by Masha Gessen
• • •
FOR ALL of Joanna’s commitment to community, when the Tsarnaevs arrived, the house was a collection of single, separate people. Two or three unmarried men from Tanzania lived on the second floor. Friends and acquaintances of Joanna and her children set up camp, often semipermanently, in this building and in another property she owned. Joanna kept power tools in the kitchen. Taking in all of that, and the coming and going of Joanna’s children, Zubeidat saw a woman who had a clan, much as the Chechens had clans, but who lacked the skills to manage it. Zubeidat started inviting the landlady up for tea. Gradually they started having communal meals. Zubeidat and Anzor told their stories. Joanna reacted with compassion and appropriate outrage and, often, proposed solutions.
Reinventing your own story is one of the benefits and requirements of immigration. It was natural and even right that Anzor and Zubeidat would skew and embellish their narrative to make it more intelligible and compelling to an American, and to gain a foothold at a higher station in their new life. Zubeidat said that she might apply to Harvard Law School. Joanna took her, along with Max Mazaev’s wife, Anna, to an Amnesty International event at which the Russian human-rights group Memorial presented its findings on Chechnya. Afterward, Zubeidat volunteered to translate some of the documents—a gesture that got her a Harvard Law School ID, though no pay. This affiliation did not last long: Zubeidat’s remarkable aptitude for languages made her an able interpreter, but she lacked the formal education that would have been required to translate human-rights documentation accurately. Joanna suggested a Harvard Extension School course on negotiation, and most likely paid for it. Zubeidat dropped the course after the unit on the Israeli–Palestinian conflict.
For Anzor, Zubeidat, Maret, and Alvi, it was a strange period of living as a family of adults, with all their children farmed out. Maret ran the household, taking charge even of her brothers’ work negotiations: she was a woman, yes, but she was the eldest—and then, this was not Chechnya. Dzhokhar was still staying at the Baievs’ and spent only the weekends at Norfolk Street, and the rest of Anzor and Zubeidat’s children, along with Alvi’s, were in Central Asia, waiting to be brought over. Most of Joanna’s conversations with the family focused on the mechanics of getting everyone to the United States. She tried to help Alvi’s wife, Zhanar, and their two children, Aindy and Luiza, get visas. The attempt failed, and soon after, Alvi divorced Zhanar and moved out of the house, starting a journey around the United States in search of a place where he would want to live; he eventually settled in Maryland. Back in Almaty, Ruslan, who was still taking care of Anzor and Zubeidat’s three older children, adopted Aindy. Ruslan’s own children were in Brighton, a Boston neighborhood, with their mother, who was about to give birth to a third child. Maret went to stay across the Charles River with them.
When the school year was over, Dzhokhar came to live with his parents on Norfolk Street. He was already a different kid. The Baievs were strict about speaking only Chechen in the house, and Dzhokhar had barely understood a word. The Baiev children—Maryam, who was Dzhokhar’s age, and Islam, who was a year younger—understood Dzhokhar when he spoke Russian but tended to switch into English whenever their parents were out of earshot. Before he left the Baiev house, Dzhokhar was already speaking English with the other kids—an extraordinarily fast accomplishment, even for an eight-year-old. He had also already become part of the community of Chechen seven-to-nine-year-olds in Boston: the Baiev kids, the Umarov kids, and the Mazaev kids, with whom he spent much of the summer of 2002, before entering third grade at a Cambridge public school. He would be bumped up to fourth grade before the school year was over.
For roughly the first year in the United States, an asylum applicant has no right to seek employment or to ask for public assistance. Anzor and Zubeidat were probably making rent with Ruslan’s help. Little by little, Anzor started getting under-the-table work fixing cars. He charged ten dollars an hour, and part of that went to one or another of the neighborhood garages in return for temporary work space. Zubeidat focused on her English: she made fast progress, unlike her husband, who would never really learn to speak this new language. Once she received her work authorization, in 2003, she followed Max Mazaev’s recommendation to look for work as a personal-care attendant. He connected her with the people who would become her first clients, and she would work for some of them for many years. It was unattractive but honorable work, the work Max Mazaev himself did for years before launching his adult-care center.
By mid-2003, the Tsarnaevs were granted asylum in the United States. Bella, Ailina, and Tamerlan were now entitled to visas. Maret traveled to Kazakhstan to collect the children and travel with them to Istanbul, where they stayed with friends while their U.S. papers were processed. She then brought them to Boston and left for Toronto, where she would finalize her divorce and embark on a career as an immigration lawyer.
• • •
A YEAR AND A HALF after Zubeidat and Anzor arrived in the United States with Dzhokhar, the family was reunited and looked, finally, like it was on solid ground. The Tsarnaevs’ housing was guaranteed, thanks to their landlady and the federal government. Official asylee status meant that they could apply for public assistance, and they qualified for Section 8, a federal housing subsidy program for low-income families. Anzor and Zubeidat were both working—hard, low-paying, typical recent-immigrant work. The additional adults were gone from the house, and the kids were all in one place—Dzhokhar, who was now practically an American child, and the three disoriented newly arrived Chechen teenagers from Almaty.
Immigrant families often suffer from a sort of inversion: kids stop being kids, because the adults have lost their bearings. The kids do not turn into competent adults overnight; they go through a period of intense suffering and dislocation made all the more painful for being forced and unexpected. But at the other end of the pain, they locate their roles and settle into them, claiming their places in the new world.
Dzhokhar’s role was that of the sweet kid, the kid everyone loves. All the descriptions of him that have emerged from conversations with people who knew him, including people who cared for him deeply, are spectacular in their flatness. Those who watched him from a distance describe him as a social superstar. To those who thought they got closer, he was charming. Indeed, charm appears to be his sole distinguishing personality trait. Teachers thought he was bright but uninterested in thinking for himself. Dzhokhar was the kid who said the things that made others like him. Many of the articles that have been published since the Boston Marathon bombing have noted that Anzor and Zubeidat did not attend Dzhokhar’s wrestling matches, or his graduation from middle school—as though those absences signified notably grievous parental neglect. But Dzhokhar did not need his parents there and he probably did not want them there. Anzor and Zubeidat’s presence had a lot of weight and texture, entirely unsuitable for a boy making his way in the world as a sweet, weightless cloud. Joanna—American, sociable, quintessentially Cambridge—attended Dzhokhar’s graduation from middle school.
In 2003, Dzhokhar entered fifth grade, which was appropriate for his age. Ailina, at thirteen, and Bella, at fifteen, were older than most of their new seventh- and ninth-grade classmates. Tamerlan, entering tenth grade as he neared his seventeenth birthday, was a giant among sophomores—but this was his chance to prepare for college. Tamerlan and Bella started at the city’s only public high school, Cambridge Rindge and Latin. The school has an odd hybrid identity: it is a large urban high school with a pervading hippie ethos—the legacy of the many progressive teachers who have shaped it over the years. It maintains a distinct cult of itself. Its students seem, with a few exceptions, to hew to a powerful collective identity as residents of the special brilliant society of Cambridge and as students of an outstandingly diverse school. At the same time, Harvard and MIT professors, on whose presence so much of Cambridge pride is predicated, send their children to private schools. Cambridge Rindge and Lati
n’s genuine diversity comes courtesy of immigrant and poor populations: a third of the students come from low-income families, a third speak English as their second language, and only a third are white. For test scores, the school ranks at 213 out of the state’s 347 public high schools.
Joanna took the family to performances and movies and loaned them DVDs. Zubeidat suggested that The Chronicles of Narnia was an allegory about Chechnya. The landlady tutored all three teenagers in English; Ailina picked up the language as fast as she learned the habit of riding her bicycle to school, but Bella and Tamerlan, who would never shed their accents, were placed in English-as-a-second-language classes at Rindge. Tamerlan was also trying to teach himself English by reading Sherlock Holmes stories, which had been popularized in the former Soviet Union by excellent translations and a series of inspired short films. It may not have been as masochistic as Uncle Ruslan’s dictionary-based approach, but it was just as transparently self-defeating. Consider this single sentence from “The Adventure of the Speckled Band,” arguably the most famous of Conan Doyle’s stories among Russians: “‘Alas!’ replied our visitor, ‘the very horror of my situation lies in the fact that my fears are so vague, and my suspicions depend so entirely upon small points, which might seem trivial to another, that even he to whom of all others I have a right to look for help and advice looks upon all that I tell him about it as the fancies of a nervous woman.’”
• • •
THE BIG QUESTION facing the family was how to make Tamerlan succeed. One look at him and you knew he was destined for greatness—an impression confirmed by people outside the family. The physical grace of his large body, and his sharp features and large dark eyes, turned heads and messed with them. But he had lived in seven cities and attended an even greater number of schools. True, he could play keyboard and aspired to good grades, but with his late start in America, how was he to assert his potential? Anzor and Zubeidat did what immigrants do: they asked others for advice. They were lectured on the relative merits of different colleges, and learned that even the public ones carried a frightening price tag. They sorted through lists of possible professions. Would their golden boy be an engineer, a performer, an entrepreneur?
Khassan Baiev suggested martial arts. It was a terrible suggestion. If Almut Rochowanski, the legal scholar who founded the group for Chechen refugees, were to classify immigrants from the Caucasus, she just might divide them into two groups: those who push their male children into martial arts and those who do not. It is the second group that will succeed; the first group’s assumptions come from the old country. Back in the Caucasus, if you took at least one national title in wrestling, boxing, or any other fighting sport, you were set for life. In return for the honor you brought your region, you would get a gym of your own to run and, more often than not, a seat on one of the so-called legislative bodies. In the United States, a martial-arts career was generally a dead end, one that would leave a man cocky, injured, unemployed, and unassimilated by his late twenties.
Khassan Baiev’s own experience was exceptional, but neither he nor Anzor and Zubeidat knew this. He had been a man with a career in Russia, then a man with money, then, in Chechnya, a man with a mission. In the United States, he was a man with a tragic and glorious past and too much time on his hands. He tried volunteering at a Boston-area hospital and quickly despaired of ever building a medical career in the United States; he also grew profoundly disillusioned with the American medical system. Then a friend suggested he try competing in sambo again—the sport had once helped him overcome discriminatory Soviet university admissions policies and set him on his way to becoming a doctor. Again it worked a miracle. Baiev became a champion in his early forties. It did not exactly lead to making a good life in the United States—he ended up starting a practice in Russia and supporting his family’s neat middle-class Boston life from there—but for him martial arts were a proven magic bullet. What is more, this was the one thing Anzor could do for his son in the new country: he started training Tamerlan in boxing.
Tamerlan was a naturally gifted fighter, if an unconventional one—though it is impossible to tell whether his unusual stance came naturally or was the result of Anzor’s training. Rather than defend his body and face while he boxed, he let his long arms hang down. He could look overconfident if he was winning, which he often was, or vulnerable, literally unguarded, if he was beaten, which happened rarely. After training with Anzor at home, he worked his way through a series of Boston-area gyms to the Wai Kru Mixed Martial Arts center in the neighborhood of Allston, just across the river from Cambridge. When he first showed up, he had no mouthpiece, helmet, or other standard protective gear and insisted that he did not need them. This suggested to the owner that Tamerlan was either a buffoon or a boxing genius; with time, it seems, he concluded that the boy was a bit of each.
One of the few documents of Tamerlan’s life to have become public before his crime and his death is a photo essay shot by a young man named Johannes Hirn in 2009 and published in a Boston University graduate student magazine the next year. Titled “Will Box for Passport,” it offers a tellingly inaccurate narrative: Tamerlan says his goal is to make the U.S. Olympic team and become a naturalized citizen that way—though as an asylee, he should have qualified for citizenship anyway. He also says, “I don’t have a single American friend. I don’t understand them,” though his best friend at the time, former classmate Brendan Mess, was an American. He also claims to be from Chechnya and to have fled it with his family in the early nineties, when the fighting broke out. None of this is gravely untrue, but all of it is a sort of shorthand for a story he had come to tell about himself, one in which he was a stranger in a strange land and boxing his only hope. The photographer seems to have had an inkling that Tamerlan’s self-presentation was not entirely accurate. One large black-and-white picture in the spread shows him wearing high-tops, chinos, and no shirt, smiling while sparring with a young woman. The caption reads: “Tsarnaev says he doesn’t usually remove his shirt when among women at the gym.”
The strange thing about Anzor and Tamerlan’s outsize ambition for Tamerlan’s boxing career—the plans for stardom and for a spot on the Olympic team, if not the expectation of Hollywood-style prosperity to follow—was that it was not entirely unreasonable. With his ability, training, and drive, Tamerlan could have had an Olympic career. But he did not.
His first victory came in January 2004, just six months after coming to the United States: he won in the 178-pound novice class in the Golden Gloves amateur competition in Lowell, Massachusetts. He got a trophy and gave an interview to the Lowell Sun. “I like the USA,” he said. “You have a chance to make a lot of money here if you are willing to work.” He had not yet seen anyone who had actually made money in the United States, but this was what he had been told. He started climbing quickly but dropped boxing abruptly during his senior year of high school—he needed to concentrate on academics in order to graduate.
In 2006 he started at Bunker Hill Community College, a lonely sixties building perched at the intersection of two highways in Charlestown, near the boundary with Cambridge. This two-year college, which he attended part-time, was not what anyone had imagined in Tamerlan’s brilliant future. He did not return to competing until 2008—but when he did, his boxing prospects again began to shine. In 2009 he made it to the national amateur boxing competition in Salt Lake City. The next year, he got the Rocky Marciano Trophy for winning the New England Golden Gloves competition. He did not, however, go on to the nationals that year: the federation had changed its rules, and noncitizens were now excluded. After that, he let his amateur boxing registration lapse.
There is a footnote to Tamerlan’s boxing career. More than a year after it was over, he called Musa Khadzhimuratov, the paraplegic former bodyguard living in New Hampshire, and said he was traveling to a competition, flying out of Manchester, New Hampshire, and wanted to leave his car with Khadzhimuratov. “He had a cold,” Khadzhimura
tov told me later. “I noticed on the way to the airport how bad it was. I said, ‘They are not going to let you compete in that condition, there is no point in getting on the airplane.’” They stopped at a drugstore and loaded up on antihistamines and decongestants. When Tamerlan returned a few days later, he said he had come very close to beating his first opponent but then the judge had noticed he was ill and disqualified him.
• • •
TAMERLAN had long since dropped out of Bunker Hill. He still planned to be a star, though. He played keyboard. He talked of becoming a performer, a musician and dancer. He often, though not always, dressed ostentatiously: flowing shirts unbuttoned all the way down to his navel, huge scarves, and pointy shiny shoes that accentuated his swagger. He looked like an Italian gigolo, and he told the graduate student photographer that he dressed “European style.” He had two girlfriends, a pretty, white American-born woman named Katherine Russell and an aspiring model named Nadine Ascencao. Tamerlan had gone to Rindge and Latin with Nadine, except there she had been one of the least popular girls in the ESL crowd. Sometime after graduation, she transformed herself: she got the clothes, the hair, and the makeup that she had lacked in high school, and she dropped her Cape Verdean identity, claiming instead to be Italian. She also started dating Tamerlan, who had been the object of desire of so many Rindge girls—while he claimed that boxing was his only “babe.” At some point in 2009, both Nadine and Katherine may have been living at 410 Norfolk Street.
By this time, taking multiple wives had become if not common then at least accepted back in Chechnya, which was in the process of inventing its own form of fundamentalist religious rule. So his parents might not have objected to such an arrangement. Anzor did object strenuously to Tamerlan’s plan to marry Katherine. Boston Chechens gossiped that Anzor told his son, “Look how marrying a non-Chechen woman got me nothing but trouble. Don’t make the same mistake.” The fact that Katherine, who had grown up in Rhode Island, the daughter of a surgeon and a nurse, converted to Islam in order to marry Tamerlan did not convince Anzor. If anything, it irritated him—his wife and son had slowly, in spurts, begun exploring religion, but in Anzor’s mind Islam had nothing to do with being Chechen; it merely obscured the real issue, which was that Katherine was not and could not be one of them.