After Reni said she did not think Tamerlan did it, all hell broke loose. “That’s when it started with the curse words,” she told me. “He says, ‘So you fucking think it’s right to kill people?’ And I say, ‘Don’t put words in my mouth.’”
Reni was starting to get scared of the FBI. They could do anything—they could even get Ibragim deported. He had booked a ticket to travel to Chechnya on May 24: he had just gotten his green card, and this would be the first time he would visit his parents and eleven younger siblings. Now Reni was begging him to cancel the trip because she was afraid he would not be allowed to return. She spent all day May 21 calling and texting him, trying to get him to cancel. Ibragim relented, and Reni, who had booked the ticket for him herself, logged onto Expedia.com to return it. By the time Reni texted Ibragim to tell him she had canceled the ticket, it was around six-thirty in the evening—the end of Reni’s shift at the Hilton, one of her two hotel jobs.
She rode her motorcycle home. She felt her phone vibrating like crazy as she rode, but she did not look at it until she got home: it was her younger brother Alex, whom she had helped get a job at the Hilton, calling to say that the two FBI agents had shown up there again. She had Alex pass the phone to one of the agents, and then she told them to come to her apartment. They came at seven-thirty. While Reni was waiting for them to arrive, she called and texted Ibragim, finally writing in Chechen: “Why aren’t you answering me?” When they first got married, Ibragim had said he would want their children to speak Chechen, so Reni, who found languages easy, learned this one. Whatever was going on now, it seemed like a good time to switch to a language few other people would be able to understand.
The two FBI agents left a bit after nine, after another circular and unpleasant conversation; as usual, one of them had asked most of the questions while the other took notes. Reni looked at her phone: still no response from Ibragim. She went to bed. When she woke at five and her phone’s screen was still blank, she grew worried. She dialed his number. I’m going to wake him up, she thought. He is going to scream at me. There was no answer.
ELENA TEYER THOUGHT it was only slightly odd when her daughter converted to Islam. That is, covering herself was a strange choice for a beautiful young woman with long thin legs. Riding her motorcycle in that getup could not have been comfortable, either. Other than the dress, converting seemed to have been easy. Reni explained to her mother that the basic “Thou shalt not kill” and “Thou shalt not steal” from the Bible—roughly the sum total of her familiarity with the Christianity into which she was born—underlay both religions. It had also seemed logicaclass="underline" Reni had been in search of an identity ever since they moved to the United States, and if she had now found one through the love of a good man, so much the better.
Elena’s own story contained perhaps too little love, too few good men, and too much change. She was one of those Russian women who rely on no one but themselves. The Soviet Union collapsed while she was still in college, making her one of the millions who had to make their way without their parents’ help or guidance. Elena became a restaurant manager. She did well, raising two kids on her own. In the early aughts she moved from southern Russia to Moscow to help open and run a hotel restaurant there. In 2004, she started corresponding with an American man, who soon came to visit and then soon came to visit again, and within two years thirty-five-year-old Elena and her children moved to Atlanta to live with him. The marriage lasted less than six months before Elena moved out with her kids. She wanted to go back to Russia, but three tickets would have cost nearly three thousand dollars and she could not imagine getting that kind of money. A local Orthodox church helped her rent a tiny basement apartment. Elena started working—first as an on-call waitress for a catering business, then she worked her way up to maître d’ at a fancy hotel restaurant. Two years after arriving in the United States, she was making enough to pay rent on a good apartment and cover expenses, but she had no health insurance. Plus, her permanent-resident status, for which she had qualified as the wife of an American citizen, could be revoked now that she was no longer married, which would make it illegal for her and the kids to stay in the country. Elena was no stranger to hardship, but the uncertainty was starting to feel like too great a burden.
Someone mentioned that the U.S. Army was hiring. After fighting two wars for years, the military was perpetually short on personnel. She failed the test administered at the recruitment office: her English was not up to par. But the recruitment officer gave useful advice on how to study for the test and—even better—told her that an English-language course for prospective recruits would be opening up soon.
Elena left the kids in Atlanta and went to a base in Texas for the course. It was like English-as-a-second-language basic training. The students had to rise at four in the morning, dress in uniforms, and stand in formation in the quad—before spending the day studying English. Elena discovered that she loved it. It might have had something to do with having grown up a military brat, but that was not the crux of it. This was difficult—giving up your personal freedom at the age of thirty-eight is hard, as is getting up at four every day—but things had been difficult her whole life. What they had not been was fair. The Army offered a clear, transparent, and fair deaclass="underline" Elena gave over her mind and body in exchange for training, job security, medical insurance, and American citizenship for her and her kids. Both partners paid up front. Then she would be set: there would be retirement benefits, too. Honesty and openness are inherently seductive qualities, especially for people who have rarely encountered them. Elena became a patriot of the United States.
She completed the English course, then eight weeks of basic training, followed by vocational training—she had decided she wanted to work at an on-base drugstore—in San Antonio. She served in Fort Jackson, South Carolina, for two and a half years, and then was transferred to Germany. When she went overseas, only her son, Alex, went with her. Her daughter was twenty by then, too old to be dragged around by her mother. Elena wished she had commenced the dragging around a bit earlier, in fact: Alex, who was eleven when they came to America, was doing very well. He was growing up American, while his sister, Nyusha (in her case a diminutive for Evgenia), seemed to be struggling to figure out who she was. While Elena was away for her initial military training, Nyusha went and legally changed her name to Reniya Manukyan, taking the last name of a family friend of Armenian descent who she believed was her biological father, despite Elena’s denials. Reni stopped considering herself Russian, began referring to herself as Armenian, and even taught herself the language. She had the ability and perseverance for these kinds of feats.
Although Elena continued to call her daughter Nyusha, she got it: the girl was looking for somebody to be. The conversion to Islam was the product of the same need and actually made a bit more sense to Elena because it was not an abstraction—her daughter was in love with Ibragim. Nyusha took things a bit far when she tried reprimanding her mother for her insufficiently modest dress; Elena was not one to be told what to wear, except when she was at work in the Army. But Elena liked Ibragim. He was gentle, and he had been through a lot: fleeing the war in Chechnya with his family as a child, growing up in Saratov, a Russian city on the Volga, an ethnic Other, returning to Chechnya when it was still in shambles. Ibragim had gone back to Saratov to attend college—he had studied to be a translator from English—and had come to the United States on a work-study program before what would have been his last year of college. He had stayed, getting political asylum. His family back in Chechnya was doing well—his father had a high-level job with the new administration—but most of the prospering had come after Ibragim left. Elena saw him as a boy alone in a strange country, and she had a pretty good idea of what that felt like. She was happy to accept him fully into her family, as long as he finally got a job and stopped relying on her daughter, who worked two.