Or, to be precise, daybreak, five A.M., just before the cock crows.
Karim, the caretaker of the farm who has been keeping a close watch over him for the past week, comes to wake him up.
He gets along well with Karim. He has gotten used to their long conversations in the evening, after the lamps have been put out and the others have gone to bed. In his poor English, the Pakistani tells him about his five children, his little house in Rahim Yar Khan, his problems. And he, in turn, asks over and over the same questions: What do you have against us? Why do you hate us so? What crime has America committed that deserves such terrible reprobation, and what can we do, or be, to earn back the trust of your people, of all poor people?
But this time, something is wrong.
Even groggy with sleep, he senses this is not the same Karim. He is stony, closed. He can tell from the way Karim tears off the covers and orders him to get dressed that he is no longer the companion of yesterday who gave him his daily lesson of Urdu. And then, when he fumbles at his shoe laces with stiff, clumsy fingers, the Pakistani speaks with a tone he's never used before and it sends a chill through his body.
"Don't bother with that. Where you're going, you won't need laces," he says, tight-lipped, without looking at him.
And with that, with these words, and especially with the way he says them, he understands that something has transpired during the night, that they have made a decision, and the decision is not to set him free.
Suddenly, he feels fear.
He feels a glacial rush flow through his body-and for the first time since he has been here, he feels fear.
And yet, at the same time, he cannot believe it.
No, again, he does not believe it-he cannot believe that, in the space of one night, the situation could have deteriorated to this extent.
To begin with, he is their ally. Their a-l-l-y. A hundred times over the past eight days he has told them that if there were but one American and one Jew left in the world to extend a hand to Muslims in general and those of Pakistan in particular, to reject the absurd theme of the clash of civilizations, and to believe in peace with Islam, he would be that man. Daniel Pearl, Jew, liberal, hostile-as his entire career has demonstrated- to everything stupid and arrogant about America, friend of the neglected, of the downtrodden, of the disinherited.
And he is lucky. He has always been one of those people protected by an uncanny kind of luck. His father is telling the press the same thing at this very moment, and it's what he himself has always said, throughout his fifteen years as a journalist. Danny has a lucky star. Danny has an angel on his shoulder. It would be a fine thing if his luck deserted him now, in Pakistan, on the eve of the day he is due to leave for America! What an ironic turn of events that would be, if his luck turned just as he and Mariane learned they were going to have a son!
To think you could find a Muslim gynecologist in Karachi willing to do a sonogram and tell them the sex of their unborn child, and then not be able to convince these Islamists that they've got the wrong man, that he is not the Zionist Jewish spy denounced in the press. No, it is too absurd! And since all that is absurd is, to the inveterate rationalist, stupid, impossible, unreal, he decides this will never happen and that, ultimately, he'll make his jailers listen to reason.
The door leading to the second room, where the others are, is open. Karim, still obstinate, still evasive, motions to him to move forward. Forget about the shoes. He follows without too much apprehension, breathing in the sweet scent of the nearby bougainvillea and mango trees.
When he reaches the room, he understands.
He still cannot believe it, but he understands.
First of all, their faces.
Their careful air this morning.
This communion of terror he senses in their body language and in the way they watch him enter.
He knew, from talking with them, that Bukhari, the commando, had the blood of at least a dozen Shiites on his hands. He knew that Amjad Hussain Farooqi, or Lahori, the head of Lashkar i-Janghvi, had ties with al-Qaida. But he knew it without knowing it. They may have told him, Bukhari may have retorted, the other night, with a childlike laugh; "You, you may have an angel, but I've got a devil!" -they looked too nice to be killers.
But suddenly, that's it.
Silent, hands crossed behind their backs, their sinister expressions revealed by the unsteady light of the oil lamps, they show their other faces, the ones they wore when they plunged the children of Shiite families who lived near to the Binori Town mosque, in Karachi, into quick lime. He had read an article about it one day. And all at once, he knows.
And, there are three men in the corner of the room, near the door, who weren't here yesterday. Sitting on their heels, with empty soda cans at their feet, they seem distracted, as though their thoughts are elsewhere or they are praying. They wear the red and white scarf of Palestinian fighters, but from the long white tunics pulled up on their calves, their bare feet, and, at their waist, the curved dagger with the handle of horn, the jambiya as they call it in Sanaa, he can tell they are Yemenis.
"Lie down!" Bukhari orders in a dull, hollow voice, as though he were talking to himself.
The ground is bare. It's cold. He doesn't see where he is supposed to lie down.
"Lie down!" Bukhari repeats impatiently, a little louder.
And, to his great surprise, Bukhari walks over and gives him a kick in the shins that makes him fall to his knees as the others jump on him, two of them tying his hands with a piece of green rope, a third whipping an enormous syringe out of the folds of his robe and swiftly pulling up his shirt to give him a shot in the stomach.
He struggles. "Are you crazy? What are you doing? I'm your friend."
But now they're hitting him, and Bukhari is yelling "Shut up!" as they kick him in the stomach, in the head. He goes silent, panting. He tries to protect his face. He is stunned with astonishment and terror. And then, when he is in too much pain to get up by himself, they lift him by the arms and pull him to his feet.
He feels strange now. His mind is fuzzy, his ears are buzzing. He feels like he's being sucked into a vortex of sand. But at the same time, mixed with the fear, the pain, the tears and the torpor, he is flooded with euphoria- as though his mind were a bright flame that has escaped his body and is floating next to him.
"They've drugged me," he says to himself. "The syringe. Those bastards, they've drugged me."
He doesn't really know if the idea is reassuring or makes him even more fearful.
"You're going to repeat after me," Bukhari tells him, taking a piece of paper out of his pocket and motioning to one of the Yemenis who has a camcorder that, blinded by tears and the sweat dripping into his eyes, he initially takes for a gun about to kill him point blank: "My name is Daniel Pearl. I am a Jewish-American from Encino, California, USA."
Pearl repeats it. It's hard, he's out of breath, but he repeats it.
"You are going to say, 'I come from, on my father's side of the family is Zionists. My father is Jewish. My mother is Jewish. I am Jewish.'"
Pearl would like to tell the Yemeni that he is too close, that's not the way to film, that the result will be an amateur cameraman's image of a face with "fish eyes." But, despite the strange state they have inflicted upon him, this bizarre mixture of euphoria and pain racking his body and mind, he is lucid enough to realize this is no time to give advice. And so he repeats the phrase again.
"Articulate," says Bukhari. "Speak more slowly and distinctly: 'My family follows Judaism. We have made numerous family visits to Israel. In the town of B'nei Brak, in Israel, there is a street called Chaim Pearl Street which is named after my great-grandfather who was one of the founders of the town.'"
How do they know that, Pearl wonders? Where did they go to dig up that information? B'nei Brak is a small town. And the fame of poor Chaim Pearl, his forebear, has never gone beyond the close circle of his parents and his two sisters. So he's not going to repeat that, he says to himself. He can't let these barbarians put their dirty hands on this little family secret. But Farooqi is already walking over to him, and he sees the huge shoe that hurt him just a moment ago, and so, with a tentative half-smile he hopes will be perceptible on film, he thinks better of it and repeats, "My family follows Judaism. We have made numerous family visits to Israel . . . "
Bukhari seems content. He clears his throat. He spits on the ground. He congratulates the Yemeni, seeming not to realize that this incompetent is too close-but no matter. And he gestures to Pearl, a sign of encouragement, as if to say "You see! You can do it!" and it gives him a moment's hope.
"Repeat again," he says, after peering at length at his paper. "Repeat this: 'Not knowing anything about my situation, not being able to communicate with anybody, only now realizing that some of the people in Guantanamo Bay must be in a similar situation.'"
That's all right. That's what he really feels. He can agree with condemning the conditions of detention of the prisoners at Guantanamo. The only problem is he's out of breath, and his delivery is too jerky. The Yemeni makes a face. They'll have to re-shoot it.
"Again," Bukhari continues: "I've come to realize that this is the sort of problems that Americans are going to have anywhere in the world now. We can't be secure, we can't walk around free, as long as our government policies are continuing and we allow them to continue."
It's not because he is unwilling. No, he can say this too, if necessary. But the drug must be taking effect, and his head hurts. His legs are like a rag doll's and he's having increasing difficulty concentrating. Can Bukhari understand that? Can he give him some shorter sentences to say now?
Bukhari, suddenly understanding, almost human, chin in hand as though the whole scene deserved contemplation, dictates this sentence: "We Americans cannot continue to bear the consequences of our government's actions . . . "
And then the rest, one after another, patiently, as though dealing with a child: "Such as the unconditional support given to the state of Israel . . . Twenty-four abuses of the veto power to justify the massacre of children . . . And the support for the dictatorial regimes in the Arab and Muslim world . . . And also the continued American military presence in Afghanistan."
There. It's done. The Yemeni turns off the camera. Are they going to let him sit down now, give him a little water? He feels so terrible.
And then, an extraordinary thing happens.
Bukhari goes and turns up the oil lamps to provide a much brighter light.
He barks an order to Fazal, who has been sitting curled up, as if he were cold, in the corner with the Yemenis ever since they came into the room. He hurriedly jumps up and crosses the room, eyes wide and staring, and steps just behind Pearl.
At a sign from Bukhari, without a word, the other Pakistanis get up and leave. Before they shut the door quickly behind them, he glimpses the dirty light of dawn, the clouds moving in the sky, a flock of birds scattering. Just for an instant, he can feel the beneficent coolness of the early morning breeze on his swollen face.
The only ones left in the room besides Fazal Karim and the out-of-breath cameraman, fussing with his camcorder, are the other two Yemenis, who get up and unsheathe their daggers. One of them comes and stands behind him, next to Fazal Karim, the other stands close at his left, practically pressed against him, the dagger in his right hand.
And then, all of a sudden he sees him.
He couldn't see him until now, because he was in the shadows, and anyway, without his glasses, he can't see more than six feet in front of him.
He sees his eyes, bright, feverish, too deeply set, and strangely pleading-for half a second, he wonders if he too has been drugged.
He sees the weak chin, the barely perceptible trembling of the lips, the outsized ears and bony nose, and the straight, tar-black hair.
He sees his hand, large, hairy, with its gnarled joints and its dirty fingernails, and a long, grainy scar that runs from thumb to wrist and seems to cut it in two.
Then finally, he sees the knife. He has never seen a knife so close up, he says to himself. The handle of cow horn, the leather. A chip near the handle, a bit of rust. And then, there's another thing. The Yemeni sniffles. He blinks and sniffles simultaneously, as if he were keeping time. He can't seem to stop sniffling. Does he have a cold? No. It's a tic. He thinks: That's funny, this is the first time I've ever seen a Muslim with a tic. And then he says to himself: The executioners, in the past . . . it was a good idea to put a hood over their heads, to hide their faces . . . It's hot. His head hurts. He wants desperately to sleep.
The green light on the camera flashes on.
Fazal faces him and ties his wrists together and then, stepping behind him, grabs him by the hair.
The nape of the neck, he thinks, shaking his head and trying to free himself-the center of voluptuousness, the weight of the world, the hidden eye of the Talmud, the executioner's axe.
And the gaze of this man, he thinks, looking at the Yemeni with the knife. For a fraction of a second their eyes meet, and he realizes, at that instant, that this man is going to slit his throat.
He would like to say something.
He feels he must tell them, one last time, that he is a journalist, a real one, and not a spy. He wants to shout-"Would a spy have trusted Omar Sheikh? Would a spy have come here so confidently, without any cover?"
But it must be the drug, having its final effect.
Or else it's the rope cutting into his wrists and hurting him.
The words won't come.
Talking becomes difficult, like breathing under water.
He tries to turn his head, to beseech Karim with his eyes one last time. The cigarette, remember the cigarette you offered me last night? Don't you remember everything I told you about the way we American journalists helped the Afghan mujahideen during the jihad against the Russians? Don't you remember, you were so moved by it, you put your hands on my shoulders, your brusque and brotherly embrace? But Karim holds him with an iron hand so that he can't move an inch.
And then, like static jamming his mind, thoughts seem to slither in lazily from obscure corners: His bar mitzvah, in Jerusalem. His first ice cream, in a cafe on Dizengoff, in Tel Aviv with his father. George, the Bulgarian shoe salesman he met in the tube in London. His friend, the Belgian bass player. The Irish fiddler he had played with last year in a Soho bar. The soft, whiney sounds of the shelling by the liberation army of the Tiger, that last night at Asmara. His wedding to Mariane, in a chateau near Paris. And Hemingway's matador, leading with his left shoulder, the sword that strikes the bone and refuses to go further. Yet it takes only a third of the blade, if it comes from high enough, and if the matador's aim is true, to reach the aorta of the bull, if he is not too massive. His father, again, carrying him on his shoulders coming home from a walk. His mother's laugh. A round loaf of French bread, the deep, tasty crevices of its crust.
As the Yemeni killer grabs the collar of his shirt and rips it open, he thinks for a moment of other hands. Caresses. Games of his childhood. Nadour, the Egyptian friend at Stanford he used to spar with, between classes, for fun-whatever became of him? He thinks of Mariane, that last night, so beautiful, so desirable-women want what, in the end? Passion? Eternity? She was so proud, Mariane, when he got his Gilani scoop! And he misses her so! Had he really been reckless, should he have been more wary of this Omar? But how could you know? How could you suspect? He thinks of the dying Kosovar refugee who clutched his hand. He thinks of the sheep he saw suffocate, last year, in Teheran. He thinks he prefers Bombay and the Secret Book of the Brahmin to Karachi and the Koran. His memories are like horses on a carousel whirling round in his head.
He feels the hot, slightly rank breath of the panting Yemeni.
From the courtyard, he smells a sweetish odor that, until now, he hadn't noticed and that, absurdly, bothers him: Funny, he thinks, when you haven't bathed for eight days . . . you can easily get used to your own stench. . . but that of others . . .
He hears strange noises that come from far away and sound like the echo you hear when you put a conch shell to your ear. He even thinks, for an instant, are those footsteps? Voices? Someone coming to save me?
It's funny, up until this morning he would have thought the courtyard was silent, you couldn't hear anything. But now, he hears everything. You can hear a rustling, a furious murmur of sounds, all blending together. An avalanche of unsuspected sounds. Never before had he listened so closely to the background sounds of silence, the sounds he wishes would block out the breathing of the Yemeni.
A moment of dizziness.
His sweat turning cold.
His Adam's apple that struggles in his frail neck.
He is seized by a huge hiccup, and he vomits.
"Straighten him up!" says the Yemeni killer. The other Yemeni, behind him, grabs him under the arms like a sack of potatoes and sets him up straight.
"Better than that!" he says, stepping back, like an artist getting a better view of his painting. And now it is Karim's turn to pull his head up, face towards the ceiling, the bared neck straining with the shout that is about to come, though leaning a bit to the side.
"Get out of the way!" the killer says to the Yemeni with the camera, who is too close and will hamper his movements. The man with the camera steps aside, very slowly, as though filled with a sacred terror at the thought of what is about to happen.
His eyes closed, Pearl feels the motion of the knife as it approaches his throat. He hears a rustle in the air next to him and realizes the Yemeni is practicing. He still cannot believe it. But he's cold, he's shivering, his entire body recoils. He would like to stop breathing, make himself small, disappear. At least, he would like to lower his head and cry. Has he done this before, he wonders. Is the man a pro? And what if he's not? What if he bungles it and has to start over again? His sight is going foggy. His last vision of the world, he tells himself. He is sweating and shivering at the same time. He hears a dog barking, far away. A fly buzzing, close to him. And then, the squawk of a chicken that gets mixed up with his own cry, astonishment mixed with pain, inhuman.
And that was it. The knife entered the flesh gently. Gently, ever so gently, he began under the ear, far back on the neck. People have told me it is something of a ritual. Others, that it's simply the classic method for cutting the vocal chords and preventing the victim from screaming. But Pearl reared up. He gasped furiously for air through his butchered larynx. And his reaction was so violent, the strength he finally summoned so great, that he bucked out of Karim's grip, roaring like a beast, and collapsed with a groan in his own blood, that gushed like water. The Yemeni with the camera is shouting too. Half way through, his hands and arms covered with blood, the Yemeni killer looks at him and stops. The camera was jammed. Because of the camera, they have to stop, and begin all over again.
Twenty seconds, perhaps thirty, go by, time for the Yemeni to start over again and reframe the image. Pearl is lying down on his stomach now. The half-severed head is separated from the torso and lies far back on the shoulders. The fingers of his hands dig into the ground like claws. He is no longer moving. He moans. He splutters. He is still breathing, but in fits and starts, a groan cut with gurgles and whines like a puppy's. Karim puts his fingers in the wound to clear the way for the knife. The second Yemeni inclines one of the lamps in order to get a better look and then, feverishly, as though drunk on the sight, the odor, the taste of hot blood that spouts from the carotid as though from a broken pipe, splashing in his face, he cuts Pearl's shirt and then rips it off. The killer, too, finishes his task. The knife slides back into the first wound, the cervical vertebrae crack and blood spurts in his eyes again, blinding him. The head, rolling back and forth as though it had a life of its own, finally comes off and Karim brandishes it, like a trophy, for the camera.
Pearl's face, crumpled like a rag. His lips, at the moment the head is detached, seem animated with a last movement. And the black liquid, of course, flows from his mouth. I've often seen people who had been killed. None, for me, can be worse than this one face I did not see and continue to imagine.
CHAPTER 5 WITH THE PEARLS.
"No, that's not it . . . "
I'm in Los Angeles, Mulholland Drive. Sky that color you see only here. Light that hurts your eyes. A small house by the side of the road, with a garage, potted flowers hanging from balconies, a profusion of small cacti. Cautiously, discreetly, with all possible tact, I am in the process of sharing my preliminary conclusions with Daniel Pearl's parents, including my version of their son's death.
"No, no, that's not it," interrupts the father, Judea, who looks to me like the genial French humorist Francis Blanche, with kind intelligent eyes that occasionally flash with infinite sadness. "It's true there was a video tape. But it was in two parts. I'm sure it was taped at two different times of the day. You can't go ahead as if the two parts say the same thing, or as if they're said in the same tone."
What are these two parts? And what does that change?
"Everything," he replies. "It changes everything. You have the part when he talks about the United States, the prisoners in Guantanamo. There he actually talks like a robot. The words are obviously dictated. Maybe he's even being shown cue cards, off camera. He trips over certain words. He puts in these long 'uhhhs' between words. He deliberately mispronounces things. He says 'Amrica,' for instance, which is what they must have written on the card. What I mean is that he's doing everything to let us know, we who are going to get the message, that he doesn't believe a word of what he's saying. And then you have the second part, where he says, 'My name is Daniel Pearl . . . I am a Jewish-American . . . I live in Encino, California . . . On my father's side I come from a family of Zionists . . . My father is Jewish . . . My mother is Jewish . . . I am Jewish."
Judea knows these words by heart. I sense that he could recite them to the end, like a poem. At certain points he takes on intonations and a voice that are not entirely his but Danny's, his son's . . . As for the other part of the message, which concerns Guantanamo and American policy, I find it strange that he seems so certain that it was dictated and that Danny is reciting it against his will. I would have thought otherwise. I had thought and written otherwise, but I let him speak.
"Just listen to this second part. Listen . . . "
His face has brightened. He's smiling. He's looking at his wife who is smiling too. She's fragile, heartrending, a sharp pretty face half hidden by a fringe of jet-black hair and a pair of glasses, a tiny figure who floats in her shift, halfway between the living and the dead. He takes her hand, strokes it imperceptibly. They have the same look that they have in the magnificent photo in the staircase to the office, dating from the time, forty-three years ago, when they arrived from Israel. The house is full of photos of Danny, of course. But there are also photos of his sisters, Michele and Tamara. Of Mariane, his wife, and little Adam. And there are two magnificent, glorious, resplendent portraits of them-the little Iraqi Jewish girl and the little Polish Jewish boy landing in America like the Ellis Island immigrants, because they know that this is the land of liberty. And suddenly that's what they look like.
"That part about being Jewish, he said that. Those are his words. Those are his sentences. Nobody is forcing him to do anything at that point. There are no cue cards. How many times do I have to tell you that two plus two makes four, that I'm a Jew, that I'm proud of it-that's what he's telling them. I imagine at that point he still trusts them. He doesn't know what's going to happen. So he's talking to them, telling them where he comes from, his background. We all have roots, don't we? And these are mine. You're Moslems. I'm a Jew. But ultimately we're human before anything else."