my innocence. I almost wished that I could un-know what I knew. I had enjoyed believing; I didn’t enjoy not believing. The mystery had offered a hazy glow of indefinite promise; the solution to it contained nothing but embarrassment and dismay. Once, it seemed to me, I had sat on Father Christmas’s knee in the twilit cardboard grotto and glimpsed the great treasure-house of delights to come; now I could see that his beard was cotton wool and that he would be hanging his stocking up on Christmas Eve just like everybody else.

  But what was I to do? How was I ever going to stop it? Perhaps even now David and his German scribe were working late and early on another stack of manuscript. Perhaps another kilogram of spoof fiction was winging its way to Munich. Perhaps the rest of our lives was going to be spent like this.

  The summer solstice came and went. I had many other things on my mind. I did nothing.

  DB:

  Nothing. Nothing from Frayn, nothing from Jürgen. Nothing.

  I felt as if one of my agents in the field had gone missing, nabbed by the enemy.

  For a start, I thought Frayn must be away on holiday. But as the days became weeks and the weeks months, I realized that something else had happened. Petra and I would meet backstage at the Duchess. She would look at me expectantly, and I would shake my head sadly.

  Where are you, Frayn? Why don’t you answer? You can’t leave me twisting in the wind! And it’s not just me who’s waiting! It’s all of us: Celia and Micheal, and Celia’s homeless husband, and the daughter who lives in Australia. You’ve left them all with nothing to do and nothing to say. And they’ve got so much that they want to tell you, if only you’d give them the chance!

  Then there’s the Germans: Heisenberg and Weizsäcker and poor crop-haired Gerlach. What about them, Frayn? Okay—I’ll let Gerlach’s hair grow and give him back his bow tie—if you can just allow him to exist! Aren’t you curious about any of them? Don’t you want to know why Heisenberg can’t do simple arithmetic? Or why he always plays the “Appassionata” sonata? There are reasons for all these things. Serious reasons, funny reasons. But I can’t tell you them unless you ask!

  Am I feeling what Scheherazade would have felt if the old Sultan had died on her? Or worse, if he’d said, “Enough! Stop! No more! You can live! Just so long as I never have to listen to you saying ‘Once upon a time’ ever again!”

  And then there’s Hans! Poor little Hans! Scarcely more than a child, and his life’s over already, almost before it had begun!

  Are you feeling guilty, Frayn? You should be! Child-murderer!

  Now come on, Burke, be reasonable. Who did I think I was? I was an actor who had played a joke on his writer. The writer had found out, and now he had more worthwhile things to get on with. But he had wanted to go on—he had—he’d told me in so many words! Or his creature had, on his behalf. “If you might continue the game,” Jürgen had written, in his not-quite-perfect English, “until you should have a good collection of these ‘documents,’… I believe you might get a rather nice book.”

  Language, or at any rate the written word, had once again let us down. A simple face-to-face conversation, complete with eye contact and body language, would have cleared the air in seconds. Why didn’t he simply phone me and say: “Let’s meet. I think we’ve got something to talk about”? For an obvious reason, now I came to think about it: because he didn’t know who I was. All right, so why didn’t I phone him? We could have had a glass of wine together. He could have blamed me for wasting his time. I could have said I was sorry. Had the conventions of the game taken over? Did they mean that all our transactions could be conducted only through fictitious intermediaries? Or had we come up against a certain natural reserve in both of us?

  Whatever the reason, it was Shaw and Terry all over again. A certain strange intimacy had been achieved, and then it had been rudely broken off.

  Eventually the penny dropped. Whatever he had wanted, as it seemed to me, he had clearly changed his mind. I felt wrong-footed. A genuine misunderstanding, no doubt, but I needed to dispel the uncertainty and banish any dark thoughts that might have ended our little dance together on a sour note.

  A way had to be found to end things neatly. Somehow the runaway train had to be brought safely into the station, with both our egos still on the rails. I couldn’t really expect Frayn to do it, any more than a burglar could expect the owner of the house he has broken into to show him out and wish him well.

  We’d have to get Celia to help us. At the end of July, she took up her pen once again, as sadly this time as she had joyously before. It was the end of the affair.

  MF:

  Once again, at the sight of the familiar address and the familiar typescript, my spirits went down and my guilt was reawakened. I was wrong, though.

  Dear Michael, if I may call you that now?

  I was touched by this new familiarity—particularly by the care she had taken to spell my name the same way as I did.

  It is sad, but I must bring this Farm Hall business to a close. I know you will be shattered, but it is simply taking up too much of my time. I am a writer now, thanks to you, and that must come first. One has a duty to one’s public.

  And, rather like a former lover demanding the return of her letters, she asked me to return the German manuscripts. Not to her Chiswick address, though, but c/o Burke, at a familiar-looking address in Kent.

  She signed it Cissy, with three kisses. I blew Cissy many heartfelt kisses back—and I blew them c/o Burke. She had finally come up trumps, and rescued us both from the swamp just as elegantly and skillfully as she had dropped us into it in the first place.

  I gratefully picked up my cue. I entirely understood, I said in my reply; we were perhaps getting to know each other a little too well, and if this thing had gone on we might not have been able to control our feelings indefinitely. I had noticed my wife looking at me a little oddly as I kept talking to her about Celia Rhys-Evans, and I imagined that Cissy, too, had had a few odd looks from her husband; which was no doubt why she had asked me to write to an accommodation address.

  Curious, I said, that her understanding friend was called Burke, because I also knew someone of that name who lived in the same part of Kent. The one I knew, however, was an extremely guileless and sweet-natured individual, who was most un
likely to get mixed up in devious activities involving the passing on of clandestine packages.

  Or perhaps, I suggested, it was the same one. Perhaps my Mr. Burke was rather more devious than I had realized. I had to see my one shortly, I told her, for the last night of the first cast of my play, so I should take her manuscripts to the restaurant with me afterward, and see if he blushed when he saw her name on the envelope.

  DB:

  So at the last-night dinner the two of us finally spoke face-to-face about it all, as I had looked forward to doing, and all things were made clear. With the brown envelope of papers on the floor between our chairs, we retraced the strange journey we had pursued together yet apart for the last few months.

  We realized, as we talked about it, how often coincidence, accident, and even error had played a part in the story, as if someone or something out there was conspiring to make fools of both of us. Michael said that the detail that had convinced him beyond anything else that the German documents were genuine was the effortless native fluency of my double s. I said I didn’t know what he was talking about. He wrote it on the tablecloth for me: β. I had to confess that I had never even known there was such a letter—I thought it was a capital B.

  I told him about some of my earlier hoaxes, and said that I was coming to the conclusion that people would believe anything—that indeed they preferred to believe the unlikely. Try founding a religion on the assertion that water will wet you and fire will burn you, and you will whistle in the wind. Tell them that water is really their great-grandmother come back to see them, and that fire can only heal them, and the queue of eager believers will stretch round the block.

  I had after all warned Michael Blakemore in so many words that the papers must be a hoax, just as I had warned my earlier victims about the Lover of Hats and the woman who had recognized her family photographs. Once again my warning had been peremptorily brushed aside. Perhaps everyone’s faith had even been reinforced by these challenges from an unbeliever.