had not communicated with Anzor’s family in several years. The media generally assumed the estrangement had resulted from a difference of views on Islam and on what it meant to be Muslim and Chechen in America. Far more likely, the rift was caused by Ailina’s split with Elmirza. Chechen men beat their wives. When they do not, other men often suspect them of weakness and subservience to their women. When they do, the wife’s family usually tries to mitigate the effects without interfering—sheltering the wife in times of crisis and sending her back after a few weeks. No one ever calls the police. No one lets the men be jailed, disgraced, and effectively deported. Ailina ruined Elmirza’s American dream and broke Chechen tradition by keeping Ziaudy, who rightfully belonged to his father’s family. However Americanized Ruslan had become, he would have had a very difficult time justifying the situation to his wife’s family back home.
• • •
BELLA’S TROUBLES began in 2006. Anzor took her out of school after learning that she had been seen holding hands with a boy, and a non-Muslim boy to boot. Back home—and by now Anzor imagined that place to be the Caucasus, where he had spent all of a couple of years—Bella’s behavior would have warranted an honor killing; all Anzor did was deny her the opportunity to complete eleventh grade. Tamerlan sought out the boy and knocked him out with a well-placed punch. It is not clear that he had been dispatched to do so, but when the school counselor called, Anzor said that his son had done the right thing. He probably lacked the English to explain, but it is the older brother’s duty to protect his sisters’ honor. Tamerlan had been vigilant for two years, always lurking around the group of ESL girls Bella had quickly joined, and ensuring that she did no socializing after school, when the rest of the group may have wanted to go to the mall or to hang out at Harvard Square. Tamerlan, then a senior, got a week’s suspension.
Anzor let Bella return to school eventually, after placing severe restrictions on both girls’ movements, but it was too late for her to get credit for junior year. Her schooling was effectively over, so it was time for her to marry. She stayed on in Kazakhstan after Ailina’s wedding that summer, working as a translator at a law firm and circulating in the local Chechen community, where an eligible man was sure to materialize. Within months she was engaged to Rizvan, a young man from Chechnya who had been visiting relatives in Kazakhstan.
Bella and Rizvan went to live with Rizvan’s widowed mother in Chechnya, then still one of the most dangerous and damaged places on the planet (just three years earlier, a United Nations report had called Grozny “the most destroyed city on earth”). Bella became ill with cytomegalovirus, developed complications, and had to be hospitalized in Dagestan, where Anzor and Zubeidat, taking their first trip home—visiting Kazakhstan and Dagestan, that is—found her. It was probably they who persuaded her to return to the United States to give birth to the baby she was carrying. She flew back in the fall of 2007 and became, briefly, the woman doing most of the cooking and cleaning at 410 Norfolk, before giving birth to a boy, named Ramzan, in 2008. Rizvan, who tried to follow his wife, was denied a U.S. visa. When Bella returned to Kazakhstan and Chechnya the next year, she developed an even more serious infection and was hospitalized in life-threatening condition. It is likely to have cost a great deal of money to get her well enough to travel, and to get her on a plane back to the United States; this could only have added to the family’s financial woes.
Bella returned to Cambridge in the winter of 2009. Baby Ramzan was back in Kazakhstan with his father and the father’s relatives. Bella had applied for Russian papers for him, and until they came, he was temporarily unable to travel. Zubeidat flew to
• • •
BELLA’S TROUBLES began in 2006. Anzor took her out of school after learning that she had been seen holding hands with a boy, and a non-Muslim boy to boot. Back home—and by now Anzor imagined that place to be the Caucasus, where he had spent all of a couple of years—Bella’s behavior would have warranted an honor killing; all Anzor did was deny her the opportunity to complete eleventh grade. Tamerlan sought out the boy and knocked him out with a well-placed punch. It is not clear that he had been dispatched to do so, but when the school counselor called, Anzor said that his son had done the right thing. He probably lacked the English to explain, but it is the older brother’s duty to protect his sisters’ honor. Tamerlan had been vigilant for two years, always lurking around the group of ESL girls Bella had quickly joined, and ensuring that she did no socializing after school, when the rest of the group may have wanted to go to the mall or to hang out at Harvard Square. Tamerlan, then a senior, got a week’s suspension.
Anzor let Bella return to school eventually, after placing severe restrictions on both girls’ movements, but it was too late for her to get credit for junior year. Her schooling was effectively over, so it was time for her to marry. She stayed on in Kazakhstan after Ailina’s wedding that summer, working as a translator at a law firm and circulating in the local Chechen community, where an eligible man was sure to materialize. Within months she was engaged to Rizvan, a young man from Chechnya who had been visiting relatives in Kazakhstan.
Bella and Rizvan went to live with Rizvan’s widowed mother in Chechnya, then still one of the most dangerous and damaged places on the planet (just three years earlier, a United Nations report had called Grozny “the most destroyed city on earth”). Bella became ill with cytomegalovirus, developed complications, and had to be hospitalized in Dagestan, where Anzor and Zubeidat, taking their first trip home—visiting Kazakhstan and Dagestan, that is—found her. It was probably they who persuaded her to return to the United States to give birth to the baby she was carrying. She flew back in the fall of 2007 and became, briefly, the woman doing most of the cooking and cleaning at 410 Norfolk, before giving birth to a boy, named Ramzan, in 2008. Rizvan, who tried to follow his wife, was denied a U.S. visa. When Bella returned to Kazakhstan and Chechnya the next year, she developed an even more serious infection and was hospitalized in life-threatening condition. It is likely to have cost a great deal of money to get her well enough to travel, and to get her on a plane back to the United States; this could only have added to the family’s financial woes.
Bella returned to Cambridge in the winter of 2009. Baby Ramzan was back in Kazakhstan with his father and the father’s relatives. Bella had applied for Russian papers for him, and until they came, he was temporarily unable to travel. Zubeidat flew to
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