Ving-Føjl (Mechanic)

The relation between Ving and the mechanic is built around surveillance, but its history is less direct than Smilla first assumes: Ving did not recruit the mechanic to watch Isaiah and Juliane. Seidenfaden hired him first, and only later did the mechanic take on the task of keeping an eye on the Baron, bringing him into the orbit of the people Ving was monitoring.

Surveillance and mistaken assumptions

When Smilla asks how the mechanic came to live in the White Palace, she already thinks she knows the answer. She proposes that Ving put him there to watch Isaiah and Juliane. The mechanic shakes his head, and Smilla revises her theory: perhaps the mechanic was there first, and Ving moved Isaiah and Juliane in so they could be watched or questioned about what they knew and remembered. In that version, Juliane’s unsuccessful request to move to a lower floor becomes part of the surveillance arrangement: the two were meant to remain near the mechanic.

The correction matters. The mechanic says that Seidenfaden hired him, and that he had never heard of Isaiah or Juliane until Smilla uncovered their connection. Ving’s presence in the arrangement is thus not its starting point. The apparent closeness between the mechanic, the Baron, Isaiah, and Juliane arose from a chain of decisions whose original purpose was not the one Smilla initially inferred.

Seidenfaden’s intermediary

Before becoming the Baron’s watcher, the mechanic had worked as a diver for Seidenfaden, a transport engineer who was then dealing in antiques. The mechanic describes diving for idols in Liai Lake in Burma, before the state of emergency. The account places their relationship in an earlier, practical arrangement: Seidenfaden employed the mechanic’s diving skills before later drawing on him again in Copenhagen.

The mechanic says that he ran into Seidenfaden in Copenhagen when he was unemployed and had nowhere to live. Seidenfaden suggested that he keep an eye on the Baron. This sequence makes the surveillance assignment an act of recruitment through an existing working relationship, offered at a moment when the mechanic was without work or housing. Ving’s connection to him is consequently indirect: Ving figures in the monitoring network, but Seidenfaden is the person who hired and placed the mechanic.

The missing cassette tape

The mechanic’s account also connects the surveillance arrangement to Tørk’s search for the cassette tape Isaiah had taken. Tørk knew Isaiah had taken something; after the glacier moved, the searchers looked for the tape for two weeks without finding it. Tørk then chartered a helicopter to Thule to find the Inuit members of the 1966 expedition. They would not return with him, but he obtained a description of the route. The mechanic identifies this as the tape the Baron took, and as the object Smilla found.

The tape gives the relationship its larger stakes. The mechanic’s placement near the Baron belongs to a network of watching and concealed knowledge, while the pursuit of Isaiah’s tape links that network to the older expedition and its route. Yet the account preserves a crucial distinction: although Smilla initially supposes that Ving installed the mechanic to watch Isaiah and Juliane, the mechanic traces his own employment to Seidenfaden, and says the other two were unknown to him until Smilla uncovered them.