by Masha Gessen
Like Zubeidat before her, Katherine, who after converting called herself Karima, had to leave the family’s home to have her baby; unlike his father before him, Tamerlan did not accompany her. Karima was staying with her own parents in Rhode Island when she gave birth to a daughter, Zahira, in October 2010. About four months later, Tamerlan moved them to Norfolk Street. Zahira did what babies do: she created family. Soon Zubeidat was spending all her free time with her, and both Anzor and Dzhokhar appeared smitten with the baby and her mother.
By 2011, Tamerlan was neither a boxing champion nor a music star nor even a college student, but a twenty-four-year-old father living with his parents, his siblings, and his own family in a three-bedroom apartment. What was he doing for work? Since his first year at Bunker Hill, he had made some change delivering pizza. He had done some van driving for Max Mazaev, who had started his senior-care center and was rapidly expanding it. In 2009, Tamerlan got an arrest record when Nadine called the police to Norfolk Street after he slapped her. Though she eventually dropped the charges, this may be why he did not have his U.S. citizenship, for which he should have been able to apply in 2009 or 2010—and this helps explain both the unexpected discovery, on the part of the Golden Gloves association, that he was not a citizen, and the almost magical thinking evident in what he told the photographer about “boxing for a passport.” At some point, Tamerlan had also started dealing pot. He was small-time, a runner—an occupation that often goes hand in hand with delivering pizza, so it is not clear which came first.
Pot was the scourge of Cambridge Rindge and Latin. Some kids would just start fading out, and by the time they graduated they seemed to have no presence. Brendan Mess, Tamerlan’s best friend, had been like that. His grades had tanked and his college ambitions had evaporated. But a few years later, he seemed to get his act together. He had been accepted to college, he was boxing—his friend Tamerlan had been taking him to the gym—and he looked more pulled together than he had since junior year in high school. Then he was dead: on September 12, 2011, Mess, thirty-one-year-old Erik Weissman, also a Rindge graduate, and thirty-seven-year-old Raphael Teken were found in Mess’s apartment in Waltham, a western suburb of Boston. Their throats had been slit. Their bodies were strewn with loose cash and loose marijuana—thousands of dollars’ worth. When Mess and Weissman were buried in a joint ceremony, Tamerlan did not show up. A whisper kept shuffling through the crowd: “Where is Tam?” or “Where is Timmy?” depending on who was asking.
Tamerlan might in fact have been at his mysterious boxing tournament—the one from which he claimed to have been disqualified because of a cold—or, with his registration as a fighter expired for more than a year, the entire exercise might have been a ruse invented for the purpose of getting himself and his car out of town for a few days. After the murders, he stopped going to the gym where he had been training with Mess.
The murders were never solved or, really, investigated. The police appeared to write them off as just more drug-related crime, even though Boston’s drug dealers had not been known to settle scores in ways so gruesome and so bizarre. It was in the course of talking to people who had known Tamerlan or Mess, however, that I discovered that Tamerlan had also been dealing.
How was it possible for the adults not to notice that Tamerlan was not so much delivering pizzas or senior citizens as making money selling marijuana, which is what kept him in his flashy clothes? The answer is, there was no one around to notice. The household’s relationship with money had created a mess of debts.The family’s federal benefits were revoked and reinstated at irregular intervals. Unanticipated, sometimes catastrophic medical expenses became a regular occurrence, creating more debts covered by impossible promises. No one was thinking straight about money—or about anything else. Each member of the Tsarnaev family was descending into a separate personal hell.
• • •
AILINA’S TROUBLES started out small. In eighth grade she began getting into fights, especially with one girl. The school required counseling, and the Tsarnaevs complied. Joanna suggested that instead of going on to Cambridge Rindge and Latin, where the social dynamics might follow her, Ailina apply to a newly formed charter school. She did, as did Dzhokhar, and both were admitted. (Dzhokhar was two grades behind Ailina, but there was no division between middle and high school levels at this school; after he finished middle school, though, he enrolled at Rindge and Latin.) The girl with whom Ailina had been fighting also entered the school, but, much to the relief of everyone at 410 Norfolk Street, she was expelled within a month.
The summer before ninth grade, Ailina joined Bella on a trip to Washington state to stay with Uncle Ruslan, who had returned from Almaty, and his family. Ruslan’s wife had a younger brother, Elmirza Khozhugov, who was studying at a nearby college. It seemed like a good idea for him to marry one of the Tsarnaev girls. Bella would not hear of it, so this left Ailina. To most Americans, the looming arrangement would have looked disturbing. Ailina was a rising high school freshman, a slight girl with typical American teenage speech and a gaggle of friends from her hip-hop class; she liked to lead people to believe she was Latin American. Joanna probably saw more of the nuance: Ailina was slightly older than her classmates, and by the time of the wedding, she would be around the age her own mother had been when she married Anzor. And unlike their own mother, Ailina and Bella did not have parents trying to force marriage matches on them. Anzor, for example, accepted Bella’s refusal to marry Elmirza—as long as she accepted the fact that she would be allowed to marry only another Chechen.
As soon as Ailina finished ninth grade, she and Bella traveled to Almaty. Ailina and Elmirza had a big wedding. It is not customary for the bride’s parents to be present at a Chechen wedding, so there was nothing conspicuous in Anzor and Zubeidat’s absence.
Elmirza and Ailina returned to Washington state at the end of the summer, in time for him to resume college and for her to enroll in a high school program for pregnant teenagers, which by that point she was. In the spring of what would have been her sophomore year of high school, Ailina moved back to Cambridge to give birth to a little boy, Ziaudy; then she returned to Washington. It is not clear when everyone at Norfolk Street became aware that Elmirza was beating Ailina, but by 2008—less than two years after the wedding and barely a year after Ziaudy’s birth—Elmirza was taken into custody after repeated reports of domestic violence, and Ailina and the baby were back in Cambridge. Tamerlan was dispatched to Washington with bail money so Elmirza could leave the country before he had to face trial—and prison time. Ailina destroyed her green card and other documents in fear that Anzor would try to force her to follow her husband.
In the wake of the Boston Marathon bombing, Ruslan would publicly condemn his nephews and reveal that he had not communicated with Anzor’s family in several years. The media generally assumed the estrangement had resulted from a difference of views on Islam and on what it meant to be Muslim and Chechen in America. Far more likely, the rift was caused by Ailina’s split with Elmirza. Chechen men beat their wives. When they do not, other men often suspect them of weakness and subservience to their women. When they do, the wife’s family usually tries to mitigate the effects without interfering—sheltering the wife in times of crisis and sending her back after a few weeks. No one ever calls the police. No one lets the men be jailed, disgraced, and effectively deported. Ailina ruined Elmirza’s American dream and broke Chechen tradition by keeping Ziaudy, who rightfully belonged to his father’s family. However Americanized Ruslan had become, he would have had a very difficult time justifying the situation to his wife’s family back home.
• • •
BELLA’S TROUBLES began in 2006. Anzor took her out of school after learning that she had been seen holding hands with a boy, and a non-Muslim boy to boot. Back home—and by now Anzor imagined that place to be the Caucasus, where he had spent all of a couple of years—Bella’s behavior would have warranted an honor killing; al
l Anzor did was deny her the opportunity to complete eleventh grade. Tamerlan sought out the boy and knocked him out with a well-placed punch. It is not clear that he had been dispatched to do so, but when the school counselor called, Anzor said that his son had done the right thing. He probably lacked the English to explain, but it is the older brother’s duty to protect his sisters’ honor. Tamerlan had been vigilant for two years, always lurking around the group of ESL girls Bella had quickly joined, and ensuring that she did no socializing after school, when the rest of the group may have wanted to go to the mall or to hang out at Harvard Square. Tamerlan, then a senior, got a week’s suspension.
Anzor let Bella return to school eventually, after placing severe restrictions on both girls’ movements, but it was too late for her to get credit for junior year. Her schooling was effectively over, so it was time for her to marry. She stayed on in Kazakhstan after Ailina’s wedding that summer, working as a translator at a law firm and circulating in the local Chechen community, where an eligible man was sure to materialize. Within months she was engaged to Rizvan, a young man from Chechnya who had been visiting relatives in Kazakhstan.
Bella and Rizvan went to live with Rizvan’s widowed mother in Chechnya, then still one of the most dangerous and damaged places on the planet (just three years earlier, a United Nations report had called Grozny “the most destroyed city on earth”). Bella became ill with cytomegalovirus, developed complications, and had to be hospitalized in Dagestan, where Anzor and Zubeidat, taking their first trip home—visiting Kazakhstan and Dagestan, that is—found her. It was probably they who persuaded her to return to the United States to give birth to the baby she was carrying. She flew back in the fall of 2007 and became, briefly, the woman doing most of the cooking and cleaning at 410 Norfolk, before giving birth to a boy, named Ramzan, in 2008. Rizvan, who tried to follow his wife, was denied a U.S. visa. When Bella returned to Kazakhstan and Chechnya the next year, she developed an even more serious infection and was hospitalized in life-threatening condition. It is likely to have cost a great deal of money to get her well enough to travel, and to get her on a plane back to the United States; this could only have added to the family’s financial woes.
Bella returned to Cambridge in the winter of 2009. Baby Ramzan was back in Kazakhstan with his father and the father’s relatives. Bella had applied for Russian papers for him, and until they came, he was temporarily unable to travel. Zubeidat flew to Kazakhstan in the spring on a dual mission: to fetch Ramzan and to raise money to repay debts by selling something she claimed was worth a fortune back in the old country. She returned with Ramzan but without the money.
• • •
ANZOR did not maintain the pretense of being a lawyer, or aspiring to be one, for long. He was a working man, and Russian speakers who met him at any point during his decade in the United States describe him as such: rabotyaga, a word that suggests a man who works with his hands, a hardworking man, a dependable man, but one who probably drinks when he is not working. He did. Both Kyrgyzstan and Dagestan are proud of their brandy, and so was Anzor proud of the bottle he invariably placed on the table when he went to visit or when someone visited him.
Anzor’s American acquaintances recall that he had health problems—something people who knew him just before he left Russia do not mention. He may have developed them around the time of the move, or they simply may not have seemed like much to his friends back home. What man doesn’t have health problems as he nears forty? All those cigarettes smoked, all that brandy consumed, all those fights—the things that tend to kill a post-Soviet man of Anzor’s generation before he reaches sixty—are bound to start making themselves known. Anzor had persistent abdominal pain, debilitating headaches, and, evidently, night terrors.
But he was a rabotyaga.
In 2004, he became friendly with the owner of a rug shop who let him use his driveway to work on cars. It was old-fashioned Soviet-style work: rather than place a car over a pit or hoist it up on lifts as one would in a garage, Anzor hitched cars up on simple jacks and slid under them, lying on his back for hours, his hands raised to reach the underside of the car. He worked most often on vehicles that would have seemed at home in such a rudimentary care setting—old carburetor clunkers suffering from knocks, whistles, shortness of breath, and other mysterious afflictions. Among Boston-area Russian-speaking owners of cars long past their prime, he developed a reputation as a friendly, inexpensive, and inventive mechanic.
Even being a rabotyaga got him into trouble in America. When the Tsarnaevs moved to Norfolk Street, a condo complex was going up across the street, replacing an old junkyard. It was part of the new Cambridge: cedar-lined structures separated by ersatz-cobblestone paths, with units as small as 230 square feet. The condo complex had something else that 410 Norfolk lacked: a driveway. It was actually a temporary parking lot for up to three cars, for condo residents only, to park for no more than fifteen minutes at a time. This was a perfect place for Anzor to do repairs: enough room to place the car and spread out all his tools, out of the way of traffic. One day Rinat Harel, an Israeli-American art teacher who had bought one of the tiny units, told Anzor that he shouldn’t be doing his work on the association’s property. “His reaction—wow! He puffed up—I saw how tall he was now. And he was screaming in Russian, then there were some English words, the point was, he was telling me I can’t tell him what to do.” Harel, not a small woman and not one to scare easily—this was a point of pride for her as an Israeli—walked away shaken and, after that incident, stopped going through the Norfolk Street entrance, using the back gate to the property instead. Most of the time, the job of shooing Anzor off the premises fell to Chris LaRoche, a hulking software engineer who shared a condo with his husband. His conversations with Anzor generally followed the same script as Harel’s. The consensus at the condo association was that this was one of those typical conflicts that gentrification engenders.
When Anzor and Zubeidat traveled to Kazakhstan in 2007, one of their goals was to seek traditional healing help for Anzor. His health problems had become pronounced enough for even the Russian speakers, at least in Boston, to acknowledge them. The wisdom in the Chechen community was that he had ruined his health by working on cars outside, in all weather, wearing nothing but a sweater.
In the summer of 2009, Anzor managed to rent a garage for a month while the owner traveled home to Ethiopia. He used the time to teach Tamerlan the basics of auto repair. Dzhokhar looked in on some of the lessons too, though he was working at a day camp that summer. In the fall, Anzor got into a fight at a Russian restaurant in Allston. His skull was fractured, landing him in the hospital. Tamerlan got the police involved and they apparently found Anzor not at fault; he even received some financial compensation. But his health suffered further. At the age of forty-three, he had begun to look like an old Chechen man: emaciated rather than slender, gray, and, it seemed, perpetually exhausted.
• • •
ZUBEIDAT TRIED perhaps harder than anyone else in the family—for herself and for her children. Her efforts at translating documents or attending classes on negotiation were not just an unreasonable reach given her education and background: they were also unreasonably brave. To help her children succeed, she pursued whatever seemed like a good idea at the moment. In 2004 she asked Joanna to help the girls join a church choir. Joanna enrolled them in the Handel and Haydn Society youth chorus, where they would sing for a year and a half. Joanna did much of the driving for the girls. She also introduced Bella to several folk-dancing groups until the girl joined one she liked in Concord, Massachusetts, fifteen miles away.
In 2006, Zubeidat enrolled in the Catherine Hinds Institute to study to be a beautician—not exactly Harvard Law, but more glamorous than home care. The institute was a good fit. Beautiful herself, chatty, and attentive, Zubeidat was a natural at what was, in effect, her first occupation, acquired at the age of forty. She supplemented her education by taking private less
ons in cosmetic tattooing. A Russian woman studying alongside her was planning to open her own salon as soon as they graduated in the spring of 2007. She offered Zubeidat a job, and soon Zubeidat was commuting to Belmont, four miles west of Cambridge. Things at the salon began well but slowed in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. As time went on, Zubeidat got less and less business there. Some of the post-bombing reporting has suggested that her new religiosity was to blame, but this does not appear to have been the sole or possibly even the main reason. Business was slow, and by the end of 2008 the salon shut down.
• • •
SOMETIME IN 2010, or maybe 2009, it would have become clear: it was as though the Tsarnaevs had never come to America. They had struggled with the language and with the people, and with buying furniture on credit. The living room now had a large plush sectional sofa, oriental rugs, and a mirrored credenza housing plates and thin-walled cups chosen to look as though they had been in the family for at least a generation. They had achieved the look every Chechen living room had, from Grozny to Tokmok to Boston, but then, their own living rooms in those places had boasted that look as well.