The Brothers by Masha Gessen Read Free Book Online

guns, and they were not always welcome. “We are practically natives here,” Ruslan Zakriev, the cowboy-hat-wearing self-appointed leader of the Tokmok Chechens, told me. “We didn’t want any trouble.” And when trouble came—as when shoot-outs began on the Chechen streets of Tokmok and Bishkek—they blamed it on the new Chechnya. Anzor and Zubeidat confirmed: The new Chechnya was not a place for living. Anzor said he had sold the house his father had been building in the village of Chiry-Yurt. They would not be going back.
    Anzor and Zubeidat together took Tamerlan to Tokmok’s School Number Two to sign him up for first grade. It was the middle of the school year, but the other children accepted him quickly and uncritically because Natalya Kurochkina told them that this boy was running from the war. “We talked a lot about the war then,” she remembered almost twenty years later. “There were kids coming to the school who had lost fathers there.” Aside from a conspicuous fear of fireworks, which may be too handy a foreshadowing to be fully believed, Tamerlan stood out only for the best of all possible reasons. He was an exemplary child, polite to a fault and often speaking caringly about his younger sisters and brother.
    Zubeidat’s project of rearing perfect children remained on track. She was an overachieving stay-at-home mother while Anzor continued to fix cars. When he came to school, however, he wore a suit; the teachers perceived them as a white-collar couple who were seeking the best possible education for their children. Tokmok’s best, however, was not nearly as rigorous, challenging, or ambitious as Zubeidat wanted it to be. At the end of second grade Zubeidat withdrew Tamerlan from the school. Here the trail goes cold for two years, but in 1999 Tamerlan was enrolled in fifth grade at Tokmok’s Pushkin Gymnasium School Number One. “We got prestigious that year,” the principal explained to me.
    School Number One was a school for families like the Tsarnaevs, those whose plans for their children extended far beyond the boundaries of their own universe. In 1999 the state educational authority granted the town’s oldest school the status of “gymnasium”—no one could be quite sure what that meant except that now it was officially the best school in Tokmok. Anzor and Zubeidat sold the old Tsarnaev family home in Sakhzavod and moved to the center of town to live near the best school. From the second-floor window of their apartment they could see the white two-story building with its Greek portico and decorative Doric columns, and a red flag protruding from the middle of the facade as though it had been stuck between the school’s eyes. There was a skimpy garden in front of the school, and this was where I found the principal, Lubov Shulzhenko, sitting on a bench beneath a dry little maple tree on a scorching morning in July 2014. She was a bleached-blond woman in her early sixties, very short and very overweight, and she had been running the school for twenty-five years. She wanted me to know what a good school it was. She wanted everyone to know. In her office, the walls were literally covered with citations. She made sure her students entered every competition, big and small, in everything from Russian spelling to rope-skipping, and she maintained a carefully curated rotating exposition of the citations, because even her impressively sized office walls could not hold them all.
    She bragged about the graduates who had fulfilled their parents’ dreams, like a young man named Sergei who had won a mathematics scholarship and was now writing software for a German company. Inside the school, Sergei’s picture was one of a dozen in a display featuring the distinguished graduates of Pushkin Gymnasium School Number One. His accomplishment appeared more impressive than any of the others’, but the caption indicated he had graduated more than a decade earlier. Miracles do not happen very often. Most of