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Daniel always talked to strangers Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=%2Fnews%2F2002%2F07%2F21%2Fwperl21.xmlhttp://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=%2Fnews%2F2002%2F07%2F21%2Fwperl21.xml
'Daniel always talked to strangers. The last strangers he met were a different breed'
By Olga Craig
(Filed: 21/07/2002)
Ruth Pearl flinches and clamps her hands over her ears, unable to listen. Her big brown eyes which, only moments before, had shone with zeal and hope, snap shut.
Her face, seconds ago animated and excited as she talked about the projects that the Daniel Pearl Foundation has already begun in memory of her son, contorts in anguish. "No, I cannot hear this," she says in a whisper. "I can't dwell on this. That day. The day we were told that our hopes for Danny's safe release were gone. That Daniel was dead."
By her side Judea, her husband, curls a protective arm around her shoulders. He murmurs words of comfort into her hair. Then they sit in silence, each absorbing the other's grief. He, protective and soothing, is solemn-eyed and ashen: she is huddled in pain.
For a moment, it seems, she believes that if she does not speak, does not hear of her only son's murder then it did not happen. But she knows that that is not so.
That day, when a white-faced FBI agent stood in the doorway of her San Fernando Valley home and softly replied "yes" when she tentatively asked: "Is it bad?" and then said "yes" again when she mouthed the words: "Is he dead?", cannot be made to go way. For Ruth Pearl, time is divided into life before January 23 and life since: life before Daniel, 38, a reporter with the Wall Street Journal was kidnapped and murdered by Islamic extremists, one of them British, in Pakistan; and life, an agony of loss, since.
"Oh, how I wish I could have just a minute, a second, of that time before," she says. "That time when I knew peace." Her brave words to me earlier - of the foundation's work in fostering cross-cultural awareness - have given way to the cold clutch of maternal grief.
Daniel Pearl's murder, probably little more than a week after his kidnapping, was brutal. In a video delivered to the American consulate, a hand is seen cutting his throat and then decapitating him. Daniel's dismembered body - hacked into 10 pieces and found with his severed head placed on the base of his neck - was discovered in a shallow grave in a Karachi suburb on May 17.
Daniel's "crime" was not, as his captors claimed, that he was a CIA agent, but that he was a Jewish American. Last week, British-born Omar Saeed Sheikh was sentenced to be executed for luring Daniel to his death, and his three accomplices were each jailed for 25 years.
It would have been "painful", the Pearls admit, had those responsible not been brought to justice. Other than that they will say only that their son's killers are "of another species".
Instead, the couple concentrate on struggling to celebrate the life of their charismatic and compassionate son. All those who knew Daniel speak of his gentleness, his caring character, his trusting and open nature. Some believe that it was the latter trait, perceived as naive in Pakistan where Islamic fundamentalism is peppered with violence, that led him to trust Sheikh as a contact while working on an article about links between Richard Reid, the alleged shoe bomber, and al-Qaeda.
His mother, however, knows that her son would not have taken unnecessary risks. He had, at one time, called for all foreign reporters to be trained in how to react in a kidnap situation. And he had undertaken to advise less experienced reporters on the dangers of foreign reporting. He had, however, a much greater reason to guard his safety.
"He had too much in his life," Ruth, 66, a retired computer consultant, says. She turns to the mantlepiece, dominated by a 4ft-high photograph of Daniel and Mariane, his wife, on their wedding day, and points to a portrait of a tiny baby.
The photograph, the latest of Adam, Daniel's only child, who was born four months after his father's murder, arrived in that morning's post. Next month the Pearls will see their grandson for the first time when Mariane, who lives in Paris, visits. So far they have been able only to listen to him gurgle on the telephone.
"Two days before Danny was kidnapped he called to say Mariane's tests had revealed the baby was a boy. He was so excited," Ruth says. At the time, she had wanted to confide in her son about her fears for his welfare.
Only the day before she had admitted to her daughter, Tamara, that she was going to ask Daniel to leave Pakistan because she was so concerned. "But Danny had an airline ticket out of Karachi for January 24, so I decided not to say anything. I knew he was leaving."
Just weeks before, in one of Daniel's regular telephone calls, he had told Ruth that he and Mariane were considering settling in San Francisco and asked her to house-hunt for them. He had planned to come home for a family reunion on January 18 but it was postponed for a month after the Journal asked him to stay longer in Pakistan.
No one, except possibly his murderers, knew that by February Daniel would be dead.
In the quiet of the Pearls' living room, its surfaces crammed with pictures of their son, the couple sit on a cream sofa. The coffee table is laid with cups and saucers and chocolate biscuits. So far they have shunned newspaper interviews. When the press swarmed around the house in May, the Pearls pasted sheets of white paper across their windows and remained inside.
Interviews, they felt would be too painful. Now they have agreed to this one, in the hope that it will publicise the foundation.
To do that, they must convey a sense of their son. The anecdotes, when they begin, tumble forth swiftly. How Daniel, deeply affected by the suicide of his college room-mate 20 years ago, had written a compassionate letter to the dead man's family. When Daniel died, a sibling of his late friend wrote to say that her brothers and sisters still carried a copy of that letter from which they drew comfort.
Of the humorous emails, which affectionately began: "Hi Mum! Hi Dad!", that he would send from around the world. Of their delight at the surprise he staged two years ago when he called to say he could not make his parents' 40th wedding anniversary - then appeared at the restaurant as they walked in. Of the scores of interviewees who have written to say how his gentle, warm nature had touched their lives. Of his love for classical music. And his passion for playing country tunes. Of how, when a pregnant friend went long beyond her due date, he wrote a song called "Come out, come out, the world isn't such a bad place" for her.
As she talks of her son's rich life, Ruth's animation returns. She tells how her daughter once asked her what she might say on her deathbed. " 'Nothing', I said. There has been nothing left unsaid. It is important that that was so with Danny. And it was. Shortly before he was kidnapped, I told him in an email that I loved him and that I knew that he loved me."
Inevitably the conversation returns to his last days. Her pallor deepens. When Daniel failed to turn up at a farewell dinner in his honour on what he thought would be his last night in Karachi, Mariane called the police. It was she who telephoned his parents.
When his captors sent their first email, enclosing the photograph of Daniel with a gun at his temple, his parents were elated. It was the first indication that he was alive. If anyone, they all agreed, could talk sense and peace to his kidnappers, it would be Daniel. "I pictured him quietly talking them out of violence. Of playing a game of backgammon with them," Judea recalls, with a smile.
The couple waited for a ransom letter, convinced that Daniel would be safe. Even when a statement was released saying that he was being kept in "inhumane" conditions, they believed that he would withstand the torture and talk his way out of the situation. "The worst bit was thinking of him worrying for his family. I so desperately wanted him to know we would be strong, to concentrate on himself."
The waiting was a mixture of elation and despair. At one stage Daniel's sister was en route to Germany where the family had heard he would be released. On four occasions, the FBI told them he was dead. "On the day they came with the final news, I sensed that was what they were going to say," Judea, 65, a professor emeritus of computer science at University College of Los Angeles, says. "They looked more serious. And they had brought a doctor with them."
The Pearls will never watch the video of Daniel's death but they have read the transcript of his words. When he says: "I am a Jew. My father is a Jew. My mother is a Jew" they hear a message of love and hope; of tolerance and understanding. They detect no fear or distress. It is a small comfort.
The foundation they have set up, however, has given them enormous succour. They hope that it will sponsor a Pakistani journalist to "walk in Danny's footsteps" and work in America in addition to establish conferences and music projects to help to bridge the divide between Western and Islamic cultures. Last month they published a compilation of Daniel's articles from around the world, entitled "At Home in the World", to make people aware of his gift for making friends and seeking out the truth.
"Daniel talked to strangers in jazz bars, on soccer fields and in train stations," says Judea. "He talked to peasants and rulers, rabbis and mullahs. He talked to winners and losers, to special strangers and ordinary strangers We know now that the last group of strangers Danny talked to were strangers of a different breed, from a different planet.
"They were strangers that knew no talking. They have silenced Danny's voice but not his spirit. The legacy of Danny's lifelong 'talking with strangers' will be for ever in our hearts."
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