TE17 Mysterious Montenegro

Aleksandar Bečanović Phantoms, sometimes horrible, sometimes amiable guests emerge from the haze of consciousness and occupy the green iris, as heavy as the ink on a deed from the family archive: their presence is so real that they can even be felt if one’s hand is outstretched in desperation. Phantoms arrive with a force that renders reality superfluous and illusion manifestly redundant, especially if they have been summoned by a poetic voice that does not wish to relinquish its desire, if they have come from manuscripts that painstakingly note their every appearance and every mark they leave behind. Phantoms bring to the surface that which has been denied but cannot be erased. Phantoms are a reflection of suffering and fear, doubts and promises, rise and fall. In those forever lost and forever returned icons he was convinced that he should see fragments of hidden motherly care, habitual fatherly disappearances, and a childhood woefully missed. Later, on paper, it would look like an inexorable series of events, like a story whose plot constantly entangles, intertwines, and disentangles again, hounded by its own laws and logic, after which only a signature still has to be added. Only the written, recorded world can be recognized because it concurs with what comes from within. That is the maxim of this captive after his hopes have been moored in the sifting and sorting of text, in the refusal of signals to arrange themselves in the expected form, in the flight of signs from the promised solution. From one story to another, from one book to another, in a labyrinth, where behind every corner there waits sometimes me, sometimes the other . . . It was a late winter’s night, his prison was again a sober cage in a fastness behind nineteen iron gates, and he had fallen asleep. 88