AILINA’S TROUBLES started out small. In eighth grade she began getting into fights, especially with one girl. The school required counseling, and the Tsarnaevs complied. Joanna suggested that instead of going on to Cambridge Rindge and Latin, where the social dynamics might follow her, Ailina apply to a newly formed charter school. She did, as did Dzhokhar, and both were admitted. (Dzhokhar was two grades behind Ailina, but there was no division between middle and high school levels at this school; after he finished middle school, though, he enrolled at Rindge and Latin.) The girl with whom Ailina had been fighting also entered the school, but, much to the relief of everyone at 410 Norfolk Street, she was expelled within a month.
The summer before ninth grade, Ailina joined Bella on a trip to Washington state to stay with Uncle Ruslan, who had returned from Almaty, and his family. Ruslan’s wife had a younger brother, Elmirza Khozhugov, who was studying at a nearby college. It seemed like a good idea for him to marry one of the Tsarnaev girls. Bella would not hear of it, so this left Ailina. To most Americans, the looming arrangement would have looked disturbing. Ailina was a rising high school freshman, a slight girl with typical American teenage speech and a gaggle of friends from her hip-hop class; she liked to lead people to believe she was Latin American. Joanna probably saw more of the nuance: Ailina was slightly older than her classmates, and by the time of the wedding, she would be around the age her own mother had been when she married Anzor. And unlike their own mother, Ailina and Bella did not have parents trying to force marriage matches on them. Anzor, for example, accepted Bella’s refusal to marry Elmirza—as long as she accepted the fact that she would be allowed to marry only another Chechen.
As soon as Ailina finished ninth grade, she and Bella traveled to Almaty. Ailina and Elmirza had a big wedding. It is not customary for the bride’s parents to be present at a Chechen wedding, so there was nothing conspicuous in Anzor and Zubeidat’s absence.
Elmirza and Ailina returned to Washington state at the end of the summer, in time for him to resume college and for her to enroll in a high school program for pregnant teenagers, which by that point she was. In the spring of what would have been her sophomore year of high school, Ailina moved back to Cambridge to give birth to a little boy, Ziaudy; then she returned to Washington. It is not clear when everyone at Norfolk Street became aware that Elmirza was beating Ailina, but by 2008—less than two years after the wedding and barely a year after Ziaudy’s birth—Elmirza was taken into custody after repeated reports of domestic violence, and Ailina and the baby were back in Cambridge. Tamerlan was dispatched to Washington with bail money so Elmirza could leave the country before he had to face trial—and prison time. Ailina destroyed her green card and other documents in fear that Anzor would try to force her to follow her husband.
In the wake of the Boston Marathon bombing, Ruslan would publicly condemn his nephews and reveal that he had not communicated with Anzor’s family in several years. The media generally assumed the estrangement had resulted from a difference of views on Islam and on what it meant to be Muslim and Chechen in America. Far more likely, the rift was caused by Ailina’s split with Elmirza. Chechen men beat their wives. When they do not, other men often suspect them of weakness and subservience to their women. When they do, the wife’s family usually tries to mitigate the effects without interfering—sheltering the wife in times of crisis and sending her back after a few weeks. No one ever calls the police. No one lets the men be jailed, disgraced, and effectively deported. Ailina ruined Elmirza’s American dream and broke Chechen tradition by keeping Ziaudy, who rightfully belonged to his father’s family. However Americanized Ruslan had become, he would have had a very difficult time justifying the situation to his wife’s family back home.
BELLA’S TROUBLES began in 2006. Anzor took her out of school after learning that she had been seen holding hands with a boy, and a non-Muslim boy to boot. Back home—and by now Anzor imagined that place to be the Caucasus, where he had spent all of a couple of years—Bella’s behavior would have warranted an honor killing; all Anzor did was deny her the opportunity to complete eleventh grade. Tamerlan sought out the boy and knocked him out with a well-placed punch. It is not clear that he had been dispatched to do so, but when the school counselor called, Anzor said that his son had done the right thing. He probably lacked the English to explain, but it is the older brother’s duty to protect his sisters’ honor. Tamerlan had been vigilant for two years, always lurking around the group of ESL girls Bella had quickly joined, and ensuring that she did no socializing after school, when the rest of the group may have wanted to go to the mall or to hang out at Harvard Square. Tamerlan, then a senior, got a week’s suspension.
Anzor let Bella return to school eventually, after placing severe restrictions on both girls’ movements, but it was too late for her to get credit for junior year. Her schooling was effectively over, so it was time for her to marry. She stayed on in Kazakhstan after Ailina’s wedding that summer, working as a translator at a law firm and circulating in the local Chechen community, where an eligible man was sure to materialize. Within months she was engaged to Rizvan, a young man from Chechnya who had been visiting relatives in Kazakhstan.
Bella and Rizvan went to live with Rizvan’s widowed mother in Chechnya, then still one of the most dangerous and damaged places on the planet (just three years earlier, a United Nations report had called Grozny “the most destroyed city on earth”). Bella became ill with cytomegalovirus, developed complications, and had to be hospitalized in Dagestan, where Anzor and Zubeidat, taking their first trip home—visiting Kazakhstan and Dagestan, that is—found her. It was probably they who persuaded her to return to the United States to give birth to the baby she was carrying. She flew back in the fall of 2007 and became, briefly, the woman doing most of the cooking and cleaning at 410 Norfolk, before giving birth to a boy, named Ramzan, in 2008. Rizvan, who tried to follow his wife, was denied a U.S. visa. When Bella returned to Kazakhstan and Chechnya the next year, she developed an even more serious infection and was hospitalized in life-threatening condition. It is likely to have cost a great deal of money to get her well enough to travel, and to get her on a plane back to the United States; this could only have added to the family’s financial woes.
Bella returned to Cambridge in the winter of 2009. Baby Ramzan was back in Kazakhstan with his father and the father’s relatives. Bella had applied for Russian papers for him, and until they came, he was temporarily unable to travel. Zubeidat flew to Kazakhstan in the spring on a dual mission: to fetch Ramzan and to raise money to repay debts by selling something she claimed was worth a fortune back in the old country. She returned with Ramzan but without the money.
ANZOR did not maintain the pretense of being a lawyer, or aspiring to be one, for long. He was a working man, and Russian speakers who met him at any point during his decade in the United States describe him as such: rabotyaga, a word that suggests a man who works with his hands, a hardworking man, a dependable man, but one who probably drinks when he is not working. He did. Both Kyrgyzstan and Dagestan are proud of their brandy, and so was Anzor proud of the bottle he invariably placed on the table when he went to visit or when someone visited him.
Anzor’s American acquaintances recall that he had health problems—something people who knew him just before he left Russia do not mention. He may have developed them around the time of the move, or they simply may not have seemed like much to his friends back home. What man doesn’t have health problems as he nears forty? All those cigarettes smoked, all that brandy consumed, all those fights—the things that tend to kill a post-Soviet man of Anzor’s generation before he reaches sixty—are bound to start making themselves known. Anzor had persistent abdominal pain, debilitating headaches, and, evidently, night terrors.