As the Embers of Hope Die Out

By Michael Lambrix
(Written August 2017)

Our beloved Mike was executed by the State of Florida on October 5, 2017.  To honor his memory, we share with you this essay he wrote eight weeks before his execution.

“Dr. Edith Bone has decided not to cry.  On this autumn afternoon in 1956, her seven years of solitary confinement have come to a sudden end.  Beyond the prison gates, the Hungarian Revolutions final, scattered shots are echoing down the streets of Budapest.  Inside the gates, Bone emerges through the prison´s front door into the courtyard´s bewildering sunlight.  She is 68 years old, stout and arthritic. 

Bone was born in Budapest in 1889 and proved an intelligent – if disobedient – child.  She wished to become a lawyer like her father, but this profession was closed to women.  Her options were school-mistress or doctor; she accepted the latter. 

The Great War began soon after her graduation and so she went to work in a military hospital.  Perhaps it was there, seeing the suffering of the poorer classes, that her communist sympathies bloomed; she watched an illiterate soldier, a shepherd before the war, as he cried at the window, cradling his shattered arm and worrying about his lost children.  He was only one broken man among many. 

After the war, Bone devoted herself to political work in England for 16 years, and it was this foreign connection that would excite suspicions of authorities when she returned to communist Budapest in 1949. Secret police stopped her at the airport on her way back to England. 

Inside headquarters, a slim man presented himself, decked in fine clothing and smooth manners.  He took her into his little office and told her they knew she was a spy, an agent for the British Secret Service. “Until you tell us what your instructions were, you will not leave this building.” 

Bone replied, “In that case, I shall probably die here, because I am not an agent of the secret service.” What followed – her seven years and 58 days of solitary confinement – is the stuff of horror films.  She was held in filthy, freezing cells, the walls either dripped with water or were furred with fungus.  She was generally half-starved and always isolated except when confronted by guards.  Twenty-three ill-trained officers interrogated her with insults and threats – once for a 60 hour stretch.  For one period of six months, she was plunged into total darkness. 

And yet her captors received no false confessions, no plea for mercy; their only bounty was the tally of her insolent replies.  It became a kind of recreation for Bone to annoy the prison authorities on the rare occasions when she saw them. 

But Bone´s most extraordinary strategy was not the way she toyed with her captor, it was the way she held sway over herself – the dogged maintenance of her own sanity.  From within that forced void she slowly, steadily, built for herself an interior world that could not be destroyed or stripped from her.  She recited poetry, for starters, translating the verses she knew by heart into each of her six languages.  Then she began composing her own daggered poems. One, made up during her six months without light, praised the saving grace of her “dark-born magic wand.” 

Inspired by a prisoner she remembered from a Tolstoy story, Bone took herself on imaginary walks through all the cities she´d visited.  She strolled the streets of Paris and Rome, and Florence and Milan: she toured the tier garden in Berlin and Mozart´s residence in Vienna. Later, while her feet wore a narrow furrow into the concrete beside her bed, she set out in her mind on a journey home to London.  She walked a certain distance each day and kept a mental record of where she´d left off.  She made the trip four times, each time stopping when she arrived at the Channel, as it seemed too cold to swim. 

Bone’s guards were infuriated, but she proved proficient in the art of being alone.  They cut her off from the world and she exercised that art, choosing peace over madness, consolation over despair, and solitude over imprisonment.  Far from being destroyed, Bone emerged from prison, in her own words, “a little wiser and full of hope.”

Michael Lambrix was executed by the State of Florida on October 5, 2017