Føjl

Føjl, identified in Ravn’s recollection as Peter Føjl, is Ravn’s former fellow sailor in the Danish Navy’s Seals and the reason Ravn gives for helping Smilla. His defining action came during an under-ice dive in Greenland: when Ravn lost his safety line and was being carried away by a current, Føjl plunged into the freezing water without an oxygen tank and brought him back. The rescue, which left scars on Føjl’s wrists and ankles, becomes the measure of a debt Ravn says he has never repaid.

Identity and Character

Føjl appears in these passages chiefly through the memories and testimony of others. Ravn describes himself without self-excuse as a man who drinks, smokes, and works too much, neglects his family, and has little to show for his life. He recalls his oldest child asking where he lived while he lay in a bathtub. Against this account of personal failure, Ravn sets his gratitude to Føjl: whatever value his life has, he says, he owes to the younger sailor. His confession makes Føjl more than an old comrade; he is the person whose intervention gave Ravn a future.

Ravn’s account also makes clear that Føjl did not fit the physical expectations of their unit. In training, smaller sailors generally lasted longer than larger men, who might manage one lift before being exhausted. Føjl was large, but moved with the speed of someone small, and the instructors could not wear him down. This combination of strength and speed distinguishes him from the other men, while his composure under interrogation courses supplies a second, less physical measure of endurance.

Navy Service and the Under-Ice Rescue

Føjl and Ravn served together in the Seals when they were in their early twenties. Ravn recalls a regimen designed to turn the men into fighters: they rose at five in the morning to swim half a mile in ice-cold water, then ran for an hour and a half. They also parachuted at night over the sea, three miles from the Scottish coast, and hauled a rubber boat on their heads through Danish woods while officers tried to break down and remake their psyches. Ravn’s description presents the unit’s training as sustained bodily punishment rather than an abstract test of discipline.

The moment that defines their bond occurred during a winter exercise beneath solid sea ice in Greenland. The unit had dynamited a hole through the ice for the dive. Ravn entered a cold belt; condensation from his exhaled air froze and blocked the small valves in his tank. He had not yet attached the safety line that would have helped him return to the opening. Underwater, the hole became impossible to see: from six feet away it was a dark edge, and from fifteen feet it vanished. Ravn panicked, lost the line, and felt the current carrying him down and away through the green, neon-bright water beneath the ice.

Føjl was watching. With no time to wait, he took a lead belt in one hand and jumped into the water without an oxygen tank, carrying only a line. He reached Ravn at a depth of forty feet. Because Føjl was wearing a dry suit, the pressure forced the rubber against his body; at about thirty feet, its edges cut through the skin at his wrists and ankles. Ravn remembers the ascent in clouds of blood. The scars left around Føjl’s wrists and ankles remained a visible trace of the rescue.

Føjl’s action did not end when he brought Ravn toward the surface. He forced water from Ravn’s lungs, gave him artificial respiration, and performed heart massage while they waited for evacuation. The weather was bad, and the exercise had only a small gas-turbine helicopter available; Føjl kept working on Ravn throughout the trip back. They were taken to Scoresbysund, where the men had been exercising. Ravn adds that the cold suited Føjl, a detail that links his physical resilience to the Greenland setting without diminishing the danger of the rescue.

Loyalty and Ravn’s Debt

Ravn tells Smilla directly that he is helping her for Føjl’s sake, not because of romantic feeling for her. He does say he likes Smilla, but contrasts that affection with his love for his wife and identifies his obligation to Føjl as the reason for his actions. The distinction matters: his support is grounded in a loyalty that predates the present investigation and has survived the years since their shared service.

His account of the rescue explains the weight of that obligation. Føjl risked his life without the equipment that would ordinarily protect a diver, then continued resuscitating Ravn while waiting for help and during the return journey. Ravn’s claim that he owes his life to Føjl is therefore literal as well as emotional. The memory also gives their bond a bodily history: the blood from the cut suit edges, the water in Ravn’s lungs, and the long effort to keep his heart and breathing going.

Disappearance and Narrative Significance

In the present, Smilla tells Ravn that Føjl has disappeared. She has tried to call him, but a stranger answered, leaving open the possibility that he is in jail. The passages do not establish what has happened to Føjl or confirm that he has been arrested. His absence is instead the immediate uncertainty around which Ravn’s loyalty becomes active: a man once saved by Føjl now helps pursue the question of where his old comrade has gone.

Føjl’s presence in the narrative is thus built from an absence and a story of return. He is not physically present in the recalled rescue, yet the detail of his intervention transforms Ravn’s account of his own compromised life into an account of a debt still owed. The passage also sets Føjl’s steady conduct against the cold, darkness, and disorientation of the under-ice ordeal. Ravn loses his line and his bearings; Føjl acts decisively, reaches him, and keeps him alive. That remembered difference explains why, years later, Ravn’s answer about whom he is helping is so immediate.