blue notebook, first page

I have three small blue notebooks containing notes pertaining to Belle. None is completely filled. They are numbered, and some of the notes have dates. I’m starting with the first one here. Going back to the beginning of the project to try and figure out where I am. This reconstruction will be a chronology of the discovery – usually not how texts are constructed. But in it I might find a clue to the trajectory of the narrative.

The first page in the first book is dated 5/9/96 – 12 years ago. It begins with the simple question “what’s in the box?” And then asks other questions: what’s the theme, what about the German guy…and then a bunch of possibilities for finding the German guy? The German guy, time-wise, is a minor part of Belle’s story. She lived 85 years, and knew him for maybe 15 at he most. It’s certainly possible that his presence colored her life for many years afterwards. She once told me he died in prison. “Better to die like that than to be killed by the Germans like a dog,” she said. But that’s the only mention of him I recall. Besides, it’s not even true. He didn’t die in prison. And the Germans were not set to kill him.

After the question about the German guy I have a few suggestions for how I might find him: the library, the German Archaeological Institute, a woman teaching Ancient Studies at UMBC, someone at Princeton, a question about Brits that might have known him. Oddly, I think it several years later I contacted the woman at UMBC. I also tell myself on this page to Xerox everything, which I did. But these first couple pages of notes are scattered – vague and general ideas on how to get started, meetings with friends who’d done projects of their own, broad suggestions on where answers might lie, and a reminder that the Biblical town of Shechem is now Nablus.