Smilla Jaspersen—Bernard Jakkelsen

The relationship between Smilla Qaavigaaq Jaspersen and Bernard Jakkelsen is a fragile alliance forged under coercion aboard the Kronos. It begins with Jakkelsen treating Smilla as a target for sexual and physical domination, then turns into an uneasy exchange: he knows the ship’s concealed passages, while she insists on learning what the vessel is carrying. His eventual death, with her jacket still covering him, leaves their connection suspended between self-preservation, reluctant care, and the limits of what either can do for the other.

Encounter and Unequal Terms

Jakkelsen first appears as a man who makes even ordinary shipboard encounters threatening. The crew use surnames, and Smilla learns that he is called Jakkelsen; on deck he is the exception to the crew’s subdued discipline, smoking beneath a no-smoking sign. When he announces that she is expected to clean cabins for eleven men and four officers, he turns the assignment into a sexual taunt, implying he will leave things on the floor for her to pick up. The laughter around him is subdued, but his dominance shapes the room.

Smilla refuses the role he is trying to impose. She grabs his lower lip and bends his little finger backward until he drops to his knees. She tells him she will clean his cabin by opening the porthole and washing his things away with salt water. The threat reverses the immediate balance of power, but it does not make them equals: Jakkelsen does not retaliate then, and the encounter establishes instead a wary knowledge of each other’s capacity for violence.

Hostility and Coercion

Their conflict sharpens when Smilla approaches the forward cargo hold. She sees Verlaine sitting on a huge metal container below the open hatch before someone seizes her from behind. Jakkelsen is the assailant. After the ship rolls and they fall against the winch controls, he tells her that people aboard keep to their own areas and warns her to get lost. His fear, newly visible in his face and voice, suggests that the hold is not merely a forbidden space but a place whose secrets expose him to danger as well.

Later, Jakkelsen breaks into Smilla’s cabin. He has waited for her to move, then opens the door into her head, knocks her down, and enters carrying a marline spike with a wooden handle and hollow steel tip. He strikes her right ankle with its heavy end and demands the small plastic container she has. Smilla cannot speak through the pain, but hands it over. This is not a negotiated exchange: Jakkelsen uses the injury to force compliance, and the resulting swollen foot remains a physical cost of their relationship.

Knowledge Becomes Leverage

The balance shifts when Smilla makes access to information the condition of cooperation. She asks to see the forward cargo hold, then presses Jakkelsen to take her to the boat deck and explain what the ship’s tank is designed to hold. Her questions are tied to the larger mystery she is pursuing, which began with a boy falling from a roof; she believes the ship’s cargo may connect to events whose links have not yet been untangled.

Jakkelsen can provide what she cannot obtain alone. He guides her through a narrow passage beginning in the engine room, down between the engine-platform beams, through a watertight fire door, and into the ship’s concealed routes beneath the quarterdeck and toward the wing tanks. After snorting a line of powder from Smilla’s pocket mirror, he becomes a confident guide, though his broken front tooth gives his speech a lisp. His expertise is useful, but it is entangled with drug use and coercion. Smilla can bargain for his knowledge; she cannot make him dependable.

The alliance is also shaped by the danger Jakkelsen sees around them. He tells Smilla that he saved her life and describes waiting below while people who might be searching for her return. His account of locked doors, two people on bridge watch, illuminated decks, and the risk of a marine inquiry makes clear that he is calculating how a disappearance could be noticed. Whether spoken as warning or self-defense, his explanation reveals that survival aboard the ship depends on knowing its routines and constraints as well as its machinery.

A Bargain Without Trust

Jakkelsen resists helping Smilla further, asking how she can demand it after he rescued her and warning that another man would cut him into pieces. Smilla does not answer with reassurance; she repeats that she has to know what the tank is meant to hold. The gap between them is not repaired by gratitude. He wants recognition of his rescue and fears the consequences of assisting her, while she treats the information as necessary to her investigation.

When Smilla later asks him to help her reach the boat deck at night, Jakkelsen objects that the area is restricted and tells her to jump overboard instead. The exchange shows the alliance at its most provisional: she needs his access and knowledge, but he is neither freely willing nor consistently able to help. Their cooperation is driven by immediate necessity, not a shared destination or settled trust.

Death and the Unresolved Bond

At the offshore platform, Smilla finds Jakkelsen sitting in the shadow outside the light. Minutes earlier he had moved quickly; now he is hunched over, hot with sweat, and too limp to stand. The metal clink in his clothing leads her to his syringe. She remembers his assurance that he could take care of himself, but recognizes that he needs medical help beyond what she can provide. She pulls her jacket over him to shield his face from the rain and slips the syringe back into his pocket.

The gesture does not erase the violence between them. Smilla reflects that trying to save someone determined to destroy himself may require an idealism she no longer possesses; even so, she covers him rather than leaving him exposed. Later, in a case shaped like an electric bass, she finds Jakkelsen’s corpse folded into a space too small for his body. His head has been pressed toward his right shoulder and his legs bent behind his thighs; his eyes are open, and her jacket is still over him. It is the final material trace of their connection: not proof of reconciliation, but evidence that the adversary who had become a reluctant guide was also someone Smilla could not simply regard as an enemy.