By Jasmine V. Bailey

No one knew Putin when he became
prime minister. I remember it well—Dan

In case there is any doubt, I am guilty.
—Dzhokhar Tsarnaev

“The thing about Chechnya is, there were two wars,” Dan says, fishing two Chalkidiki olives out of the jar with chopsticks and plopping them into chilled glasses. The ten-year anniversary of the Boston Marathon Bombing is coming up, and I am feeling nostalgic or depressed, and I want to get to the bottom of something in my mind. “We refer to Putin’s war as the ‘second war’ in Chechnya, counting Yeltsin’s war in the 1990s as the first. But really the first was the Russian imperial war to make Chechnya part of the Russian empire, and the second was Stalin’s exile of Chechens to Kazakhstan.” “Exile qualifies as war?” I ask.

“It’s a euphemism for genocide. Between half- and three-quarters of a million Chechens were rounded up at gunpoint and forced to move to resettlement camps. They had less than half an hour to pack, and Soviet soldiers shot people for any reason. They got them out quick so they could plunder their houses. If there was any organized resistance, they killed everyone. They were stuffed into cattle trains in the middle of winter and transported 2,000 miles to godforsaken places in Central Asia with no food, shelter, or infrastructure. A quarter of them died. Half of them were children.”

Dan and I spent our first fall and winter together at the end of 2010 in Bewkes House, the stone farmhouse he rented a couple towns away from Colgate’s campus, stately on a country road it shared with two Amish families a mile in either direction. I would drive my Camry there and wedge it in a snowbank, then go into the living room where Dan always had an enormous fire crackling in the largest of the three fireplaces. We lay on blankets with cold grapes, cheddar, and bread, and almost always a bottle of cava. When I open sparkling wine, I remove the foil and wire carefully, leaving a clean, naked neck, but Dan would leave these on, and they seemed like the arms of a reckless girl stretching out lavishly, eager for the next mistake.

Those nights, Dan spun out the tapestry of himself. He began learning Russian when he was 18 and starting college, finding ways to spend his summers traveling in Bulgaria and Moldova. After college, he worked observing elections in Russia, then started a PhD in Russian politics. He went back to Eastern Europe and Central Asia to interview the aging Oblast Duma members from the post-Soviet transition. They mostly failed to answer his questions, though their memories of the petty rivalries of those days were sharp as ice picks and even the least substantial interviews went long. I had never met a man who had been to Mongolia. 

Sometimes I ran my fingers through his hair and held it for a moment—the streaks of gray surprising, exciting against his fresh skin and bright black eyes. He was the first man I’d ever been with who was already married. I never met his wife, who at the time was spending a year in Azerbaijan doing fieldwork for her own PhD. I expected this relationship to change me, but I was pessimistic about how. I tried to think of our winter as something that only happens once, like a revolution.

In January, Dan left Colgate for Bryansk, a city southwest of Moscow not too far from the Ukrainian border. His fellowship was six months. I was alone with the second half of my fellowship and two-and-a-half packed feet of snow outside my apartment. By now I knew I was not going to make friends among the junior faculty, keener to invest in people who would stay or who at least weren’t having an affair with their other colleague while his wife researched oil wells. I didn’t line up a job for the fall, and the book manuscript I had hoped would be published languished somewhere in Pittsburgh, not a city known for fulfilling dreams. I had had a flicker of success I thought I could make last. Now, with a key to his empty house, I moved my things into Bewkes, but I never moved in. Before the lilacs stunted by ice could fail to bloom, I moved my things out again. 

For anyone who studies Eastern Europe and Central Asia, nationalities are important. Then again, nationalities are important to people whose nations are stateless. The Soviet government, uniting such a geographically vast and culturally diverse array of peoples, undertook a project of enshrining its many ethnic minorities, their languages, and distinctive cultural features. It used the Russian word for “nationality” to refer to all these groups, whether the Karelians, with fewer than 5,000 people, or the Ukrainians, the sixth-largest nation in Europe. Thus, the word “nation” in Russian came to mean something different from what is internationally understood by the term, to the degree that any definition is agreed upon for that term. Few of the groups that are discussed as nations in the former Soviet Union are also considered nations by the international community.

I ask Dan if it is fair to say that there are more nationalities without states than those with them, and he says no; most groups that general consensus agrees are nations have states. But there is a sizable minority, he says, of stateless nations. Nationhood, Dan stresses, is a political designation. Among those who really understand the things that differentiate an ethnic group from a nation, there are few who can evaluate any group’s claim impartially. There is great power in granting or depriving a group of a state, or even the right to a state implied by the status of nationhood. Indeed, the state itself is often the apparatus through which a group is able to establish the markers of nationhood, of which the United States is a prime example. Not ethnically, linguistically, or culturally unique or homogenous, and having eliminated or subjugated Indigenous nations with legitimate claims to its territory, the U.S. has nevertheless been successful in creating markers of nationhood in spades, from national epics and cuisine to shared cultural memory. 

Dan says, “One definition of nation is having an army and a police force.”

After Colgate I found work teaching Spanish at a boarding school. It was miserable, but it beat the only English teaching job I’d gotten, at a private high school in Orlando, Florida. During my visit there, I stayed in a motel that was walking distance from a shopping center where you could get “Thai massage,” Chinese takeout, liquor, or Olive Garden. If you kept walking, you could see the swampy turnoff into the Disney empire. That road reminded me of both The Glass Menagerie and Nicaragua: Spanish moss hanging from a Dollar General and kids kicking empty Nutella containers like soccer balls around dilapidated bus stops.

It was surprising to me how much teaching at the boarding school was like teaching at Colgate: everyone seemed to already have friends, and I was either too old or too young for everybody. I struggled to understand my students. Why didn’t they try harder or learn more? I had one Russian student, Vlad, who made insubordination an art. He was a senior in Spanish 2 and the other students worshiped him. I started having panic attacks before class and “family dinners,” biweekly torture sessions in which a group of eight students are randomly assigned to one teacher, given large plates of strange food, and forced to eat together while making conversation. Every month the seat assignments were shuffled.

Dan sent me a card for my birthday, and my mother, who came to visit me often out of concern, saw it and read the touching message he’d written. “You should give Russian Dan another chance,” she said. Her remark, probably offhand, struck me because I was so badly in need of advice and because she had never weighed in on my relationships before. She doesn’t know he’s married, I thought, but then I realized that was probably no longer true. His divorce had begun before he left for Russia. On New Year’s Day 2012, I drove from south Jersey to Lebanon, New York, and found Dan in his puffy vest sitting in front of what seemed like the same fire.

The Chechens are a nation, and not because the Soviet and Russian governments recognized them as such, but by international standards, and this is perhaps best underscored by the event that led to the so-called first Chechen War. Dan explains: 

After the fall of the Soviet Union, Chechens declared themselves an independent state, as did other national groups, such as the Ukrainians, which quickly became states. Chechens’ first declaration of sovereignty was made in 1990, and might have been honored if not for the attempted coup in 1991 which forestalled the signing of a reorganization treaty for the whole USSR. The then-president of Chechnya, Dzhokhar Dudayev, formed and led the Chechen National Congress, an independence movement making the case for Chechnya’s right to sovereignty to the broader world. Boris Yeltsin’s government rejected Chechnya’s claim, citing that Chechnya had not been one of the union republics of the Soviet Union. Beset by political unrest in Russia, however, he left the situation ambiguous until December of 1993, when he sent troops by land and air to establish Russian control in Chechnya. Though the Russian army outnumbered and outweaponed the Chechens badly, they could not gain control of the region and suffered staggering casualties. The Russian people were demoralized by the failed incursion. Russia did, however, manage to kill Dzhokhar Dudayev by tracing his satellite phone and shooting him from a plane. 

“So they assassinated him?” I ask.

“It was considered ‘war.’”

*

I finished my gig at the boarding school in March and moved into Bewkes House in April. I was embarrassed by my career, which had devolved into unemployment apart from a stint translating a vampire werewolf novel. Since I was afraid of seeming foolish in front of my former colleagues, I mostly avoided campus by staying in our house and occasionally going to Tractor Supply where our Amish neighbors shopped. We bought four chicks for twelve dollars from a farmer in Madison while he was in the middle of butchering a cow. His blood-covered yellow Lab, exuding the conviction of how good it is to be a dog, jumped on me as I stepped from the car, leaving streaks of blood on my coat and hands. The farmer tried to find us chicks who would lay blue and pink eggs, and we took a Rhode Island Red because they lay the largest. We gave them the lofty names of great women: Diane Rehm, Ina Garten, Ofeibea Quist-Arcton, and Angela Merkel, and none of them turned out to be roosters. Dan built them a coop and I stood at our large, uninsulated windows looking at the chickens chase one another in spirals around the yard, until summer came and we were vaguely together outside each day, growing zinnias and radicchio, surrounded by forest. We re-adopted the cat I had acquired with an old boyfriend when he decided to replace it with a Boston terrier. 

Dan and I and our cat and chickens lived a life suffused with gentleness. Sometimes violence visited, mainly when a mouse got in the house, and our cat became a machine of cruel exactitude. Another time, a neighbor’s dog got loose, and one of our chickens lost her tail tuft, though she survived by hiding in the lawnmower. I struggled to trust the happiness I felt. I had not had a job in months, and my manuscript was beginning its third year in the Rust Belt. With Dan’s sabbatical coming up, I wanted to go somewhere where everyone could assume my past wasn’t full of inexplicable gaps. We decided on Boston. One night, we drove the chickens to a friend’s barn, and a few nights later stuffed our cat and all our belongings into Dan’s CR-V and a U-Haul and drove through an average treacherous Northeast blizzard to our new apartment two blocks from Inman Square. 

The second war in Chechnya, more than anything I’ve heard Dan talk about, demonstrates the psychopathy of Vladimir Putin. In the summer of 1999, he was newly appointed prime minister by Yeltsin, who was visibly grooming him as his successor. Or at least that’s the way we normally say such things. It was more like Putin was grooming the Russian people for neo-imperialism after the fact of his succession had already been decided independent of public support. In the Russian system, the prime minister can be a mere figurehead, like Dimitry Medvedev was under Putin, or he can be a catalyst of policies and, in Putin’s case, war. 

Putin re-opened the Chechnya discourse apropos of nothing. The Yeltsin administration’s failure to put down the Chechen rebellion and the huge number of Russian casualties and deaths had been a source of embarrassment for Russians. Putin’s vision was that a war could turn that failure into a point of national coalescence and pride. He made a public remark on television, for all the world to hear, which Dan says can’t be translated. 

“It’s something like, ‘We’re going to fuck them up in the outhouse,’ but way crasser.” 

In that war, which is in some ways still going on, Putin spared no tactic for the sake of humanity. In addition to bombs and air raids, which were launched indiscriminately on belligerent and civilian territories, there were mass executions and burials, although we know less than we should because journalists were kept out of the territory, and journalists who have tried to write about Putin’s administration, like his enemies generally, tend to turn up dead. In hindsight, it’s easy to see how Putin’s war in Chechnya, which had no impetus besides his own, private narrative, and which was so exceptionally, unmitigatedly cruel, was in fact a dress rehearsal for his war in Ukraine.  “The thing is that Putin did not need this war to consolidate power,” Dan says. “The presidency of Russia was already his. He did it to set a tone.”

In 2013, the multicultural dream of America or Massachusetts or Boston or Cambridge or the human spirit was alive in Inman, where the Portuguese had not yet been priced out of our block by people like us, paying twice what our neighbors were paying for apartments tenants usually only left on a stretcher. Many of our adventures that year involved our Portuguese neighbors, who would certainly outlast us in East Cambridge. There was a two block radius around our apartment where you could buy pão francês and salt cod at the corner store, where the owner as often as not refused my money, or you could be served pão francês and salt cod by a begrudging waiter across the street at Casa Portugal. Old World Catholic parades began there some Saturdays. The marching bands sagged with tubas playing dirges in minor keys, and Laíz, our surly teenage neighbor and owner of the yapping poodle from Hell, strode resplendent in her Queen of the Parade attire: a wedding dress, sash, scepter, and teetering tiara. 

As soon as the streets were clear enough of snow, Dan began to teach me to ride my bike in the city, to keep my head low and think about where I was in relation to traffic, to make hand signals and zip around pedestrians.

Before I learned to ride my bike in Boston, I would never have believed I could do anything so dangerous or daring. Riding alongside the roaring traffic, learning to tune it out, to think of myself on my bike as a vehicle worthy of space, changing lanes and making left turns, getting where I needed to go like any commuter, I became so much more of an entity in the world than I had been or had previously felt I had the right to be. First, he helped me master the way to all the Squares: Inman, Central, Harvard, Porter. When we ventured further afield, Dan connected each milestone in biking to a new treasure of the city, like where the regattas begin on the Charles and wine at Trader Joe’s. The capstone of our excursions was a series of Saturdays in the spring and fall when we rode our bikes all the way to the massive outdoor market at Haymarket.  

Crossing the bridge from Cambridge into Boston with the lanes of traffic speeding by, I felt at once like I was going to die and like I was invincible as long as I believed in my right to travel. My strength came partly from within, but largely from training my eyes past my front tire to Dan’s back and helmet, and to the sound of him whistling, which he always did when we rode together. The cars were too loud on the bridge to hear it, but I heard it anyway. At the market, I always worried about buying too many vegetables, that we would not be able to get it all back on our bikes. “Get it all!” Dan would say, stuffing the huge camping backpack he wore for these trips as full as he could, tying bags to the outside if he had to, proud to heap so much on himself knowing that when we got it into our impossibly tiny kitchen at home, it would represent the spoils of an adventure. He was always generous like this: not only with money, but with his back.

Cambridge Street stretched all the way to my job at Harvard, where I recruited volunteers and ran experiments for a coterie of reclusive geniuses mapping how the brain controls movement. Maurice, the professor and head of the lab, was younger than you would expect such an accomplished scientist to be. His eyes were gentle and inquiring, and he was unflinchingly generous, often oblivious to himself. He had delicate, precise hands which I often watched him using as he spoke about how muscle memory is encoded somewhere other than the brain, and I thought about him using those hands so exactly, so unconsciously, which was exactly the mystery we were all working together to figure out. The magnitude of that was something that never appeared to trouble him, although it did, of course: the way something troubles you until you solve it. We had a German on a fellowship who sat at the computer behind me working on byzantine math or shopping for sneakers only a European would wear. Alkis, a Cypriot who seemed to have a cyclone inside of him that pulled his face constantly inward, paced back and forth, rubbing his hands and sometimes stopping abruptly, pointing into the air, looking toward where he pointed, then shaking his head and resuming pacing. My main responsibility was to try not to ruin the engineering I was entrusted with operating.

On my bike ride to work each day, I passed the kebab house, The Druid, Punjabi Dhaba, Prospect Street with the miniscule Whole Foods and the mosque veiled in vines, Cambridge Rindge and Latin School, where students from every conceivable background, and many of the world’s countries, streamed in and out with their earbuds and teenage intrigues, and who I had to navigate through to take out John Adams and Martha Rose Shulman’s Mediterranean Harvest from the gorgeous and massive public library behind it. I may have seen Dzhokhar Tsarnaev or bumped into him walking my bike over the winding sidewalks to the library. Though he was just the kind of boy I would have found beautiful, the kind I might have stared at, it would have been the kind of encounter I would have forgotten—there are a lot of pretty faces. 

I ask Dan if it is right that Russia has had it out for Chechens and Dan says that is right. Tolstoy believed that history could never be accurately told because the causes of events were too numerous and complex to render faithfully. I see this as a fractal: if you could pinpoint every primary source of an event, you would begin to encounter the myriad causes of each of those. These causes branch back infinitely. 

In the nineteenth century, when the Russian Empire was trying and failing to expand into the North Caucasus, the Avar Imam Shamil led the resistance against Russian incursion and became a legend to the Chechens and Avars, who, as Dan puts it, “were among the last regions to be subdued by the Russian Empire.” “Subdue” sounds like it should mean, “to give less than what is owed.”  Nothing works better than an enemy to consolidate a disparate nation. Perhaps this is what was behind Stalin’s deportation of the Chechens, considered not only by Dan, but by the European Parliament, a genocide. Not Stalin’s only genocide, nor by far his only deportation. His deportations are estimated to have resulted in 1.5 million deaths, 144,000 of them Chechen. Prior to this deportation there was an insurgence by Chechens wanting what Chechens have wanted for at least the last 200 years: independence. Perhaps that was the impetus for this policy. The reason Stalin gave was that the Chechen nation collaborated with the Nazis in World War II. 

“Preposterous,” says Dan.

*

Compared to my life in the farmhouse, I worked a lot when I lived in Boston, and not the idyllic work of cleaning the chicken coop and weeding the vegetable garden or contemplating other ways to say “fang” in English. Still, each day I walked up the stairs in the LEED certified building, surrounded by glass walls to let in light. Most days I spoke for too long with Ahmad, a security guard / receptionist who had emigrated from Lebanon long ago, about figs or the unions we belonged to. On the third floor I walked past the foosball table to the final staircase to unlock the door to the neuromotor lab, where there was nothing anyone could possibly want to steal, unless you were very familiar with Linux, in which case you would want everything. I often had lunch on the roof garden, which was mostly pebbles, sometimes reading John Adams or Mediterranean Harvest, sometimes just listening to an engineer Skype with his mom in India. 

The day of the Boston Marathon is Patriots Day, a holiday in Massachusetts. We were all in the office, Maurice staring at the largest computer screen in the world as if there were something physically inside of it you could see only if you sat still long enough, intermittently sighing. Andrew, a vague ringer for Carrot Top, whose computer was the closest to mine, turned to me in the middle of the day with a confused expression. His voice, disbelieving, epitomized how I’ve observed people in Massachusetts feel about their lives, how they always believe there can be a rational, well-meaning explanation for violence, like the Battle of Bunker Hill. 

“A bomb went off at the Marathon.” 

“You mean like terrorism?” I asked. 

 He replied quickly, “Not necessarily. They don’t know.” His tone was offended, correcting. As if there were any number of reasons a bomb might go off at a footrace.

*

One problem with terrorism is how it tends, as a term and as a phenomenon, to reinforce the power dynamics institutionalized by our system of nationstates. Max Weber said that the definition of a state is any administration that can claim a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence, and we see almost daily in our news cycle the way that acts of violence are defined less by the events that constitute them than they are by that party that commits them. A bombing, an incarceration, the killing of a politically important person or a marginalized person, have different rhetorical representations depending on whether they are committed by a recognized state or in the name of a stateless group. Often violence by non-state actors is committed in direct support of that group’s cause for statehood, such as bombings by Basque and Palestinian groups. In some cases, terrorism is committed by individuals or groups not seeking statehood but who wish to destroy the credibility of an existing state to drive a new world order. Whether or not we see the difference in how civic violence is defined as a double standard depends on how much sympathy we feel for the cause of the non-state actors who commit the violence. 

But then again, there are some acts that transcend the moral legitimacy lent by a worthy cause—events that seem like terrorism not because we think those who committed them aren’t sufficiently aggrieved, but because the nature of the violence is so craven. As a stateless people, violence committed by Chechens has often been labeled terrorism even as the equal or surpassing Russian aggression it responds to was framed as legitimate military operation. Then, too, the Chechens have been connected to violence that alienates even the most ardent supporters of their cause. 

The ongoing struggle for Chechen independence has included many bombings of civilians, mostly in Russia, in theaters, apartment buildings, and other public and private places. Many Chechen attacks have served, as they must always be intended to, to highlight the brutality of the Russian government, such as when Chechen militants took the 700 civilians attending the Dubrovka Theater hostage and the Russian Special Forces responded by gassing the theater, killing more than 120 of those hostages. The darkest blemish on the Chechen cause, Dan thinks, was when the Islamist militant Shamil Besayev, a longtime fighter for Chechen independence, ordered an attack on a Russian school in Beslan. They took 1,100 people hostage for three days and killed at least 330 hostages, most of them children. The militants demanded recognition of the Chechen state and Russian withdrawal from Chechnya. Even after Russian forces began storming the building with tanks and missiles, making it clear the siege had failed, they kept killing children and teachers.

Patriots Day is always a Monday. When I think back on that time, I imagine that the terror I felt began that day, but the truth is, I thought I had a boring work week ahead of me. The bombing shocked us, but we had no idea who’d been responsible, and went to work Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. I felt a permanent, vague anxiety, and a breath-catching sorrow pulsed in and out of my consciousness, but I went on running experiments and buying groceries.

Dan left for New York Wednesday morning, as he had planned. It was one of the first times we had been apart since I had moved into Bewkes House a year before, and I was scheduled to join him Friday afternoon. He was going to be a discussant on a panel, “Economic Transitions in the Former Soviet Union,” in an international conference of The Association for the Study of Nationalities, which almost every scholar working on Eastern Europe and Central Asia attends each year. A number of the panels that year were on Chechnya. When he left, we knew nothing about who had executed the bombings. It wasn’t until Thursday afternoon that the FBI released pictures of the suspects. 

When things developed, it seemed that they developed all at once. Friday morning everyone in Boston woke up to learn all of the solid information we would know for the rest of the interminable day we would spend holed up in our homes, waiting for the blister of the nightmare to burst. The suspects had hijacked a car and killed a police officer on the campus of MIT, then had a shootout with the police in Watertown, and the entire city was in lockdown. The suspects were Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, two young men, one very young, of Chechen descent, and they lived several blocks from Inman Square in East Cambridge. During the shootout, Dzhokhar had run over his wounded brother as he made his escape, and Tamerlan had been pronounced dead at 1:35 am; Dzhokhar was still on the loose. No one in the Boston area could leave their house; our neighborhood was the epicenter of the search. One of the officers injured by a hand grenade in that shootout would not die until almost a year later. The New England Cable News network interviewed Dan the first time by phone Friday afternoon. Taking a break from the conference, Dan tried to answer questions that amounted to “What is Chechnya and why do they hate us?” The entire segment was 90 seconds.

From our apartment, I could see a sliver of Cambridge Street, less than a block away, and in that sliver, flashes of blue police lights and armored vehicles. I turned on our poorly functioning TV, which my mom had bought me at the grocery store one day during ShopRite’s Can Can sale, a twice-yearly consumer orgy when you can get twelve cans of beans for a dollar, eight cans of tomatoes for two dollars, and huge, poorly functioning TVs for cheap. Though it had big green splotches on the picture, it had not yet fully stopped working. Instead of cable, or anything resembling proper service, we had a very old antenna Dan’s dad had given him mounted in our kitchen. Watching anything on our TV made it feel as if you were likely to have a seizure from the picture stopping and starting, smearing and pixelating. I only ever used it to watch cooking shows on the Create Channel, which I loved after long hours at the lab; now for the first time I clicked past Create to find a halfwaywatchable news channel. Every local broadcast station was in a paroxysm with the ongoing manhunt: the dead twenty-six-year-old police officer at MIT; the Chinese engineer whose car they’d stolen shivering in the cold; and the engineer’s memory of their faces. Two hometown terrorists on a killing spree, as we thought them to be, at-large on a Friday morning in a workaday place like Boston, had the reporters, used to filling time with petty thefts and the corrupt mayoral campaign, crazed with the magnitude of the drama, the fact of actual danger. To me the panic felt like it came through the floorboards, through the crack under the door, via the photons of the television picture. They kept saying, “Do not open your door for anyone; it could be one of them.” A bevy of emails from Harvard overnight told us of the campus shooting at MIT, the carjacking, admonitions to stay at home, or shelter in place. I kept thinking that I should be happy for the day off, but all I felt was sick to my stomach, short of breath, unable to lay or sit, forbidden from walking around the block, choking on air. My cellphone was abuzz with friends who had expected me in New York that day wanting to do crazy things like drive into Cambridge to get me out of the city. I had to talk more than one person down, explaining over and over again that they would never make it because my neighborhood was a temporary war zone. Dan at his nationalities conference felt as far away as someone I had not seen in years. I watched the endless newsreel long after I realized there hadn’t been anything new to report since the middle of the night, but a person obsessed needs company, and there was nowhere anyone in Boston could go; we had to sit still in our homes waiting for the murderer—possibly wounded, still armed—to knock on the door, holding us up for shelter or taking us out as one more piece of collateral damage in a fight for something no one understood.

Obedient and afraid, I stayed home, and I nearly jumped from my skin when, in late-morning, someone banged on the door. At first I didn’t answer. We’d been told not to. But crazy Lucy from upstairs was always knocking because she needed cab fare to the hospital or a cup of sugar, and odds were it was her now.

“Yes?” I stood by the side of the door in case someone shot through it. 

“Jasmina! Can I borrow the slow cooker?”

“Goddamn it, Lucy, there’s a lockdown.”

“What’s lockdown?” 

One thing I noticed in the magnifying glass of panic was that everything in the apartment belonged to both Dan and me. The bad TV, its antenna perched on a small pyramid of Valentine’s Day San Marzano tomatoes, the cat uncomfortably awake with the generalized anxiety. I hadn’t noticed when things changed. Even my fear, my sadness for Boston, was ours. Like a hotel bed, it was too big for me alone.  

The Tsarnaevs were from Kyrgyzstan, a detail often overlooked, and not completely wrongly so, because it was their being Chechen that mattered, although their mother was Avar. No one in the family had lived in Chechnya since World War II, and the boys had grown up in Kyrgyzstan and then Dagestan, in Russia. When Dzhokhar’s father brought him to the United States on a tourist visa, he successfully applied for asylum on the grounds that he feared deadly persecution for being Chechen. Even the American government recognized the truth in this, that Russia means to kill the Chechens, that to be from the Caucasus, especially Muslim, especially Chechen, is to be marked. I have not been as clear with nationalities as I could have in telling this story. I’ve never once used the word Ingush, although the Ingush were deported along with the Chechens by Stalin and the Chechen declaration of independence was, in fact, “Declaration of State Sovereignty of the ChechenIngush Republic.” I have not underscored that the North Caucasians are both Muslim and speakers of non-Slavic languages, both of which make them suitable “others” against whom to prop up Russian nationalism, though Dan makes these points as strongly as any others. 

Perhaps it is easy to remember that you are Chechen when you grow up considering that where you live is not home but exile, witnessing from an uncomfortable closeness the gruesome wars Russian politicians have waged to consolidate their hold on their own sprawling, disaffected state. If you live your whole life and never touch a leaf of a plant growing in the soil of the place that defines you, or sip water as it passes through that land, do you owe it what a child owes a parent? Can blood stand in for that river you never touched? 

If I say “in the end,” I will be playing that game where we pretend things end. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was found bleeding in a boat in someone’s backyard in Watertown. He would never go to East Cambridge again, though he seemed to be everywhere in it after that. I often think of what it was like for David Henneberry, stepping into his yard, seeing the tarp lifted, finding a terrified eighteen-year-old in a pool of his own blood. I don’t know why Dzhokhar didn’t shoot him, as he shot at police for an hour before he was captured. I hate that I feel Dzhokhar’s pain and fear, how cold he must have been, that I can imagine hiding in that boat, knowing only loneliness lay before me. Tsarnaev’s federal trial ended in a death penalty sentencing, an outcome the people of Massachusetts overwhelmingly opposed. 

The media attention Dzhokhar Tsarnaev drew in the wake of his capture was disturbing. One picture often circulated of him was a selfie he had taken on his bed in his dorm room, which was sensual, to put it mildly. Rolling Stone gave him a cover, and he was widely portrayed as a male Lolita, led astray by his burly older brother, a boxer-turned-devout Muslim, radicalized and, at any rate, dead now. I felt the temptation of this narrative. In that image Dzhokhar looked like the kind of young man I had often loved: brand new, as if not yet dirtied by living. It felt easy to shunt the blame onto his older brother, to cast the one as a boor, estranged from his wife, the other as a sensitive thinker adrift in a fatherless family, a confusing world. 

Desperate for a motive, we focused on the guilt of Tamerlan, who we know fell into the thrall of a fundamentalist mullah he found online and traveled to the North Caucasus. In the days after the bombing, many were at pains to emphasize this last detail in particular. As if land can confer spiritual contamination. 

Aside from the deaths of the two police officers and Tamerlan, three people died when the bomb went off: two young women, one of them a student from China, and an eight-year-old boy. When I think about what it would feel like to lose your eight-year-old child, it sickens me that I feel empathy for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, that I think the history of Chechnya matters when thinking about the marathon bombing. What does it feel like to lose a limb, which sixteen people did as a result of the bombs the Tsarnaevs detonated, bombs they filled with ball-bearing type beads and carpenter’s nails. *

Dan came home on Saturday when the buses resumed service to Boston. He did a second interview, in-person, for the New England Cable News network. We watched it from the treadmills in the Harvard gym, since we didn’t get that channel on our home TV system. It was painful to watch the anchorwoman barely let him finish a sentence before she cut him off to demand connections to ISIS and 9/11. 

That April marked a year of living together. Sharing dinner on our little secondhand Ikea table, our cat sprawled on the largest of our three chairs, I realized we are rarely paying attention when the most important things happen. We turn up for big events, for memorials, but what are we doing when actual change occurs? 

We went to the old farmhouse again, but only to visit. Colgate made plans to renovate it and never carried them out. We broke in with a key we had kept and found everything as we left it, down to our lost tongs still dirty in the dishwasher. We walked the long path down to the pond where we used to swim and Dan fished a plastic bag from the ice with a tree limb. Along that path, behind the blackberry bushes, was a clearing in the woods carpeted in pine needles. Once, when the weather was good, we had made love there. 

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Jasmine V. Bailey is the author of Alexandria, Disappeared; Sleep and What Precedes It; and That Salt on the Tongue to Say Mangrove, a translation of Silvina López Medin’s Esa sal en la lengua para decir manglar. She won Michigan Quarterly Review’s Laurence Goldstein Prize and Ruminate Magazine’s VanderMey Nonfiction Prize. www.jasminevbailey.com