Who Killed Daniel Pearl by Bernard-Henri Lévy

the same fond look she had when she showed me her son’s room earlier, with his stuffed animals, his football trophies, and the diary he kept when he was little and was making New Year’s resolutions: to not pick his nose and to do better in math. The next day he wrote, “I am doing better in math but I am still picking my nose.”
    â€œAnd then . . . in that first part of the message, there’s something that’s absolutely incredible. It’s the sentence where he says, ‘In B’nei Brak, in Israel, there is a street called Chaim Pearl Street, named after my great-grandfather . . . ’”
    â€œYes,” I say. “It was a sentence that I found very odd, too. First of all, is it true? Is there really a street with that name in B’nei Brak? And if so, how the hell did they know about it?”
    â€œExactly!” exclaims Judea. “Exactly!”
    Now he seems euphoric. His expression is that of a great scientist making a major discovery—this must be what Professor Pearl, member of the National Academy of Engineering, world authority on artificial intelligence, looks like in his great moments of heuristic victory.
    â€œThey couldn’t have known—exactly! No one in the world could have known that! Of course it’s true. My grandfather was a local hero in B’nei Brak, a town ten miles outside of Tel-Aviv where he settled in the 1920s, with twenty-five other Hassidic families who, like him, were from Ostrowitz in Poland. But nobody knows that except us. Nobody. Which means . . . ”
    His face darkens. Often, with both of them, I see euphoria alternating with profound sadness. I assume those are the moments when the most unbearable images return, when everything is erased, everything— the tales and the testimony, the analysis, the courtesy towards the French stranger who is investigating the Pearl affair, the exchange of ideas, effort to understand—and suddenly nothing exists except the face of their child, tortured, calling out.
    â€œWhich means that sentence is a message. To his kidnappers, he’s saying, ‘This is who I am, I’m proud of it, I’m from a family who built cities, for whom building cities, digging wells and planting trees was the most beautiful thing you could do on earth—take that, you who love death and destruction!’ But primarily it’s to us, his mother and me, the only ones in the world who remember that in B’nei Brak there is a street named after my grandfather. So what is he saying to us? As you can imagine, I’ve asked myself that question thousands and thousands of times, for months. And my theory is that it’s a coded message that means ‘I’m Danny. Everything is OK. I’m being treated well. I’m speaking freely, since I’m saying something that nobody else could know except you and me. I am your beloved son. I love you.’”
    Ruth has tears in her eyes. Judea’s looking up at the ceiling and holding back tears of his own. He gets up and goes to get me a plate of cookies. A hair-dryer for her because her hair is damp and he’s afraid she’ll catch cold. I’m thinking about those Isaac Babel characters in Red Cavalry who, until the very last minute when the cossack is about to slash their faces or cut them to pieces keep repeating, “I am a Jew.” I’m thinking about that old rabbi in I-don’t-remember which Isaac Bashevis Singer novel, confronted during a pogrom by a brute about to strike him, cut his beard off, humiliate him, who surreptitiously repeats his prayer and with a thousand little gestures too subtle for the thug to perceive and visible only to He Who Sees All, persists in affirming, without arrogance, calmly, with that inner steadfastness that forges great heroes and martyrs, his unswerving loyalty to his hated community. Why didn’t I think of this sooner? How could I have kept saying, like everybody