The Copenhagen Papers

by Michael Frayn

  Was there no end to his gullibility? And he was evidently eager for yet more!

  I was awestruck by the sheer amount of scholarship that he was employing in following every slightest clue. And the time he must be spending on it! Matthew was quite right: I should be ashamed of myself. But I wasn’t! All my earlier scruples had vanished! Was I turning into an Iago or a Richard Crookback? Was this precisely the feeling that explained their fiendish addiction? The joy of power? Is this what a criminal feels when he hears that the full resources of Scotland Yard are being mobilized to track him down? Great! he thinks, I’ll send them another couple of clues, and enjoy Crimewatch UK tonight, sipping my cocoa as the sniffer dogs go charging off in the wrong direction.

  One of the things that was driving me on was having a real-life German on hand to connive with. I felt like a general who has been dithering about his battle plans until suddenly reinforced, out of the blue, by an entire armored division. Petra Abendroth had been brought up in East Germany but had lived in Britain for the last seven years. So she was fluent in both languages. She had been trained as a commercial artist, and among her skills was—calligraphy! She even had a collection of old pens handed down by her grandfather, who had been an expert in that field. Just once in a while you have the feeling that someone up there is actually trying to suggest something to you. After Petra had got over the shock of being asked by a comparative stranger to assist in a forgery, she became a keen and expert coconspirator, with that attention to detail one has come to expect from anyone German. Vorsprung durch Technik, as the Audi advertisements used to say.

  She was also very discreet, and kept her secret within the busy corridors of the theatre like a Carmelite nun. One hint of what I was up to, and the game would be up. Matthew Marsh was the only other person within the theatre who was privy to my backroom activity, but I felt confident that, having washed his hands of any role in the conspiracy, he would keep his distasteful knowledge to himself. The Duchess is a small and intimate theatre, though, and my business meetings with Petra must sometimes have had the appearance of a venal British football manager receiving a “bung” from an agent of one of the German clubs. No doubt there was gossip, but I was fairly confident that it would be barking up the wrong tree.

  The trouble was that I could not impose on Petra, my hardworking accomplice, to translate more than one sheet at a time, which is why I needed Micheal (by the time I noticed Celia’s hazy grasp of her own son’s name, the letter had already gone to press), so that he could demand, like the extortionist he was, to be paid one page at a time. As soon as he made his appearance, though, I recognized the birth of a potential star; I realized why writers take black sheep to their bosoms. I had big plans for him. I took care to place him at an unidentified location in France, well beyond Frayn’s investigative tentacles—a tax-dodger who couldn’t afford to return to Britain. I was beginning to feel the strangely powerful bond that forms between a writer and his characters. Micheal’s violent, unpredictable nature, it seemed to me, would be very useful to me as I improvised in response to any efforts Frayn might make to challenge him. If he ever did.

  I was being egged on by another accomplice, too: the fictitious version of Celia. She was taking me over! And giving me excellent advice. “Keep it vague!” she told me. “Avoid the specific! More smoke! More smoke!” Frayn’s fevered scholarship, she assured me, would take the story into wilder realms of fantasy than any I could imagine. She understood the principle on which fortune-tellers operate: Don’t be too specific! Tell a lady that she’s going to meet a seven-foot Turk with a Glaswegian accent off the 5:32 from Paddington and she’s going to be disappointed. Tell her that she is going to meet a tall, dark stranger and you leave scope for our old friend Ambiguity to work his spell.

  On the other hand, advised Celia shrewdly, I should allow the occasional specific detail to emerge through the smoke. So I let the tin box that had housed the papers come suddenly into focus. Celia and her husband recalled that the papers had been “in an old tin box full of rusty bits and pieces. We both remember that among the broken hinges and bent screws there was a very old yellowed table tennis ball. It was fatally dented, as if someone had walloped it in anger. We gave it to the cats to play with and that was the end of that.” I could just see Frayn salivating over the possibility that his hero, Heisenberg, had administered the mortal blow. But the picture on the lid of the box, which Celia clearly recalled as being of a couple of old shire horses, her daughter (now living in Australia) remembered equally clearly as being of Shirley Temple. The uncertainty of memory—the way different people’s recollections can exist in distinct and different states, rather like quantum particles and Schrödinger’s cat—is one of the central themes of the play, so I guessed that this would attract Frayn, too.

  I confess, though, that I had become very reckless by this time. The German physicists all spontaneously bursting into tears at the death of Little Nell was dangerously over the top. So was Celia’s telling Frayn that he should change the title of his play to something sensible, like When Scientists Clash! or When Boffins Bang! The explanation I found for why she had now taken to typing her letters was even wilder. (I couldn’t keep sending them to my sister in Amsterdam to copy out—though it might have been interesting to see what Frayn would have made of the Amsterdam postmark: “Aha! The Spinoza Gambit!”) Celia coolly announced that she had sprained her hand “opening a tin of cat food.”

  Perhaps it was my death wish, or at any rate my wish to be caught. I was getting a thrill out of living dangerously. In any case it didn’t seem to matter—Frayn would believe absolutely anything. I was enjoying myself like a child on a new bike freewheeling downhill. My wife says that a look of dreamy preoccupation would come over me. “I’ve just got to catch up with some paperwork,” I would murmur as I sloped off to my word processor. And she would know that Celia had stolen into the house and taken possession of me once again.

  The bills and business letters I should have been dealing with would pile up for days while I communed with my muse. But then I wasn’t really writing for Frayn at all by this time. I was writing to entertain myself.

  MF:

  “I am negotiating with my son for another page to send you. It would be helpful if I could offer him some monetary inducement…”

  Of course. I should have seen it coming. My expression of interest had gone to their heads. This monstrous pair had suddenly jumped to the conclusion that they were sitting on a gold mine. And they knew that they had the whip hand. I wanted the papers—they had them. They were going to sell them to me one at a time. I couldn’t guess how much they would accept for the next page, or how many pages there were to come after that. I was reasonably certain, though, that whatever I paid for this next page I should pay more for the one after, and more still for the one after that, in an arbitrary and indefinite progression until either my curiosity or my resources were exhausted.

  Or my years on this earth, since there was no knowing how protracted this drop-by-drop blackmail would turn out to be.

  They had me over a barrel.

  What neither the disingenuous Celia nor her grasping Micheal could know was that I had another reason of my own to find my helpless frustration galling. I realized that I was in almost exactly the same situation as the central character in the novel I had just finished writing, Headlong. The hapless Martin Clay is trying to acquire a picture that he privately believes to be a particularly precious Old Master. It belongs to a so far unsuspecting but entirely venal neighbor, who is hoping to use Martin’s discreetly expressed interest for his own shabby ends. Martin slowly discovers the terrible strength conferred by possession, and the terrible weakness implicit in coveting. The price that he will have to pay for the picture, in indignity and moral compromise if not in money, goes up from one day to the next.

  There is great pleasure in inventing frustrations and humilations for one’s characters; this pleasure turns rather sour, however, when one finds that one
is being subjected to those same frustrations and humiliations oneself. The biter bit has more to endure than the pain of the teethmarks.

  I plainly couldn’t submit to this extortion. Like Martin, I should have to swallow down my impatience and rage, and feign as much indifference as I could. I composed a discouraging reply, affecting to believe that Mrs. Rhys-Evans’s demand for money was really a request for advice as to whether she should pay her son money (I said it didn’t sound a very practical way to go about it), and offered further advice, unsolicited, as to how she should go about realizing the value of the papers. I told her that she would have to establish, at her own expense, the ownership of the copyright and the authenticity of the documents; after the fiasco of the Hitler diaries, I said, everyone in the business was extremely wary of supposed secret German documents that suddenly came to light.

  I told her how few copies even the original Farm Hall transcripts had sold, and I suggested that, even after all her efforts and expense, these new documents on the same subject would be unsalable unless there turned out to be something written in Heisenberg’s hand making it clear that he did know all the time how to make an atomic bomb. But this, I suggested, was about as likely as a snowstorm in the Sahara, and I asked her what else there could possibly turn out to be that was of interest. “I can’t really think of anything,” I said sarcastically. “Can you? A secret message from Hitler? The formula for the elixir of life?”

  I offered, reluctantly, to look through the papers and advise her, provided she got hold of all of them, and suggested the names of two scientific libraries that might take them off her hands if she preferred. Martin Clay, the increasingly disingenuous hero of my novel, would have recognized the tone, I think.

  There was also another pill to swallow. I should even have to be tactful about Mrs. Rhys-Evans’s literary efforts. Unbelievably, on top of the demand for money, she had turned to writing fiction, and sent me her first effort for my comments. “I have taken you at your word,” she wrote, “when you say, in your programme, that the Farm Hall papers, as published, contain material for several scripts. Having always wanted to be a writer, I have begun a work of fiction based on the experiences of the German scientists at Farm Hall, seen through the eyes of the youngest. I’m calling him Hans. I hope you won’t think me too bold if I send you the opening. I would be most grateful for your comments. Please don’t pull any punches: I am here to learn!”

  The accompanying typescript was headed Mystery at Farm Hall. I glanced through it. The third paragraph seemed to be particularly fine:

  The only sound to be heard was the swish of the wind and the mournful cry of a distant bittern. Suddenly I became aware of another sound. Someone was singing. One of us. It was Gerlach, the crop-haired old Nazi …

  I stopped grinding my teeth for a moment and burst out laughing. It was true that Gerlach had been the Nazi’s administrator of nuclear reasearch, but in his photograph in the transcripts he is a silver-haired intellectual in an elegant suit, with a polka-dot bow tie and a flower in his buttonhole.

  … In his harsh, cracked voice he was singing an old marching song beloved of the Führer.… But then Heisenburg [sic] … began to sing too, but to a different tune: the “Ode to Joy” from Beethoven’s Ninth. Weizacker [sic] joined in … until the British driver and his mate began to hammer on the partition, shouting “Shut up, you bloody Krauts. You’ve been beaten. Lie down and die!”

  This, I had to concede, was quite wonderful, even by the standards of most unsolicited manuscripts that turned up in writers’ postbags. I thanked her warmly for letting me see it. It was a bit difficult to have any views on it yet, I said tactfully, because so far we hadn’t really quite got to the story.

  “Maybe,” I concluded, “you’ll find some material for that in the papers.” And I thanked her for the pages she had sent so far. I had enjoyed the little mystery, I said.

  Martin would have been proud of me.

  DB:

  “Still,” conceded Frayn, having been wonderfully sarcastic about the possibility of there being anything of interest in Celia’s papers, “you never know. There may be something. Hope springs eternal.”

  It does indeed. He was of course referring to the hope of profit he had detected in the grasping Celia and her son. But what I detected was the hope still springing in him. He was struggling to keep my hope alive, so that I would send him some more papers. I had to keep his hope alive. He was clearly in agony at the possibility of losing the treasure galleon that had only just appeared on the horizon, and that now seemed in imminent danger of being captured by the perfidious Celia and Micheal Rhys-Evans and vanishing back over the horizon flying the skull and crossbones. Behind the polite phrasing and elaborate signals of disinterestedness I could plainly see a man on his knees hoarsely whispering, “Please don’t do this to me!”

  I was touched. I decided to put my Micheal’s demands for money on the back burner. (And what would I have done if Frayn had sent me a check? Even I might have been embarrassed by that.) I would send the poor man something more, and I would do it for nothing.

  Send him what, though? I hadn’t prepared my next page of German manuscript, let alone given it to Petra. We were both very busy around this time with our own private lives, so I had to think up something else.

  By 1945, I knew, Churchill had begun to worry about Stalin’s nuclear ambitions. One of the reasons the German physicists were hidden away by the British was to stop them either defecting to the Russians or being kidnapped by them. I decided to investigate the possibility that they had had secret dealings with the Russians.

  I didn’t know Russian myself, but I knew two people who did, and who between them could probably help me in my researches. One of them was a book-dealer friend of ours, Tony Neville, who had the added distinction of having once conned journalists from the Express and the Mirror with a story about dubious dealings between the British government and the Russian Department of Trade in defiance of a Western ban on exports of steel to the USSR, which produced panic in the embassies and questions in the British and German parliaments, not to mention a punch in the nose for Tony from the Mirror correspondent involved when he found out.

  The other person of my acquaintance who knew Russian was Frayn.

  Within a couple of days I had discovered (with Tony’s help) documentary evidence of Russian involvement! It was very brief and cryptic—only four words on a torn scrap of paper. I felt sure, though, that Frayn would be able to make something of it. He seemed to have an infinite capacity for making something out of absolutely anything I sent him.

  The two of us together, with me as a supplier of historic documents and Frayn as the reader of them, were a team that could tackle any problem.

  MF:

  “In haste,” said the next communication from Mrs. Rhys-Evans, a week or so later. “I am so sorry about the enclosed scrap. This is the only sheet of the German bumph my son has sent for you. When I read your last letter to him he said `This man should be writing WILLS not plays!’ He can be very rude. However, I’m sending it on. And you will be glad to know he didn’t mention money any more.”

  I was indeed glad. My policy of firmness and indifference was evidently paying off. The results in practical terms, though, I discovered when I turned to the new “sheet of the German bumph” that she had attached, were somewhat meager. It was the briefest and oddest document yet—a torn-off corner of yellowing newspaper with four words penciled on it in capitals:

  Cyrillic characters. Поставьте пакет вниз береза. I gazed at the words in bafflement. I couldn’t share Mrs. Rhys-Evans’s uncritical acceptance of this as another piece of German—but what language was it? I assumed, by analogy with Russian, that it meant “Put the package under the birch tree.” It didn’t seem to be Russian, though. A Russian would be more likely to write Положите пакет—“lay the packet”—rather than Поставьте—”stand it”—since in Russian you have to choose whether some
thing that’s put somewhere is put there upright or on its back. It was possible, of course, that the package in question was one that had to be stood upright. But no Russian could conceivably write вниз (“downward”) to mean под (“under”). The only other languages written in the Cyrillic alphabet are Bulgarian, Serbian, Ukrainian, and Belorussian. I’m not familiar with any of them, but I found it difficult to persuade myself that in any imaginable Slavonic language a plainly oblique case of береза would be written in what was equally plainly the nominative form.

  So perhaps it was Russian—broken Russian written by someone with an even worse command of the language than the author of the first document had of German. Maybe the British authorities at Farm Hall had been employing not only displaced Germans but East European exiles who knew no English or German, perhaps as domestic staff, and with whom either the British personnel or the German inmates had to communicate in a kind of Russian pidgin.… But then why had this trivial note to a janitor or cleaner been hidden under the floorboards with the journal and the rest of the material?

  I turned the scrap of paper over. It had evidently been torn out of a publication called Peace and Freedom News, with an address in Berkeley, California. My picture of life at Farm Hall changed yet again. There were not only children around, not only an array of specially imported German sporting equipment, but American pacifist publications circulating. No one could have accused the British of imposing a repressive regime upon their distinguished guests.

  But was American pacifist literature either published or imported so soon after the war? There was no date in the fragment of text remaining. Then I looked more closely at the address … and found a zip code.

  Whether this little scrap of anachronistic scribble did after all justify my policy of offhandedness now seemed open to a certain amount of doubt. I decided to continue with it, nevertheless, and my reply to Mrs. Rhys-Evans this time was very short and cool indeed. I merely informed her that the words on the front were not German but very bad Russian, then mentioned the existence of the zip code on the back, and noted that zip codes were introduced by the U.S. Post Office Department in 1963.