Birgo Lander—Føjl

Birgo Lander and Føjl are former Danish naval comrades whose friendship rests on more than shared service: during an exercise in Greenland, Føjl rescued Lander from beneath the ice and kept him alive through the return to safety. Years later, Lander makes that debt the reason he helps Smilla. His account turns a wartime act of rescue into the bond’s continuing force: Lander may judge himself harshly, but he credits his survival and the value of his life to Føjl.

A bond forged in naval service

Lander recalls serving with Føjl in the navy’s Seals when both men were in their early twenties. The training was punishing and deliberately designed to remake its recruits as fighters. For six months, they rose at five in the morning to swim in icy water and run for an hour and a half. Their exercises also included night parachute jumps over the sea off Scotland and hauling an inflatable boat through the Danish woods. Lander remembers the officers’ treatment as an effort to break down and rearrange the recruits’ psyches.

The physical demands exposed differences among the trainees. Smaller men often endured the work better than larger ones, who could manage a single lift before tiring. Føjl seemed to combine the advantages of both: despite his size, he was as fast as a smaller man, resisted exhaustion, and could not be broken in interrogation exercises. Lander remembers his characteristic friendly stare and immovability as signs of a steadiness that training could not defeat.

Føjl’s rescue beneath the ice

Their decisive test came during a winter dive beneath sea ice in Greenland. The divers had blasted a hole through the frozen surface, but Lander descended before attaching the safety line used to find the way back. A strong current and a cold belt disrupted his route; he lost the line and feared he could no longer see the opening. In the account Lander later gives, he describes being carried away from the hole and toward what felt like the realm of the dead.

Føjl acted without waiting for an oxygen tank. He took a lead belt, carried a line, and entered the water to reach Lander. He found him about forty feet down. The dry suit Føjl wore came under increasing pressure as he descended, and its rubber edges cut into his skin at the wrists and ankles. Lander’s lasting memory of their ascent is a cloud of blood, but the essential fact of the story is the risk Føjl accepted to bring him back.

At the surface, the rescue was not over. Føjl forced water from Lander’s lungs and gave him artificial respiration. Because the weather was bad and the exercise unit had only a small gas-turbine helicopter, help could not arrive quickly; Føjl continued heart massage and artificial respiration during the long trip back. They were eventually taken to Scoresbysund. The remembered scars around Føjl’s wrists and ankles remain a visible trace of what the rescue cost him.

Loyalty carried into the present

Years later, Lander helps Smilla while she and Føjl are following him. When Smilla asks whether he is doing it for her, Lander distinguishes personal affection from the reason for his action: he likes her, but says he is helping for Føjl’s sake. The explanation makes clear that the rescue is not a closed episode in the past. It has become an enduring obligation that shapes Lander’s choices in the present.

Lander describes himself with little self-congratulation. He says he drinks, smokes, and works too much, neglects his family, and feels that his life is not worth much. He recalls his oldest child once asking where he lived while he was lying in the bathtub. Against this account of personal failure, he sets his debt to Føjl: whatever his life is worth, he owes it to that little Føjl. The contrast gives his loyalty its emotional weight. His help for Smilla is neither a claim to virtue nor an expression of uncomplicated closeness; it is repayment to the man who kept him alive.

Memory, absence, and the meaning of the friendship

Lander’s recollection reaches Smilla through a shared journey in difficult weather. As she and the mechanic travel in a Zodiac, she corrects their course when snowfall obscures their view. Lander tells the story while they huddle together in the boat, and its movement through the present scene links the old rescue to their current effort to reach Føjl. The memory is not abstract history: Lander’s account explains why he is willing to help now.

When Lander has finished recounting the rescue, Smilla says that Føjl has disappeared and that a stranger answered when she tried to call him; she wonders whether he may be in jail. The exchange places the old act of loyalty beside a new uncertainty. Lander’s account does not resolve where Føjl is or what has happened to him, but it establishes the depth of the obligation that still binds his former comrade to him. Their friendship is defined by a stark imbalance of remembered risk: Føjl once acted to save Lander’s life, and Lander now acts because he believes that life remains his to repay.