Mariane Pearl: 'A Mighty Heart'
Oct. 2 -- Three months after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, news of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl's kidnapping and murder shocked America.
The reporter's then-pregnant wife, Mariane Pearl, was completely crushed by the discovery that Pearl had been executed by fundamentalist fanatics.
In Pakistan to pursue a story on international terrorism, Pearl left his seven-month-pregnant journalist wife in a Karachi apartment and set out on Jan. 23, 2002, to interview a known Islamic militant named Sheikh Gilani. He never returned.
Mariane, 35, and her 15-month-old son, Adam Pearl, were forced to move on with their lives after the loss of her husband. But Mariane says she will never forget the love she and Pearl shared and the dreams they had for their son.
In Mariane's new memoir, A Mighty Heart: The Brave Life and Death of My Husband Danny Pearl, she recalls the five weeks between Pearl's disappearance and his death.
Read the following excerpt from the book:
Dawn will rise soon over Karachi. Curled in Danny's warm embrace, I feel safe. I like that this position is called "spooning" in English. We are like spoons in a drawer, pressed to each another, each fitted to the other's shape. I love these sweet moments of oblivion and the peace they bring me. No matter where we are — Croatia, Beirut, Bombay — this is my shelter. This is our way of meeting the challenge, of confronting the chaos of the world.
As I awaken, I struggle for the right words to describe this place. It is the curse of all journalists, I suppose, to be writing a story even as you are living it. I am not sure I'll ever get to know Karachi. I have distrusted this city from the start, though we are partly here to find out if its bad reputation is deserved. Once relatively stable, even sleepy, Karachi became a nexus for drug and arms trafficking in the 1980s. Now the city is an intricate puzzle, decadent and beastly at the same time, metastasizing into a capital of blind hatred and violent militancy.
The Pakistani people are equally fractured. Those born in their own land hate the Muslim immigrants who arrived from India after the two countries were partitioned in 1947. The Sunni Muslims loathe the Shiite Muslims. Since 1998 more than seventy doctors have been assassinated in Karachi; most were Shiites mowed down by Sunni zealots. And the pro-Taliban fundamentalists, who have been sinking deep roots here, detest the rest of the world.
There are so many people in this city, but no one seems to know how to count them all. Are there ten million? Twelve? Fourteen? Most of Pakistan is landlocked, pressed between India and Afghanistan, with parts of its borders touching southwestern Iran and the farthermost reaches of China. But Karachi, on the brown coast of the Arabian Sea, is the country's major port and, as such, is a magnet for migrants who drift in from the Pakistani countryside and across the border from even poorer places — Afghan villages, Bangladesh, the rural outposts of India. By day you see the poor burn under the scorching sun, selling vegetables and newspapers at dusty crossroads. At night they disappear in the labyrinthine streets, lending the city an air of foreboding. To us, this third-world city may glow with a feeble light, but Karachi draws the desperately poor like a torch draws fireflies.
Very rarely am I awake when Danny is still asleep, especially since I became pregnant. A ray of soft light enters our room, and falling back into sweet torpor, I gradually give up on the mysteries of Karachi and rejoin my husband in this privileged warm space of ours. Together, we can hold on to this night a little longer.
Seven A.M. Danny is pushing back the bedroom door with his foot. He brings coffee and dry — if not stale — biscuits to stave off the fits of nausea I still fight in the morning. Sometimes I have to rush to the bathroom to retch as soon as I wake. The noise alone can turn Danny pale. He seems so unhappy to witness my suffering that I try to muffle the sound track. Danny pretends the pregnancy is making me moody. A few days ago I chanced on a less than discreet email he sent his childhood friend Danny Gill in California:
Hey!...Mariane's belly is getting very pronounced. It's quite a thing to see. Due date is May, ground zero is Paris. She's sick often, moody occasionally, hungry earlier than usual, impatient but only with Pakistanis, horny when other symptoms don't get in the way …
To my mind, Danny's moods have become unpredictable, too. I can't tell if it is because he is about to become a father, or because the world has gone amok in the four months since the World Trade Center was brought down, taking with it more than a few certainties. Danny is the South Asia bureau chief for The Wall Street Journal. Militant Islamic terrorism may hit anywhere on the globe, but the heart (if you can call it that) of its network is here, in this region, and the work at hand is daunting.
Danny and I have always reported alongside each other. I accompany him on most of his interviews; he comes along for most of mine. Yet I do not kid myself. He is the more experienced journalist, and he works for one of the most powerful news organizations in the world, whereas I work primarily for French public radio and television, which has barely enough money to pay for my métro tickets back home in Paris. But our differences in background and in culture make us well matched. We know naturally when to hold back and let the other speak.
I make Danny laugh to help him forget his worries; I make sure there is silence when he concentrates. And we engage each other in endless philosophical debates -- about truth and courage, about how to fight preconceived ideas, about how to learn from and respect other cultures. Still, to try to shed light on the nature of terrorist activities is to plunge into a kingdom of darkness.
Already it is getting hot. To make me feel better, Danny reminds me that today is the last day of this assignment in Pakistan. Tomorrow we will check in to a five-star hotel in Dubai and stretch out on the beaches of the Arabian Gulf. It's a roundabout way back to our home in Bombay, but Pakistan and India are now at loggerheads, and there is no longer a direct connection between the neighboring countries. Battling over the disputed Himalayan territory of Kashmir, the two nations have escalated their historical animosity to the point that the world is braced for either side to unleash an attack against the other. Both Pakistan and India have used Kashmir as an excuse to justify recent military buildups; both possess arms of mass destruction; both strike poses as if they'll use the weapons. I think of the cops of Karachi, patrolling the streets in their pitiful uniforms, batons their only weapons.
The tension is palpable. We hear it in the voices of our Pakistani friends. On December 24 , 2001 — the rare occasion that Christmas, Hanukkah, and Eid-ul-Fitr, the end of Ramadan, coincided — Danny received a note from an anxious friend in Peshawar, a relatively unstable city on the Pakistani-Afghan border:
Happy Eid and happy Crismiss to you. Please also tell us about your wife. Are Indian armies ready to fight with us but they do not know that the Muslims will sacrifice their lives for Islam. In the case of war, India will be divided in lot of pieces and Muslim will take away his [clothes]. My prayer is that OH GOD Save my country from his enemies.
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