Free The Brothers by Masha Gessen Page B

need her at home, she had joined the Peace Corps. She was a fixture of city politics in Cambridge, where she now lived. At the time Anzor and Zubeidat met her, she was taking care of one aging ex-husband (her second), and her grown children continued to drift in and out of her house.
    She had bought the house in 1994 for the very low price of $45,000, at a foreclosure auction. It was what Bostonians call a three-family, a wooden three-story house with one long apartment on each floor. Three-families are common to the working-class neighborhoods—Dorchester, Jamaica Plain, Somerville. With postage-stamp-sized yards and on-street parking only, they used to represent cheap and unambitious city living. The house sat right on the Cambridge–Somerville city line, on the Cambridge side. It was modest even by three-family standards: it was built in the back of a shared lot and lacked the porches and small balconies typical of such buildings. When Joanna bought it, it was uninhabitable: it had not been heated, and the pipes had burst all over the house, causing extensive water damage. But it was also a three-apartment building in a city where property values were about to skyrocket: Cambridge would soon make every list of America’s overpriced cities. Over the next few years, Norfolk Street, which was an orphaned corner of Cambridge when Joanna bought the building, would shed its many junkyards and acquire more condominium complexes than a street so small could be expected to fit. She gradually replaced the plumbing and rectified the worst of the damage. She lived on the first floor, and eventually rented out the top two floors at below-market prices, ensuring that at least two units of Cambridge housing remained affordable.
    Maret heard about the apartment from Khassan Baiev, who had probably heard about it from the journalist with whom he had written his memoir, a member of Cambridge’s loose network of Russophile intellectuals. Joanna had studied Russian at the University of Chicago, where she had earned her bachelor’s degree while still in her teens, like another precocious coed there, Susan Sontag. Joanna’s first husband was Alexander Lipson, a brilliant linguist and an inventive teacher of Russian who had taught out of their Cambridge home and taken his students, and his wife, by Volkswagen bus on tours of the entire Soviet Union, including Central Asia.
    The third-floor apartment was not, strictly speaking, available for rent: the walls, which Joanna had repositioned, were unfinished. Maret, who was in charge of the negotiations, said the Tsarnaevs would happily finish the improvements themselves—they were just desperate for a place to live, now. They could have the apartment for eight hundred dollars, easily a third below the market rate. There were three bedrooms, all of them small, but Anzor and Zubeidat could move right in along with Maret and Alvi, even though they were likely soon to be joined by their children. Indeed, from the moment Joanna met the Tsarnaevs, she passionately wanted them to live in her home. She seemed—as they surely sensed—uniquely positioned to help them. She got them: she spoke Russian, she had seen where they came from, she had even studied Sufism. And she was primed to see the Tsarnaevs exactly as they wanted to be seen.
    They presented themselves as having studied law. Anzor said he had worked in the prosecutor’s office. They were fleeing ethnic strife. They were clearly modern people, Zubeidat with her low-cut dresses and elaborate makeup, Anzor with his clean-shaven face and athlete’s body. That they were separated from their children—even Dzhokhar, whom they left at the Baievs’ for the moment, so as not to interrupt his schooling midyear—was a measure of the gravity of their situation. And they manifested an anger about the injustices of the world that was not unlike Joanna’s own. They were, as she was, at once profoundly disappointed by the world and stubbornly looking