The Brothers Read Online Free PDF

mountain ranges, so neither of them could be seen from a house window. Immediately upon arriving, Zubeidat commenced dreaming of living by the sea again someday. Everyone on this street dreamed of someday going home to someplace beautiful and far away.

Two
    WANDERING
    T he idea that they were like brother and sister because they were both from the Caucasus really held only as long as Anzor and Zubeidat stayed far away from both the Caucasus itself and their families. According to both Avar and Chechen traditions, now that Anzor and Zubeidat were married, she was to enter his parents’ house as a member of his family. Had she married an Avar, she would have had the support and coaching of the women of her own family in this endeavor; as it was, she was now alone. And to her new family, she was immediately suspect. Neither Anzor nor his parents, who had grown up in Kyrgyzstan with only a mythical, vague story of the Caucasus, had ever even heard of the Avars, although they speak a language closely related to Chechen and have historically been viewed by their Russian rulers as a subset of the Chechens. To the Tokmok Chechens, Zubeidat was just not-Chechen. She worked conscientiously to fit in, quickly and easily learning to speak Chechen—though she and Anzor always spoke Russian to each other—but in other ways she was as different as a woman could be from her new mother-in-law. Liza was what Americans might call a victim of domestic abuse; her Chechen neighbors from Tokmok just say that Zayndy was “very strict” and never let his wife go out in public by herself or, for that matter, with him. Few of their former neighbors can even recall her name, so quiet and invisible was she. Zubeidat and Anzor, on the other hand, appeared inseparable; more than that, they appeared to be equal partners. Not for Zubeidat the Chechen—or Avar—custom of serving the men and never sitting down at the table with them, or with the guests. Nor did she hold back in conversation. She could be charming, she had a loud, unabashed laugh, she invited and accepted compliments, and unlike her gentle husband, she could occasionally be cutting. If anything, these rebellious ways had to do with Zubeidat’s having grown up in a city, and with having made a break with her own family, but Liza had only one word for all of it: Avar.
    Anzor had promised Zubeidat back in Novosibirsk that he would take her as far as they needed to go to be happy together. It is not clear how they chose Kalmykia as their destination after Tokmok. Most of Anzor’s uncles and cousins had moved to Chechnya, and Zayndy was, according to his plan, slowly building a house there as well, in the village of Chiry-Yurt. But Zubeidat may have feared she would not be accepted in Chechnya, or perhaps none of Anzor’s uncles had extended an invitation. An older cousin on Liza’s side, though, invited them to Kalmykia, Dagestan’s northern neighbor—and perhaps the idea of living on the Caspian again appealed to Zubeidat. But Kalmykia turned out to be the opposite of Makhachkala, a desert—just sand and steppes and emptiness that made even what sea it touched seem desolate. And Anzor’s relative turned out to be a cattle farmer. Anzor’s family, like all the Chechens in Tokmok, had always kept cows, sheep, and goats in numbers the Soviet government deemed excessive. (Most of their livestock was part of the shadow economy and had to be hidden when inspectors or snoops came around.) So Anzor easily fell into the farmwork: he was generally willing to do any kind of labor, and this he was good at. But Zubeidat, although she had family who lived in a village back in Dagestan, was herself a city girl, and she had not imagined that a cattle farm in the middle of nowhere would be the place where she would find happiness.
    Happiness came in the form of their first child. Zubeidat gave birth to a boy in October 1986. They named him Tamerlan, for the Central Asian conqueror with refined