Seidenfaden—Føjl (Mechanic)

Seidenfaden and Føjl are connected by a practical, unequal relationship built around work: Seidenfaden first hires Føjl to dive for antiques, then, years later, finds him unemployed and without a place to live in Copenhagen and suggests that he watch the Baron. Their history emerges during Smilla’s questioning aboard the Kronos, where Føjl’s account turns a seemingly straightforward job into one strand of the surveillance surrounding the Baron.

An Earlier Working Relationship

Føjl says that Seidenfaden hired him when Føjl was working as a diver. The assignment took him to Liai Lake in Burma, where he retrieved idols for Seidenfaden before the state of emergency. Seidenfaden, Føjl explains, was a transport engineer who was dealing in antiques at the time. The recollection establishes a concrete earlier connection between them: Seidenfaden supplied the work and its purpose; Føjl performed the dangerous underwater labor.

The Baron and a Later Job

Føjl next encountered Seidenfaden in Copenhagen. By then he was unemployed and had no place to live. Seidenfaden proposed that he keep an eye on the Baron, giving their renewed association the character of an arrangement made out of need and opportunity rather than a stated personal bond. The suggestion also places Seidenfaden in the chain of people involved in monitoring the Baron, though Føjl says he had not heard of the other two people later uncovered by Smilla.

What the Recollection Reveals

Føjl tells this history while Smilla presses him about who placed people near the Baron. The sequence of his disclosure matters: he first distinguishes Seidenfaden from the other two, then describes the diving work and their later meeting in Copenhagen. His account explains how he came to watch the Baron, but it does not establish how much Seidenfaden knew about the broader arrangement or what he expected Føjl to discover.

The relationship is therefore defined less by intimacy than by recurring employment across very different circumstances: first an antiquities operation at Liai Lake, then an offer of surveillance to a man without work or shelter. That practical continuity connects Føjl’s precarious position to the hidden networks surrounding the Baron, while the limits of his knowledge remain part of the account.