Smilla Jaspersen—Peter Føjl

Smilla Jaspersen and Peter Føjl’s relationship develops from cooperation during Smilla’s investigation into a tentative, embodied intimacy. Peter becomes someone she can approach in fear and desire, but happiness does not dissolve her guardedness: she longs to keep him close while defending the private space that lets her remain herself.

From investigation to trust

The relationship takes shape alongside the investigation rather than apart from it. When Peter shows Smilla a map connected to another expedition, she notices a pencilled margin note identifying a revision based on the 1966 Carlsberg Foundation expedition. Their exchange is workmanlike, but the scene places them together over evidence that opens a new direction in her inquiry. Peter is not simply an object of affection; he is a companion in the practical business of finding out what happened.

That partnership carries a different weight when Smilla goes to Peter in the middle of the night. He comes to the door in his pajamas, still groggy, and she tells him she is frightened but will go ahead anyway. His half-awake smile and assurance that he knew she would do it do not remove the danger. They show, instead, that he recognizes her resolve and is present when she admits fear. For Smilla, who is accustomed to acting alone, that small exchange marks a movement toward trust.

Attraction and bodily intimacy

Smilla’s attraction is not presented as a settled certainty. In a telephone booth, Peter steps in beside her, filling the cramped space with his large frame. She observes his hands: smooth and clean despite being used to hard work, and despite his occasional job at a garage. The close quarters make his physical presence inescapable, but her response is not merely discomfort. She recognizes that she takes pleasure in standing beside him and has to stop herself from prolonging the conversation just to remain there.

Later, Peter pours drinks, and Smilla leaves her glass untouched. She explicitly chooses to kiss him before drinking, refusing to let the encounter be mistaken for something caused by intoxication. The decision gives the intimacy a clear measure of agency: she wants the kiss to be hers, not an act she can disown. In the moment, desire is experienced bodily and completely, as if her whole body has gathered in her mouth.

The following morning gives the relationship a quieter register. Peter lies asleep beside her, his face pressed into the sheet; Smilla studies his brown hair, streaked with gray, and the physical details she had not been able to look at in the same way before. Happiness comes over her not as a possession but as a force moving through the room and the world. The change is not that she has become secure. She first imagines letting the feeling pass without demanding more, then immediately wants Peter beside her again tomorrow. She calls this her chance, and her last chance, exposing how swiftly tenderness becomes bound to fear of loss.

Cultural memory and the limits of explanation

Smilla’s history shapes what closeness means to her. She recalls a Greenlandic origin account in which two men, both sorcerers, create children after one transforms his body to give birth. She also describes her mother as living across roles that European categories would tend to separate: she bore and raised children and cleaned skins, while also shooting, paddling a kayak, and bringing home meat. These memories establish a world in which identity and survival are not easily contained by imposed divisions.

Her childhood memories also bind freedom to physical space. In her account, Greenland has no prisons, and the contrast with Copenhagen’s use of imprisonment becomes the image of the locked room as a specifically Greenlandic hell. She remembers a childhood spent almost never indoors and a mother for whom remaining in one place for long was unthinkable. Smilla describes spatial freedom as something she cradles and worships. That history helps explain why intimacy with Peter cannot simply mean surrendering every boundary: attachment is desirable, but confinement is not.

Smilla is tempted, while happy beside Peter, to explain her connection to Inuit life. She believes understanding another culture comes through living within it, learning its language, and being tolerated as a guest; once the foreign is grasped, she argues, the urge to explain it falls away. At the same time, she feels the wish to tell Peter why she values a way of living that can hold irreconcilable contradictions without forcing a simplified answer. She recognizes that happiness encourages her to assume that sharing the present means Peter can also contain her past. The thought makes intimacy a risk as well as a refuge: being met in the present does not automatically guarantee that another person can receive the whole history behind it.

Closeness without surrender

Their later playfulness brings that tension into a concrete gesture. Peter carries Smilla up the stairs; she kicks in his arms, and they laugh quietly to avoid attracting attention. The movement recalls for her the Greenlandic custom of a bridegroom carrying a bride to the sled on the wedding night. Yet the moment does not settle into a romantic promise. Peter’s sweetness and awkward politeness still seem dreamlike to her, vivid but not entirely anchored in reality.

At the door, Smilla reaches for the frame and feels the broken, ragged ends of tape on the hinge. She guides Peter’s hands to the damaged tape, making him understand that her apartment has been entered or tampered with. When he whispers that they could sneak away, she refuses to leave the space undefended. Her apartment is sacrosanct: she says that anything can be taken from her, but she must have a corner somewhere for herself. The declaration is not a rejection of Peter. It is the condition under which closeness remains possible—a relationship in which she can reach for another person without giving up the boundary that protects her independence.