The Brothers Read Online Free PDF Page A

course of three years, in a highly controlled manner. The process was hellish and hellishly corrupt. It also took much longer than planned. But by the mid-1960s everyone who wanted to move to the Caucasus had left. Soviet statistics make it all but impossible to determine what proportion of the exiled population went back, but thousands of families stayed in Kyrgyzstan. Those who stayed also wanted to go home—but to them, home had become an abstraction, or at least a distant goal. Some lacked the money to move. Others could not face the hardship. “No one is kicking us out of here, and no one is waiting for us there,” a Chechen man in Tokmok told me in 2014.
    Sixty years to the week earlier, a man named Medzhit Baiev said in the presence of a secret-police informant: “I am an old man and don’t need to go anywhere, but my children will now have the same rights as all the other peoples of the Soviet Union. I am deeply grateful to the government.” He was right: his descendant Khassan would grow up in Chechnya. In the 1990s he would face the war there, work as a surgeon operating on the wounded, then escape to the United States and settle in Boston, where he would eventually help another Chechen family, the Tsarnaevs, to settle as well.
    But in the 1960s, the Tsarnaevs also stayed in Kyrgyzstan. Zayndy had made it by then—he ran the dumping ground that had formed in an old quarry in Tokmok. Between his official salary and a sideline of collecting scrap metal, paper, and clothing that he fished out of the refuse and turned in to the relevant recycling plants, he was making a good living. His wife was having one child after another. He ran the house like a homegrown tyrant; his wife would stay home and raise their kids to be educated and ambitious, but she would never be seen outside the home. Zayndy would invest in some land in Chechnya and build a house, so that eventually his children’s children would grow up there. This was the thinking of most of those who stayed behind: they were not putting down roots in Kyrgyzstan—they were just extending their stay before their families returned home at last.
    In 1985, Anzor Tsarnaev returned from his military service in Novosibirsk to his father’s home in Kyrgyzstan, bringing his young wife with him. The neighborhood was Sakhzavod, so named for the nearby sugarcane-processing plant. There was also a cannery and a wool-processing plant—it was the industrial outskirts of Tokmok, which itself had come to feel like the remote outskirts of Frunze, the capital. Frunze was like a flattened version of Novosibirsk—the same vast squares and broad avenues and Soviet neoclassical buildings, only much lower. And Tokmok was like nothing in particular. The Chu had been harnessed in 1982. It was now a tame little stream flowing through a concrete enclosure, but Tokmok itself still had a makeshift, insecure sense about it, as though every structure could be washed away any minute. With the exception of a couple of school buildings, nothing here looked like it was meant to last.
    A conglomeration of settlers had nested their homes near the factories: cinder-block first stories with wooden attics and sharply pitched asbestos-board roofs. One of these roofs had given way under the feet of Anzor’s older brother in 1979 as he was replacing a worn red Soviet flag on top of a trade school with a newer one, and he had fallen to his death. In 1985, when Anzor and Zubeidat came, most of the other five Tsarnaev children were still in or around their parents’ house. The street on which they lived was split about equally between Chechens and ethnic Germans. The latter called their children by Russian diminutives but continued to speak German to them:
“Yasha, herkommen,”
they called out into the street at suppertime, and the children disappeared behind the cinder-block fences. The street had a blind feel to it—a single block long, lined with solid gray fences, it ran perpendicular to the