But he was a rabotyaga.
In 2004, he became friendly with the owner of a rug shop who let him use his driveway to work on cars. It was old-fashioned Soviet-style work: rather than place a car over a pit or hoist it up on lifts as one would in a garage, Anzor hitched cars up on simple jacks and slid under them, lying on his back for hours, his hands raised to reach the underside of the car. He worked most often on vehicles that would have seemed at home in such a rudimentary care setting—old carburetor clunkers suffering from knocks, whistles, shortness of breath, and other mysterious afflictions. Among Boston-area Russian-speaking owners of cars long past their prime, he developed a reputation as a friendly, inexpensive, and inventive mechanic.
Even being a rabotyaga got him into trouble in America. When the Tsarnaevs moved to Norfolk Street, a condo complex was going up across the street, replacing an old junkyard. It was part of the new Cambridge: cedar-lined structures separated by ersatz-cobblestone paths, with units as small as 230 square feet. The condo complex had something else that 410 Norfolk lacked: a driveway. It was actually a temporary parking lot for up to three cars, for condo residents only, to park for no more than fifteen minutes at a time. This was a perfect place for Anzor to do repairs: enough room to place the car and spread out all his tools, out of the way of traffic. One day Rinat Harel, an Israeli-American art teacher who had bought one of the tiny units, told Anzor that he shouldn’t be doing his work on the association’s property. “His reaction—wow! He puffed up—I saw how tall he was now. And he was screaming in Russian, then there were some English words, the point was, he was telling me I can’t tell him what to do.” Harel, not a small woman and not one to scare easily—this was a point of pride for her as an Israeli—walked away shaken and, after that incident, stopped going through the Norfolk Street entrance, using the back gate to the property instead. Most of the time, the job of shooing Anzor off the premises fell to Chris LaRoche, a hulking software engineer who shared a condo with his husband. His conversations with Anzor generally followed the same script as Harel’s. The consensus at the condo association was that this was one of those typical conflicts that gentrification engenders.
When Anzor and Zubeidat traveled to Kazakhstan in 2007, one of their goals was to seek traditional healing help for Anzor. His health problems had become pronounced enough for even the Russian speakers, at least in Boston, to acknowledge them. The wisdom in the Chechen community was that he had ruined his health by working on cars outside, in all weather, wearing nothing but a sweater.
In the summer of 2009, Anzor managed to rent a garage for a month while the owner traveled home to Ethiopia. He used the time to teach Tamerlan the basics of auto repair. Dzhokhar looked in on some of the lessons too, though he was working at a day camp that summer. In the fall, Anzor got into a fight at a Russian restaurant in Allston. His skull was fractured, landing him in the hospital. Tamerlan got the police involved and they apparently found Anzor not at fault; he even received some financial compensation. But his health suffered further. At the age of forty-three, he had begun to look like an old Chechen man: emaciated rather than slender, gray, and, it seemed, perpetually exhausted.
ZUBEIDAT TRIED perhaps harder than anyone else in the family—for herself and for her children. Her efforts at translating documents or attending classes on negotiation were not just an unreasonable reach given her education and background: they were also unreasonably brave. To help her children succeed, she pursued whatever seemed like a good idea at the moment. In 2004 she asked Joanna to help the girls join a church choir. Joanna enrolled them in the Handel and Haydn Society youth chorus, where they would sing for a year and a half. Joanna did much of the driving for the girls. She also introduced Bella to several folk-dancing groups until the girl joined one she liked in Concord, Massachusetts, fifteen miles away.
In 2006, Zubeidat enrolled in the Catherine Hinds Institute to study to be a beautician—not exactly Harvard Law, but more glamorous than home care. The institute was a good fit. Beautiful herself, chatty, and attentive, Zubeidat was a natural at what was, in effect, her first occupation, acquired at the age of forty. She supplemented her education by taking private lessons in cosmetic tattooing. A Russian woman studying alongside her was planning to open her own salon as soon as they graduated in the spring of 2007. She offered Zubeidat a job, and soon Zubeidat was commuting to Belmont, four miles west of Cambridge. Things at the salon began well but slowed in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. As time went on, Zubeidat got less and less business there. Some of the post-bombing reporting has suggested that her new religiosity was to blame, but this does not appear to have been the sole or possibly even the main reason. Business was slow, and by the end of 2008 the salon shut down.
SOMETIME IN 2010, or maybe 2009, it would have become clear: it was as though the Tsarnaevs had never come to America. They had struggled with the language and with the people, and with buying furniture on credit. The living room now had a large plush sectional sofa, oriental rugs, and a mirrored credenza housing plates and thin-walled cups chosen to look as though they had been in the family for at least a generation. They had achieved the look every Chechen living room had, from Grozny to Tokmok to Boston, but then, their own living rooms in those places had boasted that look as well.
Tamerlan was dealing drugs.
Anzor was fixing clunkers in the street.
The neighbors hated them.
Bella and Ailina had neither graduated from high school nor succeeded in their marriages; their children were with them rather than with the fathers’ families, so their chances of finding new Chechen husbands were vanishingly small. No one had gotten an education, if you did not count Zubeidat’s aesthetician certificate.
Ziaudy, Ailina’s son, had a learning disability.
The apartment was bursting with people. In the second half of 2009, the small three-bedroom was home to: Anzor, Zubeidat, Tamerlan, Dzhokhar, Bella, Ailina, the toddlers Ramzan and Ziaudy, and Malkan’s teenage son Husein, whom Ruslan had brought to the United States but placed with Anzor’s family. In the summer, the teenagers took possession of the barbecue area at the condo association across the street, drinking, smoking, and playing music until all hours; the residents seem to have been too timid to confront them. The apartment was clean, but crowded and cluttered beyond reason: it no longer felt like community—it resembled a refugee camp. Anzor and Zubeidat had stymied Joanna’s efforts to help. Instead of easing the immigrants into her reality, Joanna had fallen into theirs, with its imaginary family heirlooms capable of covering debts that had grown hopeless. At some point the smell of defeat became so thick that everyone had to run away.
At the end of 2008, Zubeidat managed to place Ailina in an independent living arrangement under the auspices of a battered women’s shelter. Ailina stayed a few months and then took off for New York, where she had somehow acquired friends. After her own trip to Kazakhstan to fetch Ramzan, Zubeidat went to New York and brought Ailina and Ziaudy home, too. Bella started attending the Catherine Hinds Institute. Ailina was admitted to a school where she would study to become an X-ray technician, but she could not borrow money for tuition because she had destroyed her American papers. Then Bella’s green card disappeared as well.