by Masha Gessen
It was not too long before one of the officers motioned Reni over to his desk and started asking questions. He wanted to know where she had been. Reni had gone to Russia for a cousin’s wedding—she had left Atlanta on April 16. Over the course of the next twenty minutes, the officer asked a great many detailed questions about her mundane and limited travels in Russia during the previous two weeks. Then he asked her if she knew Tamerlan Tsarnaev. Reni said she did not. The officer insisted that she knew him, and she equally adamantly insisted that she did not.
“Who is Ibragim Todashev?” the officer asked then.
“Why? Did he do something?” Reni asked back.
“What do you mean?” the officer asked. “What could he have done? Why did you ask that? What do you think he would have done?”
Reni had asked the question because she was not taking any of this very seriously. It was not until later that she realized that “you should never joke with them.” Ibragim Todashev was her husband. They had married in July 2010, after knowing each other for a couple of months—this was why Reni had converted to Islam. Ibragim had moved from Boston to Atlanta to live with her, but after a bit less than a year she grew tired of supporting him while he did nothing but the “brainless sports” in which he competed, namely mixed martial arts. They moved to Orlando together, thinking that the Chechen community there would make it easier for him to find a job, but there they split up and Reni moved back to Atlanta, although subsequently they had made up and split up and maybe made up again, eventually settling into a comfortable pattern of talking on the phone every day and spending every other weekend or so together.
So what bad things could Ibragim have done? He could have cheated on Reni. He could have gotten into a fight—that had happened a few times, and once, a couple of months before they met, he had been arrested in downtown Boston for attacking a driver who he thought had hurled an insult that mentioned Ibragim’s mother. Reni was not all that surprised by these fights: as she saw it, Americans and Russians—especially Russians from Chechnya, where Ibragim was born—just drew the line between acceptable and unacceptable behavior in different places. Chechens saw an insult as no less a transgression than a blow, and as far as a Chechen was concerned, an American who shouted an obscenity was spoiling for a fight. Sometimes Reni thought Ibragim might have been better off staying home and mooching off her than roaming the streets and getting into fights with Americans, who were liable to call the police, who in turn were liable to think a loose cannon like Ibragim—a professional martial artist to boot—should be kept under lock and key. Reni, who was not Chechen and who had spent the last two weeks with relatives in Russia, had no idea of the hold the very idea of a Chechen martial artist had taken on the American imagination in that time.
Reni spent five hours in that room, answering questions that made little sense to her. Her plane had left by the time she came out. She dialed Ibragim, who explained that Tamerlan Tsarnaev was his friend Tamerlan from Boston. Reni had never met him, but Ibragim had mentioned him and she had talked to him once or twice when she answered Ibragim’s phone.
“Tell them what you know,” Ibragim instructed her. “Don’t try to hide anything. I’ll tell you more when I see you.”
The next morning two FBI agents were waiting for Reni when she came to work. They had another circular conversation. A week later, Ibragim came to visit: he drove up on Thursday and back the following day. He told Reni that all the Chechens in Boston and Orlando were getting dragged in for questioning. The day he left, the FBI agents came again. This time Reni decided she had something to say about Tamerlan.
“If you ask me, I’m going to tell you, I don’t think he did it.” She really was starting to think that maybe, like some of the American Chechens were saying, the Tsarnaev brothers had been set up. People were starting to point out some inconsistencies in the FBI’s story—but even more, the ongoing siege of the Chechen community made it feel like they were the ones under attack.
After Reni said she did not think Tamerlan did it, all hell broke loose. “That’s when it started with the curse words,” she told me. “He says, ‘So you fucking think it’s right to kill people?’ And I say, ‘Don’t put words in my mouth.’”
Reni was starting to get scared of the FBI. They could do anything—they could even get Ibragim deported. He had booked a ticket to travel to Chechnya on May 24: he had just gotten his green card, and this would be the first time he would visit his parents and eleven younger siblings. Now Reni was begging him to cancel the trip because she was afraid he would not be allowed to return. She spent all day May 21 calling and texting him, trying to get him to cancel. Ibragim relented, and Reni, who had booked the ticket for him herself, logged onto Expedia.com to return it. By the time Reni texted Ibragim to tell him she had canceled the ticket, it was around six-thirty in the evening—the end of Reni’s shift at the Hilton, one of her two hotel jobs.
She rode her motorcycle home. She felt her phone vibrating like crazy as she rode, but she did not look at it until she got home: it was her younger brother Alex, whom she had helped get a job at the Hilton, calling to say that the two FBI agents had shown up there again. She had Alex pass the phone to one of the agents, and then she told them to come to her apartment. They came at seven-thirty. While Reni was waiting for them to arrive, she called and texted Ibragim, finally writing in Chechen: “Why aren’t you answering me?” When they first got married, Ibragim had said he would want their children to speak Chechen, so Reni, who found languages easy, learned this one. Whatever was going on now, it seemed like a good time to switch to a language few other people would be able to understand.
The two FBI agents left a bit after nine, after another circular and unpleasant conversation; as usual, one of them had asked most of the questions while the other took notes. Reni looked at her phone: still no response from Ibragim. She went to bed. When she woke at five and her phone’s screen was still blank, she grew worried. She dialed his number. I’m going to wake him up, she thought. He is going to scream at me. There was no answer.
• • •
ELENA TEYER THOUGHT it was only slightly odd when her daughter converted to Islam. That is, covering herself was a strange choice for a beautiful young woman with long thin legs. Riding her motorcycle in that getup could not have been comfortable, either. Other than the dress, converting seemed to have been easy. Reni explained to her mother that the basic “Thou shalt not kill” and “Thou shalt not steal” from the Bible—roughly the sum total of her familiarity with the Christianity into which she was born—underlay both religions. It had also seemed logical: Reni had been in search of an identity ever since they moved to the United States, and if she had now found one through the love of a good man, so much the better.
Elena’s own story contained perhaps too little love, too few good men, and too much change. She was one of those Russian women who rely on no one but themselves. The Soviet Union collapsed while she was still in college, making her one of the millions who had to make their way without their parents’ help or guidance. Elena became a restaurant manager. She did well, raising two kids on her own. In the early aughts she moved from southern Russia to Moscow to help open and run a hotel restaurant there. In 2004, she started corresponding with an American man, who soon came to visit and then soon came to visit again, and within two years thirty-five-year-old Elena and her children moved to Atlanta to live with him. The marriage lasted less than six months before Elena moved out with her kids. She wanted to go back to Russia, but three tickets would have cost nearly three thousand dollars and she could not imagine getting that kind of money. A local Orthodox church helped her rent a tiny basement apartment. Elena started working—first as an on-call waitress for a catering business, then she worked her way up to maître d’ at a fancy hotel restaurant. Two years after arriving in the United States, she was making enough to pay rent on a good apartment and cover expenses, but she had no health ins
urance. Plus, her permanent-resident status, for which she had qualified as the wife of an American citizen, could be revoked now that she was no longer married, which would make it illegal for her and the kids to stay in the country. Elena was no stranger to hardship, but the uncertainty was starting to feel like too great a burden.
Someone mentioned that the U.S. Army was hiring. After fighting two wars for years, the military was perpetually short on personnel. She failed the test administered at the recruitment office: her English was not up to par. But the recruitment officer gave useful advice on how to study for the test and—even better—told her that an English-language course for prospective recruits would be opening up soon.
Elena left the kids in Atlanta and went to a base in Texas for the course. It was like English-as-a-second-language basic training. The students had to rise at four in the morning, dress in uniforms, and stand in formation in the quad—before spending the day studying English. Elena discovered that she loved it. It might have had something to do with having grown up a military brat, but that was not the crux of it. This was difficult—giving up your personal freedom at the age of thirty-eight is hard, as is getting up at four every day—but things had been difficult her whole life. What they had not been was fair. The Army offered a clear, transparent, and fair deal: Elena gave over her mind and body in exchange for training, job security, medical insurance, and American citizenship for her and her kids. Both partners paid up front. Then she would be set: there would be retirement benefits, too. Honesty and openness are inherently seductive qualities, especially for people who have rarely encountered them. Elena became a patriot of the United States.
She completed the English course, then eight weeks of basic training, followed by vocational training—she had decided she wanted to work at an on-base drugstore—in San Antonio. She served in Fort Jackson, South Carolina, for two and a half years, and then was transferred to Germany. When she went overseas, only her son, Alex, went with her. Her daughter was twenty by then, too old to be dragged around by her mother. Elena wished she had commenced the dragging around a bit earlier, in fact: Alex, who was eleven when they came to America, was doing very well. He was growing up American, while his sister, Nyusha (in her case a diminutive for Evgenia), seemed to be struggling to figure out who she was. While Elena was away for her initial military training, Nyusha went and legally changed her name to Reniya Manukyan, taking the last name of a family friend of Armenian descent who she believed was her biological father, despite Elena’s denials. Reni stopped considering herself Russian, began referring to herself as Armenian, and even taught herself the language. She had the ability and perseverance for these kinds of feats.
Although Elena continued to call her daughter Nyusha, she got it: the girl was looking for somebody to be. The conversion to Islam was the product of the same need and actually made a bit more sense to Elena because it was not an abstraction—her daughter was in love with Ibragim. Nyusha took things a bit far when she tried reprimanding her mother for her insufficiently modest dress; Elena was not one to be told what to wear, except when she was at work in the Army. But Elena liked Ibragim. He was gentle, and he had been through a lot: fleeing the war in Chechnya with his family as a child, growing up in Saratov, a Russian city on the Volga, an ethnic Other, returning to Chechnya when it was still in shambles. Ibragim had gone back to Saratov to attend college—he had studied to be a translator from English—and had come to the United States on a work-study program before what would have been his last year of college. He had stayed, getting political asylum. His family back in Chechnya was doing well—his father had a high-level job with the new administration—but most of the prospering had come after Ibragim left. Elena saw him as a boy alone in a strange country, and she had a pretty good idea of what that felt like. She was happy to accept him fully into her family, as long as he finally got a job and stopped relying on her daughter, who worked two.
Elena herself felt like she was finally settling into a good life. After two years in Germany she requested a transfer to Georgia: she had spent only a few years in Atlanta, but she felt like the city was home, both because Nyusha was there and because it was where Elena first landed as a Russian mail-order bride. She and seventeen-year-old Alex returned to Georgia in March 2013. She was now based at Fort Stewart, 230 miles southeast of Atlanta, and Elena immediately set about house-hunting in Savannah, the beautiful historic town about forty minutes away, toward the coast. A month later, she was closing on her first house. The date was April 15.
• • •
ELENA DID NOT BEGIN to grasp the impact of the Boston bombing until two weeks later, when her daughter was detained at the airport on the way home. Reni-Nyusha told her mother that Ibragim had been called in for questioning and said that the FBI was following him everywhere he went. On May 10, during a visit to Reni, Ibragim came down to see Elena in Savannah. Reni had asked him to run some things of hers from Atlanta to her mother’s house. Ibragim struck Elena as depressed. She was also surprised to see he was still limping, ostensibly a consequence of a knee operation back in March. It might in fact have been the result of a fight he had had in an Orlando parking lot a few days earlier.
Around seven-thirty in the evening on May 21 someone knocked on Elena’s door. It was two FBI agents. “What’s our fools’ psychology?” she ranted to me a year later. “If we haven’t done anything wrong, we fear nothing. I even kept telling them they were doing good for the country.” Obviously, she let them into her house.
“They spent two hours asking me the same questions over and over again: Did they sleep together? Did they sleep on the couch together when they spent the night at my place? How religious was he? Did he abuse her? I told them that if anyone had so much as touched my baby in a bad way, I would have killed them. That’s exactly what I said.” That is easy to believe. Elena is a large, shapely woman with long blond hair—the very image of an all-powerful Russian matriarch, as well as of the ideal Russian mail-order bride, and the very opposite of her own daughter, who is slight, dark-haired, and soft-spoken.
After a couple of hours of circular questioning, Elena asked the agents to leave. She called her daughter.
“I just had a visit from them,” said Elena.
“So did I.”
Elena tried calling Ibragim, but he did not pick up.
• • •
AFTER TRYING IBRAGIM unsuccessfully at five in the morning, Reni got ready for work and jumped on her motorcycle. As she left her apartment complex, she noticed a car. Everything about the car was conspicuous: the way it was parked, across two spaces, the man at the wheel, who was white—an unusual sight in this neighborhood—and the fact that he was sitting at the wheel of a parked car in the wee hours of the morning. Ibragim had mentioned being followed by the FBI, but Reni did not yet realize that overt, menacing surveillance is a typical FBI tactic that was being applied to several of Tamerlan’s friends. She did know that the man at the wheel had to be an agent. She raised the face shield of her motorcycle helmet and gave the guy a stare she hoped conveyed the depth of her disdain for him, and rode away. The car followed her, but she lost it easily and rode to the Holiday Inn, where she was working the morning shift. The FBI car, as it turned out, went to the Hilton, where she was supposed to work that afternoon and evening.
At seven o’clock Reni’s phone rang; it was a former supervisor with whom Reni had stayed friends. He was also a biker, and he, his wife, and Reni often took weekend riding trips together.
“What’s your husband’s last name?” he asked. “It says in the paper that a guy named Ibragim has been killed in Orlando.”
The thing about working at a hotel is that there is always a newspaper at hand early in the morning. Reni grabbed a copy of USA Today off the top of a stack and found the headline. The FBI agent called from the Hilton just then; she told him where she was, and he said he was coming. It took him forty minutes to get there. Meanwhile, Re
ni kept dialing her mother.
Elena had a training session that morning. She could not pick up when her daughter called or when an unknown number began showing up on her phone every few minutes. She finally picked up when the training ended, around seven-thirty in the morning.
“Hello. We were at your house last night.”
This was when she lost her cool. “You are going to start calling me at work now? I told you everything yesterday. I have nothing else to say to you.”
“We have something to tell you. Ibragim Todashev died of gunshot wounds this morning.”
Elena hung up and called her daughter. Reni was screaming into the phone: “Mama, they’ve killed him!”
“Then I knew that they weren’t kidding,” Elena told me. She rushed to do the paperwork for an emergency leave; her commanding officer was understanding, but bolting from work at an Army base still requires a lengthy bureaucratic procedure. Meanwhile, the two FBI agents from the evening before came.
“You don’t have to worry about your children,” said the one who usually did the talking. “Your family is safe.”
“Why? Why?” Elena remembers screaming, meaning, Why was Ibragim killed?
“He became aggressive,” the agent told her.
“What are you telling me that my children are safe for when you just killed one of them? Look at me—I’m being aggressive now, too. Are you going to kill me?”
What Elena remembers the FBI agent doing next is this: “He placed his foot up on the chair right next to where I was sitting, and he hiked his pant leg up. He had a gun strapped to his shin. He said, ‘If you touch my gun now, my partner can kill you. He has that right.’ The gun was just about level with my face. It’s a good thing I didn’t reach for it then. Or I wouldn’t be talking to you today.”