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.’”
THE BIG QUESTION facing the family was how to make Tamerlan succeed. One look at him and you knew he was destined for greatness—an impression confirmed by people outside the family. The physical grace of his large body, and his sharp features and large dark eyes, turned heads and messed with them. But he had lived in seven cities and attended an even greater number of schools. True, he could play keyboard and aspired to good grades, but with his late start in America, how was he to assert his potential? Anzor and Zubeidat did what immigrants do: they asked others for advice. They were lectured on the relative merits of different colleges, and learned that even the public ones carried a frightening price tag. They sorted through lists of possible professions. Would their golden boy be an engineer, a performer, an entrepreneur?
Khassan Baiev suggested martial arts. It was a terrible suggestion. If Almut Rochowanski, the legal scholar who founded the group for Chechen refugees, were to classify immigrants from the Caucasus, she just might divide them into two groups: those who push their male children into martial arts and those who do not. It is the second group that will succeed; the first group’s assumptions come from the old country. Back in the Caucasus, if you took at least one national title in wrestling, boxing, or any other fighting sport, you were set for life. In return for the honor you brought your region, you would get a gym of your own to run and, more often than not, a seat on one of the so-called legislative bodies. In the United States, a martial-arts career was generally a dead end, one that would leave a man cocky, injured, unemployed, and unassimilated by his late twenties.
Khassan Baiev’s own experience was exceptional, but neither he nor Anzor and Zubeidat knew this. He had been a man with a career in Russia, then a man with money, then, in Chechnya, a man with a mission. In the United States, he was a man with a tragic and glorious past and too much time on his hands. He tried volunteering at a Boston-area hospital and quickly despaired of ever building a medical career in the United States; he also grew profoundly disillusioned with the American medical system. Then a friend suggested he try competing in sambo again—the sport had once helped him overcome discriminatory Soviet university admissions policies and set him on his way to becoming a doctor. Again it worked a miracle. Baiev became a champion in his early forties. It did not exactly lead to making a good life in the United States—he ended up starting a practice in Russia and supporting his family’s neat middle-class Boston life from there—but for him martial arts were a proven magic bullet. What is more, this was the one thing Anzor could do for his son in the new country: he started training Tamerlan in boxing.
Tamerlan was a naturally gifted fighter, if an unconventional one—though it is impossible to tell whether his unusual stance came naturally or was the result of Anzor’s training. Rather than defend his body and face while he boxed, he let his long arms hang down. He could look overconfident if he was winning, which he often was, or vulnerable, literally unguarded, if he was beaten, which happened rarely. After training with Anzor at home, he worked his way through a series of Boston-area gyms to the Wai Kru Mixed Martial Arts center in the neighborhood of Allston, just across the river from Cambridge. When he first showed up, he had no mouthpiece, helmet, or other standard protective gear and insisted that he did not need them. This suggested to the owner that Tamerlan was either a buffoon or a boxing genius; with time, it seems, he concluded that the boy was a bit of each.
One of the few documents of Tamerlan’s life to have become public before his crime and his death is a photo essay shot by a young man named Johannes Hirn in 2009 and published in a Boston University graduate student magazine the next year. Titled “Will Box for Passport,” it offers a tellingly inaccurate narrative: Tamerlan says his goal is to make the U.S. Olympic team and become a naturalized citizen that way—though as an asylee, he should have qualified for citizenship anyway. He also says, “I don’t have a single American friend. I don’t understand them,” though his best friend at the time, former classmate Brendan Mess, was an American. He also claims to be from Chechnya and to have fled it with his family in the early nineties, when the fighting broke out. None of this is gravely untrue, but all of it is a sort of shorthand for a story he had come to tell about himself, one in which he was a stranger in a strange land and boxing his only hope. The photographer seems to have had an inkling that Tamerlan’s self-presentation was not entirely accurate. One large black-and-white picture in the spread shows him wearing high-tops, chinos, and no shirt, smiling while sparring with a young woman. The caption reads: “Tsarnaev says he doesn’t usually remove his shirt when among women at the gym.”
The strange thing about Anzor and Tamerlan’s outsize ambition for Tamerlan’s boxing career—the plans for stardom and for a spot on the Olympic team, if not the expectation of Hollywood-style prosperity to follow—was that it was not entirely unreasonable. With his ability, training, and drive, Tamerlan could have had an Olympic career. But he did not.
His first victory came in January 2004, just six months after coming to the United States: he won in the 178-pound novice class in the Golden Gloves amateur competition in Lowell, Massachusetts. He got a trophy and gave an interview to the Lowell Sun. “I like the USA,” he said. “You have a chance to make a lot of money here if you are willing to work.” He had not yet seen anyone who had actually made money in the United States, but this was what he had been told. He started climbing quickly but dropped boxing abruptly during his senior year of high school—he needed to concentrate on academics in order to graduate.