I am a girl of 10 in a family of many children -- boys and girls. I am the youngest. I love them and they love me back. They are all young and I am still small. So small that when we return late after a party I pretend that I am asleep so that a masculine embrace or a feminine warmth can carry me to a fresh bed. It was a spring like any other. A new year came with it, though I can't say how and when.

We were all together. Another joined us late at the New Year table of 1979, got his present and left. I was engrossed in the beauty of flowers -- violets and poppies -- that brought us the colors of freedom from tyranny.

The city was up in smokes. There was general merriment in the air that hid the impending closure of the revolution. My dad? I saw him, his arms akimbo, bringing his walks from the street into the yard and from the yard into the house. I would sometimes see him with his ears against the tiny speaker of his short wave radio. He would pull me to himself and say, there's something wrong here. The excitement that I felt all around me shook with these words. I was also afraid when I saw the knitted brows of the aging nationalist.

When one of us went abroad to celebrate the New Year somewhere else, my father's eyes became fixed on horizon. He took the hands of another sibling and warned that after the spring breeze dark clouds were on the horizon. Yet another sibling announced the death of bourgeois society and liberalism.

Spring was aloft, both the natural kind and the freedom kind. [1]

A year passed, the way a year must. The following New Year, one of us was not around the table and another one arrived last minute to join. Again, anxiety was visible in my father's eyes. We celebrated 1980. I was 11. My father was staring at a door that let each of us out by turns. We spend time with dreamers out on the streets. There were also those who were celebrating the revolution in confiscated houses and I can only remember that I worried about my parents and that I was too short to be able to see what was happening in huddles. I was only able to listen and every now and again I would pull at my brother's sleeves to let them know that I was there. He wouldn't pay me much attention. He was not afraid of anything.

Another year passed. I was 12. War [2] was raging and it was springtime. One more of us were no longer at the New Year table. My fathers' hair had turned whiter. It was 1981. The winter, according to the newspapers, was slightly bloody. Eyes had been gouged out of their sockets, books had been burned, some were clubbing others, and it went both ways. The question of freedom was no longer. Paranoia set in. Everyone was suspect. The spring of freedom tasted of blood. Young soldiers from southern provinces were sent back to their villages, broken.

Another year passed. I was left with my parents and four of us were absent at the table. It was 1982. Apprehension in my mother's eyes took the color of tears. My father's hairs braided in between his hands and this meant that nothing was right, that something was seriously wrong. Books had vanished into hiding. Photographs had been burnt or shredded. Reception on the radio crackled and in those days I hated the radio and was afraid of the television. Dead bodies were on display in front of cameras. They had come either from the front or were pulled out from among the rubble to make room for hatred.

My classmate's brother had come from the western front and she came to the classroom on the following week with red eyes. Her street took his name whose body was no longer. I dreamt at nights and a bit later my brother's was only a name in the birth certificate of my parents.

Was it a New Year? No. It was 1983. Just that and these years were the years of war, betrayal, accusations and death. My father's hair turned white altogether and my mother's eyes welled up with pearl color tears.

From the time that I no longer remember, years were years of forgetfulness. There is something hidden in the history of this period, but it is a treasure that the dragon of time is sleeping on.

It is now the year of 2009. Thirty years have passed. I am 40 and one thing is still with me: When the New Year comes, tears roll down. I shed my despair and inhale my hopes with the air.

When the New Year comes
I will do something about your sky
When the spring comes I will think of your sky
And my own hidden lines.