Copenhagen - Michael Frayn [31]
Margrethe One. Or so you told us. The poor fellow you guarded overnight, when you were a boy in Munich, while he was waiting to be shot in the morning.
Bohr All right then, one. One single soul on his conscience, to set against all the others.
Margrethe But that one single soul was emperor of the universe, no less than each of us. Until the morning came.
Heisenberg No, when the morning came I persuaded them to let him go.
Bohr Heisenberg, I have to say—if people are to be measured strictly in terms of observable quantities …
Heisenberg Then we should need a strange new quantum ethics. There’d be a place in heaven for me. And another one for the SS man I met on my way home from Haigerloch. That was the end of my war. The Allied troops were closing in; there was nothing more we could do. Elisabeth and the children had taken refuge in a village in Bavaria, so I went to see them before I was captured. I had to go by bicycle—there were no trains or road transport by that time—and I had to travel by night and sleep under a hedge by day, because all through the daylight hours the skies were full of Allied planes, scouring the roads for anything that moved. A man on a bicycle would have been the biggest target left in Germany. Three days and three nights I travelled. Out of Württemberg, down through the Swabian Jura and the first foothills of the Alps. Across my ruined homeland. Was this what I’d chosen for it? This endless rubble? This perpetual smoke in the sky? These hungry faces? Was this my doing? And all the desperate people on the roads. The most desperate of all were the SS. Bands of fanatics with nothing left to lose, roaming around shooting deserters out of hand, hanging them from roadside trees. The second night, and suddenly there it is—the terrible familiar black tunic emerging from the twilight in front of me. On his lips as I stop—the one terrible familiar word. ‘Deserter,’ he says. He sounds as exhausted as I am. I give him the travel order I’ve written for myself. But there’s hardly enough light in the sky to read by, and he’s too weary to bother. He begins to open his holster instead. He’s going to shoot me because it’s simply less labour. And suddenly I’m thinking very quickly and clearly—it’s like skiing, or that night on Heligoland, or the one in Faelled Park. What comes into my mind this time is the pack of American cigarettes I’ve got in my pocket. And already it’s in my hand—I’m holding it out to him. The most desperate solution to a problem yet. I wait while he stands there looking at it, trying to make it out, trying to think, his left hand holding my useless piece of paper, his right on the fastening of the holster. There are two simple words in large print on the pack: Lucky Strike. He closes the holster, and takes the cigarettes instead .… It had worked, it had worked! Like all the other solutions to all the other problems. For twenty cigarettes he let me live. And on I went. Three days and three nights. Past the weeping children, the lost and hungry children, drafted to fight, then abandoned by their commanders. Past the starving slave-labourers walking home to France, to Poland, to Estonia. Through Gammertingen and Biberach and Memmingen. Mindelheim, Kaufbeuren, and Schöngau. Across my beloved homeland. My ruined and dishonoured and beloved homeland.
Bohr My dear Heisenberg! My dear friend!
Margrethe Silence. The silence we always in the end return to.
Heisenberg And of course I know what they’re thinking about.
Margrethe All those lost children on the road.
Bohr Heisenberg wandering the world like a lost child himself.
Margrethe Our own lost children.
Heisenberg And over goes the tiller once again.
Bohr So near, so near! So slight a thing!
Margrethe He stands in the doorway, watching me, then he turns his head away …
Heisenberg And once again away he goes, into the dark waters.
Bohr Before we can lay our hands on anything, our life’s over.
Heisenberg Before we can glimpse who or what we are, we’re gone and laid to dust.
Bohr Settled among all the dust we raised.
Margrethe And