When is it time? The question may be posed before taking a leap in life, perhaps to avoid a troublesome situation. The feeling is almost visceral, space and time are trembling or quaking: the vertiginous. Here, I propose the notion of timequakes to capture such a situation. It is drawn from the life and prose of Osip Mandelstam and used to shed light on a story told to me during fieldwork in Croatia by a former Yugoslav defector, who also at one point in his life felt the tremble of time.

Mandelstam was of Polish-Jewish descent and born in Warsaw in 1891, then part of the Russian Empire. He would come of age during the Soviet Union where his critical prose caught the attention of the authorities. He was first arrested in Moscow in 1934, as the Great Purge was about to set in, and was taken directly before Stalin for a personal inquisition. This was due to his poem Stalin Epigram. ‘We live unconscious of the ground beneath our feet’, it begins. ‘Our talk cannot be heard ten paces away. And whenever there is enough for half-a-conversation, The Kremlin Highlander is mentioned’ (Mandelstam, 1965: 27). It also refers to Stalin as a ‘peasant slayer’ who has ‘fat fingers’. The poem itself had at that point never been written down, being only whispered among supposed friends, yet it still found its way to the Kremlin.

Through the intervention of his friend Boris Pasternak, Mandelstam avoided a death sentence at this point. Instead, he and his wife were exiled for 3 years, after which he was arrested again and sent to a correction camp in Vladivostok, where he died of typhoid fever 4 months later.

In her memoir, Mandelstam’s wife Nadezhda recounts how the threat of persecution and death had been with them long before the Stalin Epigram. One day in their Moscow apartment, Mandelstam stood by the window. ‘Isn’t it time?’ he said to his wife, contemplating jumping to his death as an escape. They agreed it wasn’t, not just yet, but time was trembling (Mandelstam, N. 1999). The age they lived in was, as he noted in his short piece Komissarzhevskaya, giving a swelling noise, a quaking murmur (Mandelstam, O.  1965:108).

*****

When is it time? Aged 16, Davorin had a feeling as his class embarked from Ljubljana on a school trip to Austria in 1965. This was it. His mother and father did not know. Despite his young age, Davorin had been brewing his plan to defect for two years. He had accepted his mother’s suggestion to learn German after school, although he never told her that this was part of a scheme. The parents had owned a restaurant, but after WW2 the authorities forced it to close, deeming it to be a capitalist venture. In order to support the family, Davorin´s father had begun working odd jobs transporting various goods. One day a man asked the father what exactly he was moving on his cart, and he had gruntingly answered ‘socialism’. The man turned out to be a secret informer, and soon after the father was sentenced to 9 months in a labour camp.

Once in Austria, Davorin’s class is taking a break near a forest. As they gather again to continue their trip, one pupil is missing. Later in the evening, footprints can be traced in the heavy snow, moving across the border to Germany. Davorin crosses around midnight. He walks for hours, and the following day he miraculously finds his way to a refugee shelter. It is late in the afternoon as he arrives, and the gates are closed. Yet with his knowledge of German, he convinces the guard to let him in. The next morning Davorin sees a green military van driving away from the shelter. It contains people who are being sent back to Yugoslavia, he is told, either because they have a criminal record, or because they are minors who are traveling alone and therefore forced to return. Davorin knows that his own age will soon put him on a similar trip back, so he immediately finds his school-ID and changes his age with a pencil. He is now 20 and no longer 16. His language-skills earn him a job as a translator at the shelter, and after some time he is offered the chance to go to Canada.

Davorin lived in Canada for 20 years before he finally went back to visit his home country. It was only meant to be a short visit, but he fell in love and ended up staying. It would only be a few years before the ground beneath him started rumbling again, time was making a noise, and soon the Balkan Wars erupted; a burst of history and temporal tectonics released by religious, ethnic, and political tensions.

We are now in Croatia as Davorin recounts his story in 2019, at a café by the coast where life appears tranquil. But even today time keeps trembling now and then, as when nationalistic or xenophobic graffiti appears, or when political rhetoric reminds him of things that he heard before. Quaking murmurs of the past, of vertiginous events that partook in forming his life-story.

*****

Mandelstam and Davorin are of different times and places, and their stories differ in terms of what the potential result of the question ‘is it time?’ would be: A different life, or a different death. Both had a sense that their circumstances warranted an action, the vertiginous called for a decision to be made. The unease that maybe life is in the jump and death is in the step back. Or that maybe it is the other way around. The unease of not knowing which one to be true as time begins to quake. Of not knowing, when standing at a precipice, be it a window ledge or a border, whether potentiality has run out of potential. Of not knowing when it is time.

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