The Brothers Read online

  Not far from the shooting range, in a ground-floor apartment in a complex in Manchester, New Hampshire, lives Mazaev’s cousin Musa Khadzhimuratov, an entirely different kind of Chechen refugee. Khadzhimuratov joined the war effort in Chechnya as a teenager and in a few years became the head of security for Akhmed Zakayev, a former actor who served as foreign minister in the separatist government. At the beginning of the second war, a wounded Zakayev fled Chechnya—he would later be granted political asylum in the United Kingdom—and Khadzhimuratov went into hiding. Russian troops found him, shot him, and left him for dead. He survived. His family moved him to Azerbaijan, where he underwent a series of operations. He is paralyzed from the waist down, he lacks sensation in eighty percent of his body, he has frequent petit mal seizures, and he requires around-the-clock care, but he is alive. Khadzhimuratov, his wife, Madina, and their two small children were brought to the United States by a refugee foundation, on a plane with one other family from Chechnya and a score of families fleeing Afghanistan. The Khadzhimuratovs landed in New Hampshire by accident—they had been told they were going to the Boston suburb of Chelsea, where one Chechen family already lived, but were rerouted at the last minute to what they thought was Manhattan but turned out to be Manchester. They were placed in a second-floor apartment that had a hallway with a step in it, which meant that Khadzhimuratov could not make it from the bedroom to the bathroom. The entire family stayed in the living room, with Khadzhimuratov and his son sleeping on a mattress on the floor and Madina and their daughter sleeping in armchairs. By the time they found a ground-floor, wheelchair-accessible apartment a few weeks later, they did not want to think of changing cities. The Khadzhimuratovs live on public assistance, but perhaps because the relative isolation of New Hampshire requires this, they have also assimilated to a significant extent. Their spotless two-bedroom apartment is as open as any traditional Chechen home: the kids of the Sudanese family from upstairs come here after school with the Khadzhimuratov children and never leave; a retired American named Jim, who lost all ties to his family after a bitter divorce, has adopted the Khadzhimuratovs, or has been adopted by them—he is here every afternoon. Madina, on whom Khadzhimuratov is dependent for constant care, shows none of the deference traditional for a Chechen woman. She sits at the table with everyone else and interrupts with laughter and even with the occasional correction.

  That other family from the Khadzhimuratovs’ plane made it to Chelsea, making a total of two Chechen families in that suburb. They were a middle-aged woman, her son, his wife, and their toddler daughter: the woman’s husband and her other son had been taken away by Russian security services and never returned. The other Chelsea family was that of Hamzat Umarov, his wife, Raisa, and their seven small children, who had come by way of a refugee camp in Turkey—and before that, they had crossed the border from Chechnya on foot, at the height of the fighting. An equally dramatic escape story belongs to the Boston Chechen community’s celebrity, Khassan Baiev. Before the first war, Baiev was an up-and-coming plastic surgeon with a profitable practice in Grozny and a side business not unlike Jamal Tsarnaev’s. During the war he ran a field hospital where, he says, he treated the wounded from all sides. At the start of the second war he was targeted, ostensibly for having aided the rebels. A human rights organization virtually smuggled him out of Russia and helped him apply for asylum in the United States; eventually he was able to bring his wife and three children over. Like Mazaev, Baiev concluded he would be unable to be recertified as a doctor in the United States. He tried to volunteer at a hospital. He wrote a memoir with the help of a Boston journalism professor who had once been posted to Moscow. Eventually, after the war ended, he drifted back to Russia, where he now once again has a lucrative plastic surgery practice, which keeps him in ostentatiously expensive clothes and his family living in the middle-class Boston suburb of Needham, in a cul-de-sac with a playground in the middle.

  When the Tsarnaevs arrived in Boston, the two doctors’ families—the Mazaevs and the Baievs—were already there, as was Hamzat Umarov’s large family in Chelsea. The others had not yet arrived. The Tsarnaevs’ timing was as bad as it had ever been: they landed in America precisely at the moment when they and their kind were seen as most suspect.

  • • •

  AMERICAN SOCIETY, perhaps more than some others, goes through distinct cycles, separated by shifts in the national psyche. But to a new immigrant, nothing was here before—and there is no inkling that things will be different after. There is only the mood of the present moment, and this mood becomes what America feels like. The Tsarnaevs arrived a few months after the September 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington had united Americans in fear.

  The family had plenty of experience with the power of tragedy to bring a nation together. They had seen this most recently in Russia, in August and September 1999. On three nights bombs had gone off in apartment buildings, burying people under the rubble in their sleep. More than three hundred people died, and Russia, gripped by terror, quickly turned against the Chechens, who were blamed for the attacks. Chechen men throughout Russia were rounded up, Chechen children were hounded out of school, Chechen families were chased out of their homes. The war in Dagestan started. What was now happening in the United States did not look very different: there were the witch hunts, and there was the punitive war in a faraway abstraction of a land. It was called, tellingly and absurdly, the War on Terror, an emotion all nations would like to declare war against if only that were possible. Instead, they waged war on the Muslims. It was always the Muslims.

  The Tsarnaevs came to this land, terrorized by the specter of terrorism, from a land and a moment where terrorism looked markedly different. For Americans, terrorism seemed to come from nowhere and to attack them for no reason. In Russia, the first terrorist act that shook the country in the 1990s had been a direct consequence of the war in Chechnya. In June 1995 rebel field commander Shamil Basayev led his troops across the Chechen border into the predominantly ethnic-Russian Stavropol region and seized over six hundred hostages in a civilian hospital and in the surrounding area. This hostage-taking is almost certainly unique in modern terrorist history: first, because most of the hostages survived but were not freed by force; second, and most incredible, because this act of terrorism accomplished its avowed goal.

  Russian prime minister Viktor Chernomyrdin negotiated with Basayev over the phone, and some of the negotiations were caught on tape by Russian television reporters. Chernomyrdin sounded desperate. In the end he negotiated the release of most of the hostages—except for a busload of volunteers, most of them journalists and human rights activists, whom Basayev would take to Chechnya. They were to be released once Russia pulled back its troops and sat down to negotiate with the rebels. This happened.

  The second major act of terrorism that originated in Chechnya (not counting the apartment bombings in 1999 that had almost certainly been falsely blamed on the Chechens) occurred less than a year after the Tsarnaevs arrived in Boston. On October 23, 2002, a group of men and women led by a twenty-three-year-old Chechen commander named Movsar Barayev seized a large Moscow theater during a musical performance, taking about eight hundred hostages. The standoff lasted three days. On Day Two, Khassan Baiev, the plastic surgeon now living in Boston, was called upon to negotiate with the hostage-takers over the phone, to try to secure the release of some of the hostages. He tried and failed. Earlier, a number of other people, including several journalists, had also talked with the hostage-takers, and some even managed to enter the theater; young children and non-Russian citizens had been released as a result.

  The standoff ended on Day Three with a military operation that was as well conceived as it was spectacularly botched in execution. First, sleeping gas was pumped into the building through its plumbing system, knocking out everyone inside. Russian armed personnel rushed in. They shot dead all the sleeping hostage-takers, making a subsequent investigation impossible. Then they carried the
unconscious hostages out and laid them on the porch of the theater, where none of them received prompt medical help. One hundred twenty-nine people died, most of them choking on their own vomit or asphyxiating because they were placed in a way that blocked their breathing.

  The tragedy, so clearly created through negligence and, on a more basic level, so clearly a result of the continuing war in Chechnya, drew comparatively little media coverage and virtually no political attention in the United States. After September 11, America had stopped criticizing Russia for waging war in Chechnya. In the post-9/11 era, Russia got to reframe Chechnya, and the continuing bloodshed in Dagestan, as part of a war it was now fighting alongside the United States—the war against radical Islamist terrorists. The United States and Russia agreed to share information on the Islamist threat. Tokmok appeared on the map of the world, and of American–Russian relations: for eight years starting in December 2001, United States military planes would be taking off from Manas Air Base just outside Tokmok—by agreement with Kyrgyzstan and with Moscow’s acquiescence.

  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.

  Five

  A DECADE OF BROKEN DREAMS

  For 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.