The Brothers (6 page)

In this new era, when the United States stopped viewing Chechen rebels as freedom fighters and started seeing them through Russian optics, as likely Islamic terrorists, a new regulation blocked anyone who had provided “material support” to any of the extralegal fighters from receiving refugee status and a green card.

Musa Khadzhimuratov, though he came over as a refugee, would never be issued his green card. Had this regulation been in effect earlier, it could also have applied to Ruslan Tsarnaev, who at one point after moving to the United States started a group of Chechen exiles who may or may not have had ties to the pro-independence forces. Fortunately for Ruslan, by the time the new regulation went into effect, he was a full United States citizen.

•   •   •

RUSLAN’S AMERICANNESS
had cost him a great deal. When he first moved to the United States with his wife, they lived in her parents’ house in Washington state. Graham Fuller, a former high-level CIA official, was a onetime Russia scholar, an expert on Islam, and a charming, enthusiastic talker. He and Ruslan spoke Russian with each other. But other than talking with his father-in-law while Samantha worked on her business-school applications, Ruslan did one of two things: he tried to master English by memorizing his way through a Russian–English dictionary, ignoring Graham Fuller’s counsel that this was no way to learn a language, and he sat on a couch in the basement, watching, over and over again, the same videotape of a Chechen celebration with Lezghinka, which they used to dance every night back in Bishkek. Eventually he began making contact with other Chechens in America, and he even registered his new organization at Fuller’s address. This activity brought him back to life, but by this time his marriage had collapsed.

His sister Maret’s marriage also ended, though once she arrived in Canada it began to appear that she had planned this all along, that her husband had been merely a means of transporting her across the Atlantic. All is fair in immigration. Except one thing: You never talk about the pain of dislocation. You do not describe the way color drains out of everyday life when nothing is familiar, how the texture of living seems to disappear. You breathe not a word of no longer knowing who you are, where you are going, with whom, and why—and the unique existential dread of that condition. Most important, you never question your decision: from the moment you cross the border, there is only ever the future.

Most immigrants eventually come out the other side, as Ruslan did. He completed his studies at Duke, married a Chechen woman he met in the United States, and eventually took a job in Kazakhstan, as an American, intending to return to the United States. He was now in a position to help his siblings. When his elder sister, Malkan, divorced as well, he took in her children, and he also offered to temporarily take Anzor and Zubeidat’s children while they engineered their move to America. Going to the United States, Ruslan was more certain than ever, was what they should do—if they wanted their children to have a future.

Tamerlan and the girls, Bella and Ailina, went to Kazakhstan to stay with Ruslan. In the Chechen tradition, it is the older brother who is the boss and caretaker of the family, but a big part of becoming a successful immigrant is knowing when to choose pragmatism over tradition: both Anzor and Ruslan would have to accept the reversal of family roles. Anzor, Zubeidat, and eight-year-old Dzhokhar traveled to the United States on tourist visas. They chose Boston because Maret and Alvi were both there at the moment. Neither had a stable living arrangement, however, so at first the newcomers stayed with Khassan Baiev, with whom Maret had become very close when he first came to the United States.

Dzhokhar started attending second grade at the public school where two of the Baiev children, Islam and Maryam, went. Max Mazaev helped Anzor get a few odd jobs. The family applied for asylum—once it was granted, it would extend to their other children, who would then be able to move to the United States. In April 2002, Anzor and Zubeidat found an inexpensive apartment in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Over the next ten years, it would witness the slow and catastrophic demise of a whole set of immigrant dreams.

A DECADE OF BROKEN DREAMS

F
or a new immigrant, the simplest and smallest of life’s obstacles can be insurmountable. Take, for example, this scenario: You are an asylum seeker looking to rent an apartment over the months it takes to assemble your case. You are in the United States on a visitor’s visa. You have no credit history, no pay stubs, no tax returns to show to a potential landlord. You also have no way to tell the good from the bad, the normal from the crooked. You get swindled by brokers, pay out a fortune in application fees, get your hopes up, get your hopes dashed, lower your standards, and ultimately understand you just have to hope for a miracle.

Joanna Herlihy was the Tsarnaevs’ miracle. She was sixty-eight when they met—the youngest of her four children was roughly the same age as Anzor and Zubeidat—and for most of her adult life she had been trying to save the world. With a first marriage behind her, and once her children did not need her at home, she had joined the Peace Corps. She was a fixture of city politics in Cambridge, where she now lived. At the time Anzor and Zubeidat met her, she was taking care of one aging ex-husband (her second), and her grown children continued to drift in and out of her house.

She had bought the house in 1994 for the very low price of $45,000, at a foreclosure auction. It was what Bostonians call a three-family, a wooden three-story house with one long apartment on each floor. Three-families are common to the working-class neighborhoods—Dorchester, Jamaica Plain, Somerville. With postage-stamp-sized yards and on-street parking only, they used to represent cheap and unambitious city living. The house sat right on the Cambridge–Somerville city line, on the Cambridge side. It was modest even by three-family standards: it was built in the back of a shared lot and lacked the porches and small balconies typical of such buildings. When Joanna bought it, it was uninhabitable: it had not been heated, and the pipes had burst all over the house, causing extensive water damage. But it was also a three-apartment building in a city where property values were about to skyrocket: Cambridge would soon make every list of America’s overpriced cities. Over the next few years, Norfolk Street, which was an orphaned corner of Cambridge when Joanna bought the building, would shed its many junkyards and acquire more condominium complexes than a street so small could be expected to fit. She gradually replaced the plumbing and rectified the worst of the damage. She lived on the first floor, and eventually rented out the top two floors at below-market prices, ensuring that at least two units of Cambridge housing remained affordable.

Maret heard about the apartment from Khassan Baiev, who had probably heard about it from the journalist with whom he had written his memoir, a member of Cambridge’s loose network of Russophile intellectuals. Joanna had studied Russian at the University of Chicago, where she had earned her bachelor’s degree while still in her teens, like another precocious coed there, Susan Sontag. Joanna’s first husband was Alexander Lipson, a brilliant linguist and an inventive teacher of Russian who had taught out of their Cambridge home and taken his students, and his wife, by Volkswagen bus on tours of the entire Soviet Union, including Central Asia.

The third-floor apartment was not, strictly speaking, available for rent: the walls, which Joanna had repositioned, were unfinished. Maret, who was in charge of the negotiations, said the Tsarnaevs would happily finish the improvements themselves—they were just desperate for a place to live, now. They could have the apartment for eight hundred dollars, easily a third below the market rate. There were three bedrooms, all of them small, but Anzor and Zubeidat could move right in along with Maret and Alvi, even though they were likely soon to be joined by their children. Indeed, from the moment Joanna met the Tsarnaevs, she passionately wanted them to live in her home. She seemed—as they surely sensed—uniquely positioned to help them. She got them: she spoke Russian, she had seen where they came from, she had even studied Sufism. And she was primed to see the Tsarnaevs exactly as they wanted to be seen.

They presented themselves as having studied law. Anzor said he had worked in the prosecutor’s office. They were fleeing ethnic strife. They were clearly modern people, Zubeidat with her low-cut dresses and elaborate makeup, Anzor with his clean-shaven face and athlete’s body. That they were separated from their children—even Dzhokhar, whom they left at the Baievs’ for the moment, so as not to interrupt his schooling midyear—was a measure of the gravity of their situation. And they manifested an anger about the injustices of the world that was not unlike Joanna’s own. They were, as she was, at once profoundly disappointed by the world and stubbornly looking for a way to live on their own terms. Anzor and Zubeidat also saw a kindred spirit: a beautiful, odd bird. Joanna had the body and the physical energy of a woman half her age. She wore skirts and leather sandals, and her long hair was undyed—it still had some natural blond streaks in it. To the Tsarnaevs, who were always finely attuned to the aesthetics of their situation, to encounter in Joanna’s manner and appearance some of their own distinctiveness seemed fateful.

•   •   •

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 Latin’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.’”