Finally, Neda's grades and her English ability had earned her a full scholarship at a British university. But her parents had still refused to let her go. Without her father's signature Neda could not obtain a passport, so no matter how much she screamed and cried and called them unfair, she had still been stuck in Iran.
Neda knew that sitting in the house as an adult would have guaranteed an arranged marriage. So, she had dried her tears and gained admittance to the University of Tehran, where she decided to study physics. Even though she had found herself attracted to several of the male classmates who tried to strike up conversations with her, she always remembered her goal was to leave Iran, which an Iranian husband would make impossible.
Until she'd found what she thought was the answer to her dreams. In Neda's senior year, she had at first been annoyed by a substitute for their regular professor, who was out sick. This professor normally taught only graduate classes, and clearly considered her class a waste of his time. His name was Kazem Shirvani.
But she had really had enough when he began to lecture them on the importance of learning English, since most of the cutting-edge research in physics was being done in the US and "even the work at CERN is written up first in English and then translated into lesser languages." Neda knew all about CERN, the Swiss headquarters for the European Organization for Nuclear Research.
Neda had responded at length and in English, which she had improved to native speaker fluency through study at the British Council in Tehran, both in person and online. She made her points politely but firmly. The first was that CERN's other official language, French, deserved respect as well. The second was that the Americans had made a terrible mistake in abandoning the project to build a massive particle accelerator in Texas, creating the opening the Europeans had seized in building CERN.
Kazem had laughed and agreed, and carried on with the class. Afterward he asked her to stay, and asked her whether she planned to apply to the graduate program in physics. The professor said that though French might deserve respect, a person with her knowledge of physics and English was someone Iran could not afford to waste.
While they had spoken, he had mentioned he obtained his degree from Michigan State University. Neda had been puzzled, and asked how he had managed to study nuclear physics in the US when visas were normally denied to Iranians in such fields.
That's when Kazem had explained that he had an American passport thanks to having been born there, though he had subsequently been raised in Iran.
Neda had done her best to restrain her delight at this discovery, though it wasn't easy. An American passport could be her ticket out! Further conversation had revealed that Kazem had made several trips to the US and Europe after graduating from Michigan State, primarily for academic conferences. This cemented Neda's mental image of Kazem as someone who was free to travel to the West, unlike nearly all Iranians.
This, she decided on the spot, was the man she would marry.
Naturally, turning intention into reality took some time. Neda very quickly realized that Kazem would never see her as a possible candidate for marriage before she graduated, but fortunately that happened a few months later. She was also careful not to pick nuclear physics as her incoming graduate major, even though it interested her the most, because he would be even less likely to consider marrying one of his students. She could always change it later, once she knew one way or the other whether things would work out with Kazem.
Those hurdles passed, Neda approached the most important — her mother.
Fortunately, her relief at her daughter's finally having found a man she wanted for a husband overwhelmed what would have been her normal impulse to question Neda's choice. After all, in her mind the initiative should have been hers, not her daughter's.
It helped that Kazem had a completely respectable and solid job, had never been married before, and was substantially older than Neda. There was also no question that they had done anything inappropriate in coming to know each other. Her mother believed Neda when she said that they had only had coffee on campus a few times outside the classroom.
In fact, Neda had found Kazem frustratingly difficult to get to know as anything but a professor. The only reason he was willing to speak to her outside class is that she had been the only student to in any way contradict him. He thought, but didn't add to her, in a way that made me acknowledge to myself I may have been mistaken. Kazem liked Neda, but was completely absorbed in his academic work, and the plans he had not yet abandoned to make Iran a nuclear power. Of course, he would have never discussed Iran's nuclear weapons program with any student.
However, Kazem's parents were just as unhappy as Neda's that they had no grandchildren. Though less conservative than Neda's parents, they had also been patient considerably longer. Once Neda's mother contacted them, Kazem found himself swiftly at a family dinner with Neda and both sets of parents.
After his initial surprise faded, Kazem found himself shrugging internally.
He had always planned to marry someday. Neda was beautiful, intelligent, and he respected her. His parents liked her. What more did he want?
Their honeymoon in Paris had fanned the flames of Neda's desire to leave Iran into a roaring blaze. She loved everything about Paris, and would have given anything to live there and never go back to Iran. Neda had been sorely tempted to just walk out of the door of their hotel and never come back.
Only two things had stopped her. The first was that she really did like Kazem, and knew she wouldn't be able to look at herself in the mirror after leaving him on their honeymoon. The second was more practical — she had little money, and no source of income. As a married woman on a French tourist visa, she knew her old plan of marrying a Westerner would no longer work.
So, Neda decided to wait. She would get her graduate degree, get a job and save her money, and then on their next trip out of Iran make her escape.
The first part and second parts of her plan went perfectly. The third failed completely. After graduation her job as an undergraduate lecturer in nuclear physics paid quite well, and she was glad Kazem had turned out to have no objection to her decision to switch majors after their marriage. In fact, Neda thought Kazem believed she had done it out of admiration for him, and been secretly flattered. Neda was happy to let Kazem think what he liked, as long as it got her what she wanted. She had even been able to quietly convert a fair quantity of her earnings from Iranian rials to euros and US dollars.
But Kazem had no interest in traveling outside Iran.
Neda had always been a firm believer in predicting what people would do by what they had done, not what they said. That's why she had never discussed travel outside Iran with Kazem, except for planning their honeymoon. His many trips to America and Europe, including years of study in America and his US passport, all made it a given to Neda that there would be more trips outside Iran.
This was one time, though, that conversation would have served Neda well. She found out after waiting for a year to propose a vacation to Europe that he had no interest in tourist travel outside Iran. As Kazem made clear the first time she brought it up, all his travel outside Iran had been for study or work, with the sole exception of their honeymoon. When Neda suggested a few extra days after an academic conference she wanted to attend in London, the discussion became particularly unpleasant.
It turned out that once Kazem had been identified as the head of Iran's nuclear weapons program, he had become unwelcome at any related academic event. Even after the Americans walked away from the JCPOA, Kazem was still off every invitation list. Neda had never seen Kazem bitter before. It was not a good look.