Christianshavn matters as the Copenhagen setting of one of the rooftop events Smilla raises with Ravn: in her account, Isaiah recognized the man who had taken him before his fatal fall. The location connects the boy’s death to Smilla’s attempt to reconstruct what happened and to identify the threat behind it.

Place in the Investigation

During a radio conversation with Ravn, Smilla insists on discussing what happened on the roofs in Singapore and Christianshavn. She describes Isaiah walking home alone from kindergarten in December, when a man approached him. The buildings, she says, had no windows facing the parking lot, and it was nearly dark. Smilla proposes that Isaiah recognized the man from weeks spent together and, more particularly, from one of the last days he saw his father die. She also offers another possibility: Isaiah may have associated the man with the death of one of the divers. The account is presented as a reconstruction, not as independently confirmed fact; Ravn responds that she is guessing.

The Rooftop Account

Smilla’s version emphasizes the gap between what the man intended and what Isaiah understood. She reasons that the man may have expected the boy not to recognize him, but Isaiah saw a threat. The precise circumstances of the earlier rooftop events remain uncertain in this exchange, and Smilla explicitly leaves alternatives open. Christianshavn is thus established as a place in the chain of events she is tracing, while the details of what Isaiah witnessed—and how those memories shaped his response—remain partly unresolved.

Narrative Significance

The conversation gives Christianshavn a role as a site of retrospective investigation rather than a fully described setting. Smilla moves from the ordinary circumstance of a child walking home to a hypothesis connecting recognition, earlier deaths, and the later rooftop episode. By framing the explanation as a possibility and having Ravn challenge it, the narrative preserves uncertainty even as it brings the separate events in Singapore and Christianshavn into the same inquiry. The district’s importance is therefore bound to the question of what Isaiah knew and whom he recognized before his death.