Smilla Jaspersen—Ravn

Smilla Jaspersen—Ravn is a relationship of wary cooperation that hardens into open pressure without losing its moral ambiguity. Ravn, an investigator for the district attorney, first takes Smilla’s complaint about Isaiah’s death seriously enough to reopen the case; later he warns that she can be imprisoned, urges her to abandon the investigation, and nevertheless helps her with information and a protected cassette tape. Their exchanges expose a conflict between institutional control and the stubborn demand to account for a child’s death, while making Ravn himself difficult to classify as either ally or adversary.

First Contact: Listening and Caution

Ravn arrives on a shipyard roof at lunchtime, when the workers have left it deserted. He is short, but his heavily padded gray coat makes his shoulders seem enormous; his gaunt, burned-looking face contrasts with alert eyes. His manner is unhurried: he says he has come because of the nature of the case and Smilla’s thought-provoking complaint, not because such visits are routine. She does not trust him, since his position ties him to the authorities, but his stillness and attention distinguish him from people who merely wait for their turn to speak.

Ravn has already spoken with Professor Loyen and knows that Smilla suspected Isaiah was afraid of heights. When she mentions the tracks in the snow, he listens closely. He does not dismiss her interpretation, and promises to review the investigation from beginning to end in light of what she has told him. For Smilla, who has brought a complaint into an official process she cannot fully trust, this is a real opening: Ravn acknowledges that her evidence merits reconsideration.

The opening comes with conditions. Ravn asks her to withdraw the complaint while he reviews the case, and to refuse comment if the newspapers approach her, referring them to the police instead. His request presents quiet procedure as a way to work undisturbed, but it also asks Smilla to relinquish public pressure and keep her own account out of circulation. She becomes angry. The fracture begins not with a denial of the evidence, but with Ravn’s attempt to manage how and where it may be discussed.

Cooperation Turns to Intimidation

The change in their relationship becomes unmistakable when Ravn appears with two associates in large coats and asks Smilla to speak with him. His composed face gives nothing away; his companions move closer when she hesitates. Later, he tells her that her attempts to interfere are fruitless or damaging, and reminds her that he had already promised to look into the case. The language recasts her persistence as a problem for the investigation, even though that persistence began with the very questions he had agreed to examine.

Ravn then makes the threat explicit. He tells Smilla that the authorities can put her in prison or solitary confinement, and invokes her dossier as something a judge would see. He has assembled evidence of his reach: he can follow her movements, access archives, and obtain information she sent to Greenland’s government and military. The pressure is more than a warning of possible arrest; it is a demonstration that the state can observe and contain her. Ravn’s manner, as Smilla understands it, is not sadistic. He appears to know precisely what instruments are available to him and to use that knowledge with controlled, almost melancholy clarity.

The threat lands especially hard because confinement is not an abstract punishment to Smilla. She associates the locked room with a specifically Greenlandic hell, and her childhood memories are shaped by movement and by her mother’s inability to remain in one place for long. Ravn understands, or at least exploits, the vulnerability created by her need for spatial freedom. At the same encounter Smilla concludes that she has reached the end of the road in her investigation of Isaiah’s death. Their relationship has therefore become a means by which the inquiry itself is stopped: Ravn’s authority does what his earlier appeal to cooperation could not.

Ravn’s Account of the Institution

Later, Ravn gives Smilla and the mechanic an unusually candid account of the system in which he works. He describes a division between those who become judges, retaining faith in justice and the possibility of repair, and those who become investigators and prosecutors, trained to distrust statements, confessions, and appearances. That professional suspicion, he says, is useful only so long as it is not turned against the work itself or the Ministry. Public criticism can be treated as disloyalty; bureaucrats are expected to refer questions upward rather than act as independent individuals.

In Ravn’s description, the institution does not simply reward obedience. It can also retain a difficult, suspicious investigator who has become too expert or indispensable to discard, while keeping him away from public visibility. Such a person may be placed in special assignments, including intelligence work. Ravn says he was told from above to reassure, or “pacify,” the person who filed the complaint. He raised the possibility that the boy’s death involved an irregularity, pointing to the photographs of footprints on the roof, but received no backing from either the police or the Ministry. His account makes his earlier pressure legible as part of a larger bureaucratic effort to manage a potentially embarrassing case, though it does not erase his role in carrying out that pressure.

He also explains that the fire aboard the ship and the death of a man named in the report complicated the matter further. The morning before he speaks with Smilla, he was removed from the case because of its complex nature. Even so, he has entered the basement rooms using a copied key, and he warns that a telephone recovered from the burned ship retained the last number called: Smilla’s. The detail turns their conversation into a practical warning as well as a confession. Ravn knows that she may soon be questioned, and his own access to the case continues despite his official removal.

Casino Encounter: Help, Limits, and Concealment

At the Casino Øresund, Ravn finds Smilla amid a crowd and leads her to a slot machine, where the noise makes their conversation difficult to hear. He tells her that people are looking for her and that a dozen plainclothes officers, as well as the casino’s own representatives, are on duty there. If she stays, she has only minutes of freedom; if she leaves at once, he may be able to delay the pursuit. Once again, he speaks from within the machinery of surveillance, but this time he uses his knowledge to give her a narrow chance to get away.

Smilla returns Ravn’s wallet with a photograph and a newspaper clipping. He accepts them without turning his eyes from the machine; when he hands back the clipping, the photograph is gone. The silent exchange is characteristic of their relationship: assistance is offered, but not in a form that makes the terms or loyalties simple. Ravn says he has done what he could and that Smilla has taken what she was not given; now, he insists, it has to stop. She presses him for knowledge and threatens, if necessary, to sell him out to the “Toenail,” the hard detective who keeps appearing. Ravn laughs briefly, then lets the expression disappear.

He nevertheless tells her about Tørk Hviid’s work in Chiang Rai, where Hviid was a microbiologist specializing in radiation mutations and worked on irradiating poppy seeds to improve yields. Rumors held that he had developed mayam, a substance said to be twice as strong as known heroin in its raw, boiled-down state. Ravn also explains that Hviid later worked in transport, arranging shipments of antiques and overseeing an airlift from Singapore through Japan to Switzerland, Germany, and Copenhagen, avoiding Middle Eastern airspace. He refuses to explain what Hviid discovered in Greenland, telling Smilla to put it out of her mind. His disclosures are substantial, but bounded: Ravn gives her a route into the story while withholding the discovery at its center.

Ravn urges Smilla to visit a friend, invent a plausible explanation for having been aboard the boat, surrender to the police, and obtain a lawyer. He predicts she will be free in two days and tells her to forget the rest. The advice sounds protective and coercive at once: it offers a way to survive the immediate pursuit by submitting to the very authorities whose conduct she distrusts, and requires her to abandon the inquiry.

Before she leaves, Ravn produces the cassette tape he took from her apartment to protect it in case of a search. He hides it again when she reaches for it. Asked why he is helping, he explains that he dislikes the insufficiently explained deaths of little children. The answer is brief but clarifies the durable point of contact between them: despite his institutional role and his efforts to stop Smilla, Isaiah’s death remains a matter Ravn cannot accept as adequately accounted for. He gives her neither the tape nor a promise of continued cooperation. Their relationship ends this encounter still unresolved, balanced between surveillance and protection, concealment and disclosure, and a shared refusal to treat a child’s unexplained death as unimportant.