W

ithin the double-landlocked country of Uzbekistan (meaning one must travel through two other countries to reach any ocean) lies the world’s only triple-landlocked country, the enclave known as Brezakia. Perched atop a forbidding plateau between the Aral and Caspian Seas—false seas, both are lakes, however salty they may be, and the Aral has almost dried up—Brezakia is not officially recognized as a country by Uzbekistan, or any other nation, which makes it impossible to find on maps.

The Brezakians, in turn, do not recognize Uzbekistan or any other nation and consider the world beyond their plateau a vast wilderness. Their land consists of a dozen scattered villages on their few dozen square miles of mostly arable land, their livelihood is from raising sheep and goats and an odd sort of inbred chicken which resembles the extinct dodo bird. They raise some vegetables of the leafy, grainy and tuberous kinds whose identity is not fully understood. They mine for metals and smelt them.

But their chief passion is music. All their instruments are unique to them, as are their scales. Every child learns to play and build every instrument as they learn to walk and talk.

The whole of the Brezakian people assemble twice a year on the solstices and play a vast symphony which lasts all night and through the next day, fortified by the strong quasi-barley-beer they brew. Numbering some five thousand, their number never increases due to high infant mortality, though it sometimes decreases.

There are no visitors to Brezakia. Even if one could climb the thousand foot cliffs that surround it, their language is so incomprehensible and their features so distinctive as to make disguise impossible, and they would instantly defenestrate a foreigner. The edge of their plateau forms their huge picture window on the outside world.

The discovery of the Brezakian Manuscript, as it was first known to the outside world, occurred on a June day in Uzbekistan. The sun was shining and white fleecy clouds like sheep marched obediently across the sky. A blue butterfly landed on the green moss that sat like a velvet cushion on the slate roof, then rose and merged with the sky.

The ancient manor house with its magnificent flying buttresses would have stood forever had the buttresses been made of stone as the rest of the edifice was, but termites had been busy and the front buttress, which terminated in a small studio atop a spiral staircase, abruptly collapsed, leading to the collapse of the larger building.

Under the termite-riddled floor boards of the studio was discovered a roll of parchment—actually a sheepskin—which a workman conveyed to the village schoolteacher.

The teacher took it to the University of K—, where for some years it sat in the office of the Chair of History, Professor Dmitry Eckzema, whose main virtue was maintaining his position after the collapse of the former Soviet Union.

After Eckzema’s long-awaited death, the scroll was put in the rare-book room of the University Library, where a succession of doctoral students tried and failed to decipher it: it was written in no known language with no known alphabet. The librarian, fearing the incessant unrolling and rolling of the scroll by grubby fumbling graduate students would lead to its disintegration, photocopied it and sealed the original in the library’s vault. He sent photocopies to half a dozen prominent scholars around the world.

Professor Jan van Jammer of Witwatersrand University claimed it a clever forgery from the late 19th century, but failed to mention what it was a forgery of, or why it was clever. He later revised his claim and said it was a hoax that meant nothing.

Dr. Rosetta Stone of Oxford (Magdelene College) said it was a bad copy of a bad copy of ancient Mongolian vertical script, probably a sort of shopping list, or perhaps a tally of people killed, towns pillaged, and atrocities committed. She based this on the frequent reoccurrence of one symbol which she said was a corrupted version of the Mongolian symbol for death, and the fact that Ghenghiz Khan had skirted Brezakia in the 13th century.

But he was only one of many would-be conquerors of Brezakia. Alexander had paused at the base of the cliffs and decided it wasn’t worth conquering. Attila the Hun had been in the region. After him, the Golden Horde and Tamerlane, the Persians and the Chinese, the Turks and Afghans had been there, but none of them had found a way onto the plateau. The Brezakian gene pool is neither Caucasian nor Asian, neither Turkic nor Arabic, Berber or Dravidian, but some other strain that broke off early in human history.

Dr. Stone’s thesis was debunked by Professor Iosef Djindjinashvili of the University of Georgia in Tbilisi. “Djindjin” had been unable to decipher the manuscript and had passed it on to a logician acquaintance who sent it to Dr. Gustav Haammerstein (of the famous proof that all mathematical systems contain false, but unprovably false propositions which are undiscoverable, and at the same time true, but unprovably true, theorems (one of which, his detractors state, is his own proof, which rests on the argument that zero is not nothing, and neither is the blank symbol on a page, which he defines as the content of parentheses that have no content, namely ( ), but three nested parentheses is all a sane mind can take, so I end this digression here)).

Haamerstein, holding a cushy job in Einstein’s old office at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, fed it into a supercomputer, which concluded it was not a random number permutation, but a coded message corresponding to no known language or database. Not known to the supercomputer at least.

Haammerstein (privately called “Hammerhead” by his fellow advanced scholars) gave the photocopy to his eleven year old son on a rainy Sunday afternoon and told him it was the code to the location of Captain Kidd’s treasure. Young Freidrich (awful name for a kid growing up in America, even in prim Princeton—we shall call him Fred) realized that if read diagonally, not vertically or horizontally, certain elements repeated themselves in a regular order and the treasure was buried in his own back yard.

After Haammerstein had disciplined Fred and ordered new sod, Fred realized it could be musical notation and decoded it this way, placing arbitrary notes for the symbols and submitted it to his sixth-grade music teacher as his own work (for which he was subsequently disciplined). The teacher, John Souser, arranged it for instruments playable by eleven-year olds (there are painfully few) and the resulting concert was described by one listener, an anonymous parent, as “reminiscent of a herd of berserk bull elephants on LSD stampeding through a boiler factory.” Souser’s contract was not renewed for the next school year, though it was not provably due to this incident, although the fact that the school board referred to it as an incident and not a concert was powerful evidence in itself.

But progress was being made. The musical transcript and Fred’s key for deciphering it was mailed to a female friend of Souser’s (they had gone to the same music school and once slept in the same bed, though at different times) with a letter lauding young Fred as the next Mozart. The colleague failed to notice it was postmarked April 1st. She passed it on to me, labeled “The Brezakian Symphony.”

I have previously stated that it is impossible to go to Brezakia. But it is possible to come from there. I knew a man who grew up in Brezakia.

The man escaped in his late teens to see the world. At first he saw only Uzbekistan, a miserable part of the former Soviet Union, which, like most of its other miserable parts, had never wanted to be part of it. Later he saw China and India, where he learned passable English and procured a passable forged passport. In his thirties he came to the United States and worked as a translator for the U.N. since he was now fluent in seven languages. Then later worked, more sinistrally, for a security agency so clandestine its name is classified and its existence denied, to the extent that no one who knows of its existence is even allowed to deny it, as this would indicate there might be an agency whose existence was deniable, sort of a proof of existence itself.

It gave him ample funds and time, however, and with these he sought to recreate the instruments of his youth, the wooden cymbals, the brass drums, the bone piano, the stone xylophone, the ram’s horn flute, the water hammer and so on (we will omit their Brezakian names, which would be unpronounceable consonants).

After twenty years he had assembled an orchestra of instruments in his basement. But no one but him knew how to play them.

He thought of using the agency’s influence, which was not inconsiderable, to bring ten Brezakians to America. But they would not come willingly, the outer world being a great barbarism to Brezakians, and if kidnapped, they would not play their instruments well. A common Brezakianism is, “Breath comes from breathing,” by which is meant, “One must do something willingly with one’s whole being, without any external constraints or motivations, to do or have anything of lasting value and without lingering guilt feelings or the sense of having one’s integrity compromised.” Brezakian is a pithy language.

There was only one solution. He must teach foreigners to play Brezakian instruments. He began with his next door neighbor, a retired plumber. The old man had a facility with pipes, so he was trained on the bone flute, and could double on the water hammer.

By odd coincidence, his neighbor on the other side was a retired electrician. But he had really wanted to be a bassist. Wires are like strings. He took to the circular chicken gut rolling bass with a passion.

I passed the manuscript on to my Brezakian friend. He instantly recognized it as one of the great symphonies played for the summer solstice. The musical notation had symbols for each instrument and the note played, but the manuscript was not read horizontally, vertically or diagonally, but as a spiral out from the center.

I was invited to play one of the instruments, a kind of zither made from a sheep’s thighbone and goat sinews, and after much practice our little band of mostly aged men was ready to play outdoors on Midsummer’s eve.

In Brezakia, the entire population plays this symphony, from toddlers who can barely hold their instruments to oldsters who can barely hold theirs. The music goes on all night and through Midsummer’s day and into the next night, accompanied by the universal drinking of their barley beer, brewed in barrels and kept only for this occasion and the Winter Solstice concert. Apart from these two events, Brezakians observe total abstinence. Anyone caught drinking at any other time is given the death penalty, defenestration off the cliffs surrounding the plateau, an elaborate ceremony accompanied by Brezakian music.

It is possible my friend fell into this category and managed to escape Brezakia’s Death Row, though he never talked about it. He did, however, make a barrel of barley beer according to his secret Brezakian recipe, unbunged it on his back porch and insisted we drink generously of it as the music started.

This created some controversy as both his retired plumber and electrician neighbors were reformed alcoholics, but by telling them the beer was weak (a lie) he got them to imbibe. Other members of the orchestra, including myself, were robust and active alcoholics and tippled heartily.

The Brezakian tradition is to drink from a full ram’s horn while also playing one’s instrument and without spilling a drop. One cannot put the ram’s horn down until it is empty.

I do not remember how our concert ended, or waking up in a jail cell as some of my less fortunate orchestra mates did. I do remember my Brezakian friend wildly gesticulating at me and saying, in broken Brezakian, in the mirror, that he made it all up and there was no Brezakia. I calmed him down sufficiently then wrote this down. Brezakia is real. Our music came from it. You hear it now. It echoes on strangely in our minds. It lingers past the ending of this story. It tells the story of a people isolated in central Asia, proud and tall, who believe in themselves and their heritage. They are a world inside our world. They have no crime, insanity or wars. Take a deep breath now. Let it out slowly. Breath comes from breathing.