Larking read the papers and underlined some passages before gifting them. He also gave Tamerlan and Karima a subscription to the American Free Press, a Washington, D.C.–based weekly full of libertarian, commie-baiting, and anti-Semitic rants with a few conspiracy theories thrown in. It was a lot more accessible than the sort of media Joanna had been recommending, such as Bill Moyers’s television program, with its nuanced approach to complex issues, or the critique of globalization she had given a nineteen-year-old Tamerlan when she found him reading a book by Thomas Friedman. Anti-Semitism and conspiracy theories aside, libertarianism is as good a theory of everything as politics has produced, and as late as 2012 Tamerlan was saying he agreed with Ron Paul, the perennial libertarian presidential candidate, and his analysis of American politics.
That fall Joanna approached Karima to ask her to register to vote so she could support senatorial candidate Elizabeth Warren. Karima demurred. She and Tamerlan had different values—not in the sense that they opposed the Harvard Law professor’s campaign to rein in the banks, but in the sense that they did not vote at all. This did not, however, keep them from continuing to accept public assistance—and it was this contradiction that, after ten years, finally compelled their landlady to ask the three remaining Tsarnaevs to move out.
ONLY DZHOKHAR was still in his cloud of sweetness and light. As his older sisters tumbled into disaster, as his nephews got bounced between cities and continents like a couple of precious but useless objects being regifted, as his brother sank into conspiracies, and as his parents peeled away, Dzhokhar had continued to make good grades and good friends and make everyone happy. He joined the wrestling team and charmed the coach by doing what teenage boys never do: asking what he had done wrong and what he could do better. Soon he was captain.
He was also both smoking and dealing weed, but he was such a perfect mirror of everyone’s best expectations that even the most experienced Rindge teachers saw none of the usual signs: his clothes were purposefully messy, not stoner-messy; his big brown eyes appeared focused, if only ever for the minute or two it took to have a meaningful interaction with any of them in the high school’s vast hallway. Dzhokhar became friendly with one of the school’s most experienced teachers, retired history instructor Larry Aaronson, who was now working as Cambridge Rindge and Latin’s official photographer and unofficial cheerleader. Aaronson first took pictures of Dzhokhar at wrestling practice and then asked him to spell his name for him. It emerged that the boy was Chechen, and from Russia. Aaronson was instantly heartbroken for him, but Dzhokhar insisted: “I am lucky!”
“You are lucky? You were born in Russia, and you are Chechen—and you are lucky?”
“Larry, I got asylum. My whole family got asylum. I live in Cambridge! And I go to Rindge and Latin!”
Aaronson decided that the boy would be his poster child “for these kids from war zones who go to Rindge.” Together they devised a new, easier spelling of the boy’s name: Jahar. This was far more elegant than the solution Tamerlan had found when he was at Rindge; he just started telling people to call him “Timberland, like the shoe.” Tired of explaining what Chechnya was, he had also started saying he was from Russia. At some point Jahar discovered his new friend was also a neighbor. Aaronson lived just a few houses up the street, on the Somerville side of Norfolk. Jahar’s reaction: “I am so lucky!”
Aaronson was the teacher who was still trying to talk sense into his old stoner students Brendan Mess and Erik Weissman, years after they had graduated, yet he missed the signs of chronic pot use in Jahar. Still, he was stymied in his efforts to get to know the boy better. “Whenever I tried to talk to him about being Chechen, it meant nothing to him.”
HAVING YOUR ETHNIC IDENTITY mean nothing to you, however, is unusual for American high school students, especially those attending a progressive, aware school like Cambridge Rindge and Latin. Everyone is somebody, and it always means something. Over at Needham High School, Islam Baiev was struggling: “No one has heard of Chechnya,” he told me. “It gets tiring to explain every time. Normally I say we used to be independent and now we are part of the Russian Federation. And then it gets into this whole debate about whether I’m Russian or not. People have tried to convince me that I’m Russian, and I say, ‘No, we have a completely different language and culture.’” And if Chechens were Russian, perhaps Moscow would not have tried to bomb them out of existence throughout the nineties and the aughts.
That sort of discussion was much too convoluted for Jahar. Perhaps because he felt he needed a smoother narrative, or perhaps because a paper on one’s identity is always a good thing to show an American college, during his senior year at Rindge, Jahar set out to write a paper on being Chechen. It was his second year taking an English class with a young teacher named Steve Matteo, who had on first meeting him made fun of his name, then still spelled Dzhokhar: “Don’t they have vowels in Chechnya?” At least he had heard of Chechnya. In fact, Matteo could claim a connection to Chechnya, through a handshake or two. His wife was Muslim, from Turkey, as was the wife of one of his best friends, Brian Williams, a man who claimed to teach “the world’s only course on Chechnya.” Williams taught at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth.
Matteo suggested Jahar contact Williams for help with the paper. He did—as Williams recalled a couple of years later, “His questions were totally uninformed, very general”—and Williams sent him the lengthy syllabus for his course, with advice to pay special attention to two books. One was Khassan Baiev’s Grief of My Heart, with the story line that was intimately familiar to Jahar; the other was Allah’s Mountains: The Battle for Chechnya by British journalist Sebastian Smith, a lucid, if rather romanticized, history of Chechnya and the North Caucasus under Russian domination, including the two post-Soviet wars. From what Matteo could tell when Jahar submitted the paper, he had not read the book.
Williams complains about the myths and misconceptions that abound about Chechens—including the myth of a “Chechen Jihad” and of Chechen involvement in al-Qaida, which, he says, has never been documented but has often been described by those who make generalizations in the absence of evidence. Google “Chechens” and the Chechen Jihad will come up. Williams claims he is “on a one-man mission to debunk the myths” spread by the Internet. In Jahar’s case, he apparently failed. Tamerlan, though, put Allah’s Mountains on his online book list around the time his younger brother would have been considering reading it; with all the time on his hands in 2010–2011, Tamerlan may even have done so.
Around the same time, Jahar took another step toward reconnecting with his Chechen and Russian identities. It was an unusual move, though only in retrospect would it appear disturbing. He started an account on VK.com, a Facebook clone site on which most Russians his age maintained their social media lives. In his profile he indicated that he spoke Russian and Vainakh, the language of the Chechens. The inclusion of his ancestral language was a fib, since he did not really speak it, while the omission of English from the list appears conspicuous. He proceeded to post on the page in Russian—a bit of a linguistic feat for a kid whose Russian-language schooling was interrupted in second grade.