The Brothers by Masha Gessen Read Free Book Online Page A

the other graduates, including the distinguished ones, had stayed in Tokmok, doing what their parents did—working as clerks in the bloated town government or one of the other outposts of state power. And for the majority of graduates, the most useful skill they acquired at Pushkin Gymnasium School Number One was so-called professional training: woodworking for the boys and sewing for the girls.
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    ANZOR’S SIBLINGS who had left Tokmok were living an entirely different life. Bishkek, where Maret, Ruslan, and Alvi were living, was less than an hour’s drive away, but it seemed a century closer to the Technicolor world of the video-screening salons. Bishkek has its own Chechen neighborhood on its own outskirts, called Lebedinovka, or Swan Village. It is as flat and dusty as Sakhzavod, though the houses and gardens, hidden from view by tall concrete fences, are often larger and better tended than those in Tokmok. Many of the families who live here have relatives in Tokmok, including the Tsarnaevs and the Tsokaevs; some grew up in Tokmok. As Muslims, they pray five times a day and hold the fast during Ramadan; as Chechens, they acknowledge that children are the property of the father’s side of the family, and some of the women do not sit at the table with the men; and yet, life in the capital has a perceptibly different quality from life in the provinces, however close they may be.
    Ruslan was studying law at the university. Almost every night he stopped at the house of Badrudi Tsokaev’s niece Madina—rather, the house of her husband’s parents—and stayed until three in the morning. Incredibly, Madina’s mother-in-law, the head of that household, had no objections to a mixed-gender young crowd that talked endlessly and finished just about every night by dancing the Lezghinka, a fast, even frantic dance traditional to many of the cultures of the Caucasus.
    Then something truly incredible happened. Maret, who was now a judge, came to see an old classmate, Badrudi Tsokaev’s sister Yakha, at work. Yakha was a saleswoman at a small grocery store, and one could always stop by for a chat. Maret said she wanted to get married to a man who was “mixed.” Yakha thought this meant he was only half Chechen and assured her friend that if he was Chechen on his father’s side, the marriage would be accepted. But Maret was simply easing her friend into the news. There was nothing “mixed,” and nothing Chechen, about her fiancé: he was a Canadian. When she left for Canada with him, she did not even go to say good-bye to her old friends.
    Ruslan graduated and got a job with PricewaterhouseCoopers, the giant American consultancy, which was running a large-scale privatization program funded by the U.S. State Department. Then he started dating a young woman who worked there with him—an American woman, not a Chechen-American but a real, blond American named Samantha, who wore trousers, collected swords, was thoroughly used to getting her way, and had a father who had worked for the CIA. Then Ruslan moved in with her. Among the Chechens of Lebedinovka, a rumor began to spread that Ruslan was setting things up for a fake marriage so he could move to the United States. But the rumor did not stick: the impending marriage was in fact scandalously real. Ruslan and Samantha married in a Muslim ceremony and in 1996 moved to the United States, where Ruslan planned to go to law school—word at Lebedinovka was that he would be going to Harvard, though in fact he would eventually be accepted at Duke University Law School.
    And then Alvi went to the United States. He did not have a law degree or an American spouse—he was making money as a handyman and his wife was very much Chechen, and living in Kyrgyzstan—but he got a tourist visa and took off. By this time the entire Tsarnaev clan agreed: the future was in the United States—and the United States was within reach. Anzor and Zubeidat told all their friends that