And then Alvi went to the United States. He did not have a law degree or an American spouse—he was making money as a handyman and his wife was very much Chechen, and living in Kyrgyzstan—but he got a tourist visa and took off. By this time the entire Tsarnaev clan agreed: the future was in the United States—and the United States was within reach. Anzor and Zubeidat told all their friends that they were moving to America. They said it was the only place their children could get the education they deserved. In preparation, both Anzor and Zubeidat would obtain college degrees in law, as Ruslan and Maret had done.
MEDIA ACCOUNTS of the Tsarnaev story generally state as fact that Anzor worked at the prosecutor’s office in Kyrgyzstan—this was apparently what he consistently said after the family moved to the United States. Even the FBI investigators seem never to have questioned this claim. Some accounts add that at a certain point, as the political situation in Kyrgyzstan deteriorated, Anzor, as a Chechen, could no longer work in law enforcement. In fact, while it is true that Kyrgyzstan has seen extreme ethnic tensions and violence in the past twenty years, most of it has been directed at the large ethnic Uzbek minority; the tiny Chechen minority has not been affected—that is, it has not been marginalized further than it was before the collapse of the Soviet Union. Friends do recall that a few years after Anzor and Zubeidat began studying law, Anzor started showing off an employee ID issued by the Pervomaysky District Prosecutor’s Office in Bishkek. There is, however, no record of anyone named Anzor Tsarnaev ever having worked for the Pervomaysky or any other prosecutor’s office in Bishkek.
“He had a friend who worked at the Pervomaysky Prosecutor’s Office,” explained Badrudi. “He fixed Anzor up with an ID. It made talking to the cops a lot easier.” In other words, it was a fake ID. There was a fake uniform that went with it; no one remembers seeing Anzor actually wearing it, but he was photographed in it at least once. It is true, though, that Anzor got a new job in the late 1990s: he went to work for his older cousin Jamal.
My first meeting with Jamal Tsarnaev was set to take place at Grozny airport, a crowded and disorienting place. “How will I recognize you?” I asked him over the phone. “Oh, you’ll recognize me,” he responded. Then he paused and added, “You’ll know me by my hairdo.” Jamal turned out to have a perfectly naked, blindingly shiny skull. On the right side of his head there was a depressed patch about an inch and a half square—and it was almost perfectly square, with four round marks at the corners, where screws had been removed. As we settled in at a café for the interview, I asked Jamal what he did for work.
“Does that have anything to do with the story?” he asked tersely.
“No,” I said. “I’m just making small talk.” Asking him about his head injury or brain surgery was clearly out of the question.
He relaxed a bit and after a moment’s reflection said, “I pick up things that are not in their proper place.”
Translated, this meant something like: I am a crook. I don’t have a specialty—I am more of an opportunistic, general-interest criminal.
In the late 1990s, Jamal told me, he started a business transporting tobacco from Kyrgyzstan to Russia. By “tobacco” he could have meant just about anything, including tobacco—or drugs. Jamal was based in Grozny, and Anzor was his man in Kyrgyzstan. A prosecutor’s ID and a uniform would have been handy in this line of work.
Anzor and Zubeidat were not lying about going to America, though, or about studying law. They had both signed up to be correspondence students, a system that dated back to Soviet times, when it allowed full-time workers to obtain college degrees without taking time off—but also, in most cases, without learning much. They would travel to their colleges for one or two weeks each semester, to take exams. Anzor and Zubeidat always liked studying—Zubeidat generally grasped any new information as quickly and easily as she had learned Chechen, and Anzor had had the love of learning beaten into him by Zayndy, even if Anzor never was as good a student as his lawyer sister and brother. They were raising Tamerlan to be a good and versatile student, too. Not only was he getting near-perfect grades at Pushkin Gymnasium School Number One, he was also enrolled in extracurricular sports, advanced study of school subjects, and piano lessons.
In 2000, the Tsarnaevs left Tokmok. No one there saw any of them again until the summer of 2012, when Anzor showed up in the Sakhzavod neighborhood one afternoon. He knocked on the metal gate of the house of Badrudi’s brother, on the street where they all had grown up. To his delight, he found the old crew there, Badrudi and his brother and the brothers Abaev, sitting around a table in the garden, eating lamb kebab and drinking brandy. They filled him in on the neighborhood news of the last dozen years: a few marriages, a couple of divorces, some kids, a number of deaths, and the brothers Batukaev—Alaudin had been gunned down right here in Sakhzavod, and Aziz had been in prison for over five years and kept racking up more sentences for inciting unrest there. To his old friends, Anzor looked thinner and older than they had expected, but he sounded as good as ever. His eldest, Tamerlan, he said, was “the hope of the U.S. Olympic team” in boxing. The girls were both married with children. And little Dzhokhar was attending the best university in America on a scholarship. The story made sense to the men: everything had gone pretty much as Anzor and Zubeidat had planned.
WHEN ANZOR AND ZUBEIDAT disappeared from Tokmok in 2000, those who did not know them very well assumed that, after four years of talk and preparation, they had finally gone to America. Those who did know them knew that Zubeidat was “a dragonfly, never able to stay in one place,” as their Tokmok next-door neighbor Raisa Batukaeva put it. “She was always dragging him off.” This time they went to Dagestan. Why? It is possible that Zubeidat’s longing for the sea temporarily overpowered her American dream. It is possible that they could not conjure a way to move to America—studying law was not going to magically make it happen—and had the idea, however vague, that the troubled Russian Caucasus might make a better launching pad. It is possible that Anzor’s work for Jamal and his habit of impersonating a law enforcement official were starting to get him in trouble. Most likely, it was a combination of all these factors. They sold the apartment in Tokmok, which would have been worth about three thousand dollars at the time, and moved to Makhachkala.
Nothing—not even observing the radical changes in Tokmok after the collapse of the Soviet Union—could have prepared Zubeidat for what she found where the city of her childhood used to stand. It was as though every single building in Makhachkala had been impregnated by an architectural alien that caused it to sprout tentacles and grow other random organs. Everywhere something was being sold: cheap garish clothing imported from Turkey, counterfeit everything—cosmetics, underwear, electronics, footwear. Dagestan was still cobbling its own shoes, an estimated million pairs a year on which no one paid any taxes or extended any guarantees, but now these shoes looked like they had been made in China. The new trading outposts were kiosks assembled from plastic panels, panes of mismatched siding, metal sheeting, acrylic, and whatever else was handy. They would spring up overnight, sometimes blocking the sidewalk, and then change hands, begin to disintegrate, and disappear just as quickly, only to rematerialize as someone else’s shop that sold something else but looked and felt exactly the same as the one that was there before.