Free The Brothers by Masha Gessen Page A

Fuller’s counsel that this was no way to learn a language, and he sat on a couch in the basement, watching, over and over again, the same videotape of a Chechen celebration with Lezghinka, which they used to dance every night back in Bishkek. Eventually he began making contact with other Chechens in America, and he even registered his new organization at Fuller’s address. This activity brought him back to life, but by this time his marriage had collapsed.
    His sister Maret’s marriage also ended, though once she arrived in Canada it began to appear that she had planned this all along, that her husband had been merely a means of transporting her across the Atlantic. All is fair in immigration. Except one thing: You never talk about the pain of dislocation. You do not describe the way color drains out of everyday life when nothing is familiar, how the texture of living seems to disappear. You breathe not a word of no longer knowing who you are, where you are going, with whom, and why—and the unique existential dread of that condition. Most important, you never question your decision: from the moment you cross the border, there is only ever the future.
    Most immigrants eventually come out the other side, as Ruslan did. He completed his studies at Duke, married a Chechen woman he met in the United States, and eventually took a job in Kazakhstan, as an American, intending to return to the United States. He was now in a position to help his siblings. When his elder sister, Malkan, divorced as well, he took in her children, and he also offered to temporarily take Anzor and Zubeidat’s children while they engineered their move to America. Going to the United States, Ruslan was more certain than ever, was what they should do—if they wanted their children to have a future.
    Tamerlan and the girls, Bella and Ailina, went to Kazakhstan to stay with Ruslan. In the Chechen tradition, it is the older brother who is the boss and caretaker of the family, but a big part of becoming a successful immigrant is knowing when to choose pragmatism over tradition: both Anzor and Ruslan would have to accept the reversal of family roles. Anzor, Zubeidat, and eight-year-old Dzhokhar traveled to the United States on tourist visas. They chose Boston because Maret and Alvi were both there at the moment. Neither had a stable living arrangement, however, so at first the newcomers stayed with Khassan Baiev, with whom Maret had become very close when he first came to the United States.
    Dzhokhar started attending second grade at the public school where two of the Baiev children, Islam and Maryam, went. Max Mazaev helped Anzor get a few odd jobs. The family applied for asylum—once it was granted, it would extend to their other children, who would then be able to move to the United States. In April 2002, Anzor and Zubeidat found an inexpensive apartment in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Over the next ten years, it would witness the slow and catastrophic demise of a whole set of immigrant dreams.

Five
    A DECADE OF BROKEN DREAMS
    F or a new immigrant, the simplest and smallest of life’s obstacles can be insurmountable. Take, for example, this scenario: You are an asylum seeker looking to rent an apartment over the months it takes to assemble your case. You are in the United States on a visitor’s visa. You have no credit history, no pay stubs, no tax returns to show to a potential landlord. You also have no way to tell the good from the bad, the normal from the crooked. You get swindled by brokers, pay out a fortune in application fees, get your hopes up, get your hopes dashed, lower your standards, and ultimately understand you just have to hope for a miracle.
    Joanna Herlihy was the Tsarnaevs’ miracle. She was sixty-eight when they met—the youngest of her four children was roughly the same age as Anzor and Zubeidat—and for most of her adult life she had been trying to save the world. With a first marriage behind her, and once her children did not