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.