by Masha Gessen
Tamerlan was dealing drugs.
Anzor was fixing clunkers in the street.
The neighbors hated them.
Bella and Ailina had neither graduated from high school nor succeeded in their marriages; their children were with them rather than with the fathers’ families, so their chances of finding new Chechen husbands were vanishingly small. No one had gotten an education, if you did not count Zubeidat’s aesthetician certificate.
Ziaudy, Ailina’s son, had a learning disability.
The apartment was bursting with people. In the second half of 2009, the small three-bedroom was home to: Anzor, Zubeidat, Tamerlan, Dzhokhar, Bella, Ailina, the toddlers Ramzan and Ziaudy, and Malkan’s teenage son Husein, whom Ruslan had brought to the United States but placed with Anzor’s family. In the summer, the teenagers took possession of the barbecue area at the condo association across the street, drinking, smoking, and playing music until all hours; the residents seem to have been too timid to confront them. The apartment was clean, but crowded and cluttered beyond reason: it no longer felt like community—it resembled a refugee camp. Anzor and Zubeidat had stymied Joanna’s efforts to help. Instead of easing the immigrants into her reality, Joanna had fallen into theirs, with its imaginary family heirlooms capable of covering debts that had grown hopeless. At some point the smell of defeat became so thick that everyone had to run away.
At the end of 2008, Zubeidat managed to place Ailina in an independent living arrangement under the auspices of a battered women’s shelter. Ailina stayed a few months and then took off for New York, where she had somehow acquired friends. After her own trip to Kazakhstan to fetch Ramzan, Zubeidat went to New York and brought Ailina and Ziaudy home, too. Bella started attending the Catherine Hinds Institute. Ailina was admitted to a school where she would study to become an X-ray technician, but she could not borrow money for tuition because she had destroyed her American papers. Then Bella’s green card disappeared as well.
At the end of 2009, after two years at Cambridge Rindge and Latin, Husein moved to Maryland to stay with Uncle Alvi.
At the start of the summer of 2010, Zubeidat went to Russia, alone, and stayed for six months.
Soon after she left, Bella and Ailina and their children disappeared—presumably, to New York again. No one at Norfolk Street would hear from them until Zubeidat returned in December. She reported that they were doing all right: Ailina was home with the children and Bella was working as a waitress. Later there was some conflicting information about that. Ailina was apparently back in town in the fall of 2010, at least long enough to get arrested for trying to use counterfeit money to pay a restaurant bill. She was arraigned in Boston in January 2011 but failed to show up for her hearings—when she finally appeared in court two and a half years later, she would tell the judge she had been indigent.
Zubeidat went back to home health aide work, which now seemed to involve more overnights. By mid-2011 she was rarely staying at Norfolk Street.
Dzhokhar graduated from Rindge and in September moved to live on campus at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, just outside New Bedford, about an hour’s drive south of Boston.
In the fall of 2011, Anzor and Zubeidat filed for divorce.
At the start of 2012, the apartment was home to Tamerlan; his wife, Karima; their daughter, Zahira; Zubeidat, who was not really there; and her now ex-husband, Anzor. Zubeidat had also arranged for Ziaudy to attend kindergarten in Cambridge, so he was there, too, primarily in Karima’s care.
In January, Tamerlan went to Dagestan, ostensibly to renew his Russian passport—something that could have been done at the Russian consulate in New York, which would have charged him a lot for it, but still less than the cost of a round-trip ticket to Russia.
In February, Anzor moved out of the apartment to stay with a friend. Once he received his U.S. passport, in May, he left the country. Zubeidat, who was now visiting the apartment only occasionally, said that Anzor was traveling to Germany for diagnosis—a tumor had developed at the site of his skull injury and American doctors wanted to operate, but the Germans might be able to spare him the surgery. In fact, he went straight to Dagestan.
In June, his kindergarten year over, Ziaudy returned to Ailina.
Tamerlan came back from Dagestan in July. Two weeks later, Zubeidat left for Dagestan: she said she had to care for her brother there—he had cancer. When I met Zubeidat a year later, she was indeed caring for him as he died. At the time she left the United States, she was facing criminal charges for shoplifting at a Lord & Taylor in the Boston suburb of Natick—she knew that leaving meant she would be unable to come back, unless she was willing to face jail.
Karima took over Zubeidat’s home health aide work. Tamerlan stayed home with Zahira. He was good at it: responsible and caring and sure to take her for a walk or a tricycle ride at the same time every day. Most days now, he wore loose sweats rather than his flashy “European style” clothes.
• • •
WHAT DID AMERICA look like from the third floor of 410 Norfolk Street ten years after Anzor and Zubeidat first crossed the Atlantic Ocean? It made scarcely more sense now than it had back then. Television news combined with their landlady’s conversation and Cambridge’s progressive civics and history lessons never formed a coherent picture, much less the kind of flow of information that allows immigrants—at least those who successfully integrate into their new society—to inhabit the same story as the people among whom they now live. Instead, information continued to come in scraps, as it does to newcomers. Each scrap is tried on for size as a theory of everything. The more crudely it simplifies reality, the better it is suited for that purpose.
Starting in 2009, both Zubeidat and Tamerlan began studying the Koran. Neither of them spent much time in any mosque—though Salafism can allow room for women to study. They both relied on the Internet and on occasional intense conversations with better-informed acquaintances. The Koran did not get in the way of Tamerlan’s lifestyle, at least not in the first few years: he carried a small prayer rug in the trunk of his car and could take it out and spread it anywhere in between smoking a couple of joints. The Muslim Internet did help explain the world, though. Tamerlan, for example, found a compelling video called Zeitgeist: The Movie, one of a series of three two-hour extravaganzas of conspiracy theories purporting to debunk every historical construction, starting with Jesus Christ and ending with the September 11 attacks. The latter, as it explained with high-quality graphics and an articulate narration, was the product of a plot in which the U.S. government had been complicit.
Approaching the Koran also helped Tamerlan and Zubeidat place themselves in the Chechen community even as their family began disintegrating. Everyone here and back home had a relationship to Islam now. Some families split, like Badrudi Tsokaev’s back in Tokmok: his wife and children became observant, holding the fast at Ramadan, while Badrudi insisted that he had not needed religion in Soviet times and did not need it now. Over in Cambridge, his old friend Anzor assumed the same line of argument, even though the two had not spoken in years. Islam provided a new connection to home, too. It seemed the later someone came over, the more likely he or she was to be observant. Musa Khadzhimuratov, who left Chechnya in 2000, prayed five times a day—his prayer rug was also always with him—but his wife Madina wore bright clingy low-cut dresses. Women from a family who came later than the Tsarnaevs were covering themselves—and now so was Zubeidat, abandoning her own collection of revealing dresses. Around 2009, Bella and Ailina began covering as well.
A couple of years into his relationship with the Koran, Tamerlan disposed of some ring binders, but one of them was retrieved. It contained clippings a younger Tamerlan had hoped would help him master the world: instructions on how to seduce women and hypnotize people, articles exposing the dominance of Jewish actors in Russian entertainment, and an article in Russian with references to The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
The Protocols themselves, a tsarist-era forgery purporting to expose a Jewish plot for world domination, had supernatural staying power in Russian culture, where it reentered circulation every few decades, and it had supernatural staying power with Tamerlan as well. In the fall of 2012, while going through his books stored in the basement of the house, he called Joanna’s attention to the Protocols. She took it to read so she could later try to argue Tamerlan out of believing it: Joanna was not one to give up on the power of persuasion. She had not finished the Protocols by the time her tenant died.
Some information about the world outside came courtesy of Donald Larking, a longtime home-care client of Zubeidat’s who was among those she handed over to Karima. In the forty years since Larking had been rendered disabled by a gunshot wound to the face, he had developed an affinity for a variety of conspiracy theories and the media that broadcast them. Larking took to giving the Tsarnaevs copies of newspapers to which he subscribed—The Sovereign, which calls itself “Newspaper of the Resistance!” and on its home page showcases the “9-11 Truth Proclamation,” purporting to prove the Twin Towers in New York were blown up by the U.S. military; and The First Freedom, an Alabama-based tabloid with the tagline “Inviting the Zionist-controlled media’cracy to meet a rising free South.”
Larking read the papers and underlined some passages before gifting them. He also gave Tamerlan and Karima a subscription to the American Free Press, a Washington, D.C.–based weekly full of libertarian, commie-baiting, and anti-Semitic rants with a few conspiracy theories thrown in. It was a lot more accessible than the sort of media Joanna had been recommending, such as Bill Moyers’s television program, with its nuanced approach to complex issues, or the critique of globalization she had given a nineteen-year-old Tamerlan when she found him reading a book by Thomas Friedman. Anti-Semitism and conspiracy theories aside, libertarianism is as good a theory of everything as politics has produced, and as late as 2012 Tamerlan was saying he agreed with Ron Paul, the perennial libertarian presidential candidate, and his analysis of American politics.
That fall Joanna approached Karima to ask her to register to vote so she could support senatorial candidate Elizabeth Warren. Karima demurred. She and Tamerlan had different values—not in the sense that they opposed the Harvard Law professor’s campaign to rein in the banks, but in the sense that they did not vote at all. This did not, however, keep them from continuing to accept public assistance—and it was this contradiction that, after ten years, finally compelled their landlady to ask the three remaining Tsarnaevs to move out.
• • •
ONLY DZHOKHAR was still in his cloud of sweetness and light. As his older sisters tumbled into disaster, as his nephews got bounced between cities and continents like a couple of precious but useless objects being regifted, as his brother sank into conspiracies, and as his parents peeled away, Dzhokhar had continued to make good grades and good friends and make everyone happy. He joined the wrestling team and charmed the coach by doing what teenage boys never do: asking what he had done wrong and what he could do better. Soon he was captain.
He was also both smoking and dealing weed, but he was such a perfect mirror of everyone’s best expectations that even the most experienced Rindge teachers saw none of the usual signs: his clothes were purposefully messy, not stoner-messy; his big brown eyes appeared focused, if only ever for the minute or two it took to have a meaningful interaction with any of them in the high school’s vast hallway. Dzhokhar became friendly with one of the school’s most experienced teachers, retired history instructor Larry Aaronson, who was now working as Cambridge Rindge and Latin’s official photographer and unofficial cheerleader. Aaronson first took pictures of Dzhokhar at wrestling practice and then asked him to spell his name for him. It emerged that the boy was Chechen, and from Russia. Aaronson was instantly heartbroken for him, but Dzhokhar insisted: “I am lucky!”
“You are lucky? You were born in Russia, and you are Chechen—and you are lucky?”
“Larry, I got asylum. My whole family got asylum. I live in Cambridge! And I go to Rindge and Latin!”
Aaronson decided that the boy would be his poster child “for these kids from war zones who go to Rindge.” Together they devised a new, easier spelling of the boy’s name: Jahar. This was far more elegant than the solution Tamerlan had found when he was at Rindge; he just started telling people to call him “Timberland, like the shoe.” Tired of explaining what Chechnya was, he had also started saying he was from Russia. At some point Jahar discovered his new friend was also a neighbor. Aaronson lived just a few houses up the street, on the Somerville side of Norfolk. Jahar’s reaction: “I am so lucky!”
Aaronson was the teacher who was still trying to talk sense into his old stoner students Brendan Mess and Erik Weissman, years after they had graduated, yet he missed the signs of chronic pot use in Jahar. Still, he was stymied in his efforts to get to know the boy better. “Whenever I tried to talk to him about being Chechen, it meant nothing to him.”
• • •
HAVING YOUR ETHNIC IDENTITY mean nothing to you, however, is unusual for American high school students, especially those attending a progressive, aware school like Cambridge Rindge and Latin. Everyone is somebody, and it always means something. Over at Needham High School, Islam Baiev was struggling: “No one has heard of Chechnya,” he told me. “It gets tiring to explain every time. Normally I say we used to be independent and now we are part of the Russian Federation. And then it gets into this whole debate about whether I’m Russian or not. People have tried to convince me that I’m Russian, and I say, ‘No, we have a completely different language and culture.’” And if Chechens were Russian, perhaps Moscow would not have tried to bomb them out of existence throughout the nineties and the aughts.
That sort of discussion was much too convoluted for Jahar. Perhaps because he felt he needed a smoother narrative, or perhaps because a paper on one’s identity is always a good thing to show an American college, during his senior year at Rindge, Jahar set out to write a paper on being Chechen. It was his second year taking an English class with a young teacher named Steve Matteo, who had on first meeting him made fun of his name, then still spelled Dzhokhar: “Don’t they have vowels in Chechnya?” At least he had heard of Chechnya. In fact, Matteo could claim a connection to Chechnya, through a handshake or two. His wife was Muslim, from Turkey, as was the wife of one of his best friends, Brian Williams, a man who claimed to teach “the world’s only course on Chechnya.” Williams taught at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth.
Matteo suggested Jahar contact Williams for help with the paper. He did—as Williams recalled a couple of years later, “His questions were totally uninformed, very general”—and Williams sent him the lengthy syllabus for his course, with advice to pay special attention to two books. One was Khassan Baiev’s Grief of My Heart, with the story line that was intimately familiar to Jahar; the other was Allah’s Mountains: The Battle for Chechnya by British journalist Sebastian Smith, a lucid, if rather romanticized, history of Chechnya and the North Caucasus under Russian domination, including the two post-Soviet wars. From what Matteo could tell when Jahar submitted the paper, he had not read the book.
Williams complains about the myths and misconceptions that abound about Chechens—including the myth of a “Chechen Jihad” and of Chechen involvement in al-Qaida, which, he says, has never been documented but has often been described by those who make generalizations in the absence of evidence. Google “Chechens” and the Chechen Jihad will come up. Williams claims he is “on a one-man mission to debunk the myths” spread by the Internet. In Jahar’s case, he apparently failed. Tamerlan, though, put Allah’s Mountains on his online book list around the time his younger brother would have been considering reading it; with all the time on his hands in 2010–2011, Tamerlan may even have done so.
Around the same time, Jahar took another step toward reconnecting with his Chechen and Russian identities.
It was an unusual move, though only in retrospect would it appear disturbing. He started an account on VK.com, a Facebook clone site on which most Russians his age maintained their social media lives. In his profile he indicated that he spoke Russian and Vainakh, the language of the Chechens. The inclusion of his ancestral language was a fib, since he did not really speak it, while the omission of English from the list appears conspicuous. He proceeded to post on the page in Russian—a bit of a linguistic feat for a kid whose Russian-language schooling was interrupted in second grade.
Jahar graduated from Rindge with honors in May 2011. He had been accepted to several colleges. He had not set his sights all that high, ruling out from the start the most competitive Boston-area schools, such as Tufts and Boston University, where Hamzat Umarov’s children were studying. He told friends these schools were too expensive. He would have to finance his education through loans. Of the schools to which he was admitted, Jahar chose the least academically challenging, the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. On the plus side, one of his best friends from Rindge, Robel Phillipos, was also going to go there.
• • •
LOOKED AT from a very particular angle, and from a great remove, by the time Anzor and Zubeidat moved back to Dagestan, their children were settled. The girls were in the great city of New York. The baby of the family was attending college on a scholarship: the City of Cambridge had granted Jahar $2,500 upon graduation. Anzor would not tell his friends he had divorced his wife, and her absence from his side would not make anyone suspect a thing, because, as one of their friends in Tokmok told me, if those two ever split up, red snow would fall from the sky. And Zubeidat would tell everyone that her beautiful firstborn son was taking care of the entire family, just as the eldest boy should.
Six
HIS PLACE IN THE WORLD