Kazakhstan in the spring on a dual mission: to fetch Ramzan and to raise money to repay debts by selling something she claimed was worth a fortune back in the old country. She returned with Ramzan but without the money.
• • •
ANZOR did not maintain the pretense of being a lawyer, or aspiring to be one, for long. He was a working man, and Russian speakers who met him at any point during his decade in the United States describe him as such:
rabotyaga
, a word that suggests a man who works with his hands, a hardworking man, a dependable man, but one who probably drinks when he is not working. He did. Both Kyrgyzstan and Dagestan are proud of their brandy, and so was Anzor proud of the bottle he invariably placed on the table when he went to visit or when someone visited him.
Anzor’s American acquaintances recall that he had health problems—something people who knew him just before he left Russia do not mention. He may have developed them around the time of the move, or they simply may not have seemed like much to his friends back home. What man doesn’t have health problems as he nears forty? All those cigarettes smoked, all that brandy consumed, all those fights—the things that tend to kill a post-Soviet man of Anzor’s generation before he reaches sixty—are bound to start making themselves known. Anzor had persistent abdominal pain, debilitating headaches, and, evidently, night terrors.
But he was a
rabotyaga
.
In 2004, he became friendly with the owner of a rug shop who let him use his driveway to work on cars. It was old-fashioned Soviet-style work: rather than place a car over a pit or hoist it up on lifts as one would in a garage, Anzor hitched cars up on simple jacks and slid under them, lying on his back for hours, his hands raised to reach the underside of the car. He worked most often on vehicles that would have seemed at home in such a rudimentary care setting—old carburetor clunkers suffering from knocks, whistles, shortness of breath, and other mysterious afflictions. Among Boston-area Russian-speaking owners of cars long past their prime, he developed a reputation as a friendly, inexpensive, and inventive mechanic.
Even being a
rabotyaga
got him into trouble in America. When the Tsarnaevs moved to Norfolk Street, a condo complex was going up across the street, replacing an old junkyard. It was part of the new Cambridge: cedar-lined structures separated by ersatz-cobblestone paths, with units as small as 230 square feet. The condo complex had something else that 410 Norfolk lacked: a driveway. It was actually a temporary parking lot for up to three cars, for condo residents only, to park for no more than fifteen minutes at a time. This was a perfect place for Anzor to do repairs: enough room to place the car and spread out all his tools, out of the way of traffic. One day Rinat Harel, an Israeli-American art teacher who had bought one of the tiny units, told Anzor that he shouldn’t be doing his work on the association’s property. “His reaction—wow! He puffed up—I saw how tall he was now. And he was screaming in Russian, then there were some English words, the point was, he was telling me I can’t tell him what to do.” Harel, not a small woman and not one to scare easily—this was a point of pride for her as an Israeli—walked away shaken and, after that incident, stopped going through the Norfolk Street entrance, using the back gate to the property instead. Most of the time, the job of shooing Anzor off the premises fell to Chris LaRoche, a hulking software engineer who shared a condo with his husband. His conversations with Anzor generally followed the same script as Harel’s. The consensus at the condo association was that this was one of those typical conflicts that gentrification engenders.
When Anzor and Zubeidat traveled to Kazakhstan in 2007, one of their goals was to seek traditional healing help for Anzor. His health problems had become pronounced enough for
• • •
ANZOR did not maintain the pretense of being a lawyer, or aspiring to be one, for long. He was a working man, and Russian speakers who met him at any point during his decade in the United States describe him as such:
rabotyaga
, a word that suggests a man who works with his hands, a hardworking man, a dependable man, but one who probably drinks when he is not working. He did. Both Kyrgyzstan and Dagestan are proud of their brandy, and so was Anzor proud of the bottle he invariably placed on the table when he went to visit or when someone visited him.
Anzor’s American acquaintances recall that he had health problems—something people who knew him just before he left Russia do not mention. He may have developed them around the time of the move, or they simply may not have seemed like much to his friends back home. What man doesn’t have health problems as he nears forty? All those cigarettes smoked, all that brandy consumed, all those fights—the things that tend to kill a post-Soviet man of Anzor’s generation before he reaches sixty—are bound to start making themselves known. Anzor had persistent abdominal pain, debilitating headaches, and, evidently, night terrors.
But he was a
rabotyaga
.
In 2004, he became friendly with the owner of a rug shop who let him use his driveway to work on cars. It was old-fashioned Soviet-style work: rather than place a car over a pit or hoist it up on lifts as one would in a garage, Anzor hitched cars up on simple jacks and slid under them, lying on his back for hours, his hands raised to reach the underside of the car. He worked most often on vehicles that would have seemed at home in such a rudimentary care setting—old carburetor clunkers suffering from knocks, whistles, shortness of breath, and other mysterious afflictions. Among Boston-area Russian-speaking owners of cars long past their prime, he developed a reputation as a friendly, inexpensive, and inventive mechanic.
Even being a
rabotyaga
got him into trouble in America. When the Tsarnaevs moved to Norfolk Street, a condo complex was going up across the street, replacing an old junkyard. It was part of the new Cambridge: cedar-lined structures separated by ersatz-cobblestone paths, with units as small as 230 square feet. The condo complex had something else that 410 Norfolk lacked: a driveway. It was actually a temporary parking lot for up to three cars, for condo residents only, to park for no more than fifteen minutes at a time. This was a perfect place for Anzor to do repairs: enough room to place the car and spread out all his tools, out of the way of traffic. One day Rinat Harel, an Israeli-American art teacher who had bought one of the tiny units, told Anzor that he shouldn’t be doing his work on the association’s property. “His reaction—wow! He puffed up—I saw how tall he was now. And he was screaming in Russian, then there were some English words, the point was, he was telling me I can’t tell him what to do.” Harel, not a small woman and not one to scare easily—this was a point of pride for her as an Israeli—walked away shaken and, after that incident, stopped going through the Norfolk Street entrance, using the back gate to the property instead. Most of the time, the job of shooing Anzor off the premises fell to Chris LaRoche, a hulking software engineer who shared a condo with his husband. His conversations with Anzor generally followed the same script as Harel’s. The consensus at the condo association was that this was one of those typical conflicts that gentrification engenders.
When Anzor and Zubeidat traveled to Kazakhstan in 2007, one of their goals was to seek traditional healing help for Anzor. His health problems had become pronounced enough for
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