At the end of 2009, after two years at Cambridge Rindge and Latin, Husein moved to Maryland to stay with Uncle Alvi.
At the start of the summer of 2010, Zubeidat went to Russia, alone, and stayed for six months.
Soon after she left, Bella and Ailina and their children disappeared—presumably, to New York again. No one at Norfolk Street would hear from them until Zubeidat returned in December. She reported that they were doing all right: Ailina was home with the children and Bella was working as a waitress. Later there was some conflicting information about that. Ailina was apparently back in town in the fall of 2010, at least long enough to get arrested for trying to use counterfeit money to pay a restaurant bill. She was arraigned in Boston in January 2011 but failed to show up for her hearings—when she finally appeared in court two and a half years later, she would tell the judge she had been indigent.
Zubeidat went back to home health aide work, which now seemed to involve more overnights. By mid-2011 she was rarely staying at Norfolk Street.
Dzhokhar graduated from Rindge and in September moved to live on campus at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, just outside New Bedford, about an hour’s drive south of Boston.
In the fall of 2011, Anzor and Zubeidat filed for divorce.
At the start of 2012, the apartment was home to Tamerlan; his wife, Karima; their daughter, Zahira; Zubeidat, who was not really there; and her now ex-husband, Anzor. Zubeidat had also arranged for Ziaudy to attend kindergarten in Cambridge, so he was there, too, primarily in Karima’s care.
In January, Tamerlan went to Dagestan, ostensibly to renew his Russian passport—something that could have been done at the Russian consulate in New York, which would have charged him a lot for it, but still less than the cost of a round-trip ticket to Russia.
In February, Anzor moved out of the apartment to stay with a friend. Once he received his U.S. passport, in May, he left the country. Zubeidat, who was now visiting the apartment only occasionally, said that Anzor was traveling to Germany for diagnosis—a tumor had developed at the site of his skull injury and American doctors wanted to operate, but the Germans might be able to spare him the surgery. In fact, he went straight to Dagestan.
In June, his kindergarten year over, Ziaudy returned to Ailina.
Tamerlan came back from Dagestan in July. Two weeks later, Zubeidat left for Dagestan: she said she had to care for her brother there—he had cancer. When I met Zubeidat a year later, she was indeed caring for him as he died. At the time she left the United States, she was facing criminal charges for shoplifting at a Lord & Taylor in the Boston suburb of Natick—she knew that leaving meant she would be unable to come back, unless she was willing to face jail.
Karima took over Zubeidat’s home health aide work. Tamerlan stayed home with Zahira. He was good at it: responsible and caring and sure to take her for a walk or a tricycle ride at the same time every day. Most days now, he wore loose sweats rather than his flashy “European style” clothes.
WHAT DID AMERICA look like from the third floor of 410 Norfolk Street ten years after Anzor and Zubeidat first crossed the Atlantic Ocean? It made scarcely more sense now than it had back then. Television news combined with their landlady’s conversation and Cambridge’s progressive civics and history lessons never formed a coherent picture, much less the kind of flow of information that allows immigrants—at least those who successfully integrate into their new society—to inhabit the same story as the people among whom they now live. Instead, information continued to come in scraps, as it does to newcomers. Each scrap is tried on for size as a theory of everything. The more crudely it simplifies reality, the better it is suited for that purpose.
Starting in 2009, both Zubeidat and Tamerlan began studying the Koran. Neither of them spent much time in any mosque—though Salafism can allow room for women to study. They both relied on the Internet and on occasional intense conversations with better-informed acquaintances. The Koran did not get in the way of Tamerlan’s lifestyle, at least not in the first few years: he carried a small prayer rug in the trunk of his car and could take it out and spread it anywhere in between smoking a couple of joints. The Muslim Internet did help explain the world, though. Tamerlan, for example, found a compelling video called Zeitgeist: The Movie, one of a series of three two-hour extravaganzas of conspiracy theories purporting to debunk every historical construction, starting with Jesus Christ and ending with the September 11 attacks. The latter, as it explained with high-quality graphics and an articulate narration, was the product of a plot in which the U.S. government had been complicit.
Approaching the Koran also helped Tamerlan and Zubeidat place themselves in the Chechen community even as their family began disintegrating. Everyone here and back home had a relationship to Islam now. Some families split, like Badrudi Tsokaev’s back in Tokmok: his wife and children became observant, holding the fast at Ramadan, while Badrudi insisted that he had not needed religion in Soviet times and did not need it now. Over in Cambridge, his old friend Anzor assumed the same line of argument, even though the two had not spoken in years. Islam provided a new connection to home, too. It seemed the later someone came over, the more likely he or she was to be observant. Musa Khadzhimuratov, who left Chechnya in 2000, prayed five times a day—his prayer rug was also always with him—but his wife Madina wore bright clingy low-cut dresses. Women from a family who came later than the Tsarnaevs were covering themselves—and now so was Zubeidat, abandoning her own collection of revealing dresses. Around 2009, Bella and Ailina began covering as well.
A couple of years into his relationship with the Koran, Tamerlan disposed of some ring binders, but one of them was retrieved. It contained clippings a younger Tamerlan had hoped would help him master the world: instructions on how to seduce women and hypnotize people, articles exposing the dominance of Jewish actors in Russian entertainment, and an article in Russian with references to The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The Protocols themselves, a tsarist-era forgery purporting to expose a Jewish plot for world domination, had supernatural staying power in Russian culture, where it reentered circulation every few decades, and it had supernatural staying power with Tamerlan as well. In the fall of 2012, while going through his books stored in the basement of the house, he called Joanna’s attention to the Protocols. She took it to read so she could later try to argue Tamerlan out of believing it: Joanna was not one to give up on the power of persuasion. She had not finished the Protocols by the time her tenant died.
Some information about the world outside came courtesy of Donald Larking, a longtime home-care client of Zubeidat’s who was among those she handed over to Karima. In the forty years since Larking had been rendered disabled by a gunshot wound to the face, he had developed an affinity for a variety of conspiracy theories and the media that broadcast them. Larking took to giving the Tsarnaevs copies of newspapers to which he subscribed—The Sovereign, which calls itself “Newspaper of the Resistance!” and on its home page showcases the “9-11 Truth Proclamation,” purporting to prove the Twin Towers in New York were blown up by the U.S. military; and The First Freedom, an Alabama-based tabloid with the tagline “Inviting the Zionist-controlled media’cracy to meet a rising free South.”