Tork and Nathalie Ravn

Tørk and Nathalie Ravn are connected by a concealed act of violence: Tørk pushed Nathalie, the daughter of investigator Ravn, to her death. The novel reveals the relation in broken stages, first through Ravn’s grief-stricken confirmation over a failing connection and later through Verlaine’s account of the woman who escaped a massacre. Nathalie’s identity turns a distant pursuit into a family loss, while the fragments leave the full circumstances of her death partly out of reach.

The truth emerges over the radio

Smilla pieces together the event while speaking to Ravn through an apparatus whose sound repeatedly comes and goes. She asks him to look at a child beside him and identifies the scene she wants him to confront: the child on a roof, with Tørk behind him, driving him onward rather than stopping him. Smilla compares this to what Tørk did to a woman and asks who she was and what happened. Her account links the remembered roof scene to a second victim, but it is Ravn who supplies the decisive fact.

At first, Ravn’s voice vanishes and returns at a distance. Smilla cries out that she has to know, then names the woman as Ravn. The mechanic covers Smilla’s mouth with an ice-cold hand, and Ravn’s voice fades to an incomplete fragment. When Smilla shakes the apparatus, the connection briefly returns with an abrupt change in tone: Ravn states that Nathalie was his daughter and that Tørk pushed her. The revelation answers Smilla’s question about the woman, while Ravn’s final address—asking whether she is satisfied—makes clear the painful cost of extracting that answer. Before Smilla can ask whether Nathalie took a photograph of Tørk or worked with the police, Ravn’s remaining words disappear into noise and the connection breaks.

Nathalie’s identity in Verlaine’s account

The later disclosure comes in a different setting, when Verlaine is leading Smilla onward and she hesitates, struck by powerlessness. He recounts that, while working for Khum Na, twelve police officers arrived and only one woman escaped. Verlaine calls women vermin; Smilla interrupts with a name, asking whether the survivor was Nathalie Ravn. Verlaine nods, confirming the identification.

He says Nathalie had come over as an English nurse and spoke English and Thai without an accent. He places the episode amid a war involving Laos and Cambodia and, eventually, Burma, with U.S. support, and mentions the many casualties. This account establishes a wartime history and Nathalie’s survival of the police attack, but it does not explain when or how she later encountered Tørk. Its details widen the context around her without filling the gap between the survivor Verlaine describes and the daughter whose death Ravn names.

A relationship disclosed through violence

The connection between Tørk and Nathalie is not presented as a developed personal relationship. What the evidence establishes is an asymmetry: Tørk acts against her, while Ravn bears the loss and Smilla must reconstruct the truth from partial testimony. Ravn’s brief confirmation makes the kinship unmistakable, but the radio failure prevents a fuller account of Nathalie’s life, her connection to the photograph, or the circumstances that brought her into Tørk’s reach.

The two revelations also differ in what they can prove. Ravn identifies Nathalie as his daughter and directly accuses Tørk of pushing her; Verlaine confirms that Nathalie was the woman who escaped the massacre, then supplies her nurse identity and language abilities. Together these fragments connect a private bereavement to the broader history of violence in which Verlaine places her. They do not establish that the police episode itself was the occasion of her death, or resolve Smilla’s question about the photograph.

Narrative significance and unresolved details

The relationship is disclosed through interrupted communication rather than a continuous account. The radio’s fading signal repeatedly withholds the information Smilla seeks, and the most important statement arrives only after she shakes the apparatus: Nathalie was Ravn’s daughter, and Tørk pushed her. The later scene supplies a name and a past, yet still leaves the exact circumstances of her death unstated. This sequence makes the reader assemble the relation from a remembered rooftop, a father’s anguished confirmation, and a survivor’s wartime story.

Nathalie’s death also alters the significance of Ravn’s pursuit. He is not merely an investigator connected to Tørk’s case; he is a father speaking of his own daughter’s death. Smilla’s questioning brings that truth into the open, but the broken connection denies her—and the reader—an explanation of what Ravn was beginning to say about the photograph or Nathalie’s possible police work. What remains is the central fact of the relationship, starkly stated and surrounded by unresolved questions.