The Brothers Read Online Free PDF Page B

tastes—Tima, Russian style, for short. He was perfect and, Zubeidat knew, always would be. And she would be a perfect mother. He was decked out in bow ties from the time he was a toddler; in grade school, he would stand out among his classmates for his clean clothes; in middle school, for his near-perfect grades. But none of this could happen on a cattle farm in the steppes of Kalmykia. For the boy’s sake, Anzor and Zubeidat moved again.
    •   •   •
    THEY RETURNED TO Tokmok after just six months in Kalmykia. Zubeidat was nineteen now, Anzor was twenty, and they were parents. Now that Zubeidat had given birth to a male child, Anzor’s family might treat her more kindly. The move back to the Tsarnaevs’ house, though, was a gamble. In the Chechen tradition, the child belongs to the father’s family, and his mother is treated as merely an appendage; if there is conflict, she can leave or be kicked out, but the child stays in his paternal grandparents’ home. It might have helped that the Tsarnaev home was rapidly emptying out: the eldest daughter, Malkan, had married and moved to Chechnya; the next daughter, Maret, always Tokmok’s star student, was in nearby Frunze, studying law and supporting herself as a janitor; and now the youngest, Ruslan, had also been accepted to the law college in Frunze. Alvi, an older brother, was still in Tokmok, but unmarried. Tamerlan would be the first grandchild in the family home.
    In 1988, when the baby was not yet two, the Tsarnaev family was changed irrevocably. A quarter-century later,
The Boston Globe
would report that Anzor’s father had “died in an explosion,” as though in a blast that foreshadowed the blasts at the finish line of the Boston Marathon. The Tokmok tragedy was more mundane than that account implies. Working at the city dump, Zayndy found a large metal canister of the kind usually used for natural gas. This object could be useful not just as scrap metal but also for parts. Canisters like these were used in retrofitting cars to run on natural gas, and like everything that went into cars, they were in short supply. Zayndy placed it in his own car in order to move it from the dump. The container must have been leaking gas: when Zayndy started the car, it blew up. It was later impossible to determine, from the scraps of the car, whether the container had been in the trunk or on the backseat.
    Liza moved to Frunze to live with Maret, who had graduated with her law degree and was starting what would be a brilliant career. Alvi took over the dump but had little use for the family home. Anzor and Zubeidat were now in charge of the two-story house in Tokmok.
    •   •   •
    MEANWHILE, the Soviet Union was imploding. Far away, in Moscow, Mikhail Gorbachev declared perestroika and glasnost. All over the vast empire, movements for independence and ethnic self-determination were taking shape. Some struggles were beginning to lead to bloodshed. In Tokmok, glasnost—the gradual softening of censorship—meant that video-screening salons started opening. They were not glamorous affairs, just plain rooms with a videocassette player and a screen no larger than those found in many American living rooms, but the movies they showed were more colorful, brighter, and faster than anything Tokmok had ever seen. Zubeidat and her friends liked the Bollywood films that were flooding Soviet television and the newly minted salons. Anzor and the other men might secretly have liked them as well; openly they acknowledged loving only
Police Academy
. In any case, whether or not they were ever dubbed “the Swans,” as Zubeidat would claim, the couple continued to be so dramatically affectionate with each other that once their friends were exposed to Bollywood sappiness, they started calling them “the Indians.” And whatever the men’s taste in movies, certainly they liked that they now had a place to gather outside their homes and backyards: they loitered outside the