Sometimes Saxony comes to Berlin, just to drink East's beer and bitch about how he hates the damn place, has always done. East says a few bitchy things about Dresden too, and they have vodka and Vita-Cola next to the window in the flat in Prenzlauer Berg. They never talk about real things, because it's too hard to talk about those without worrying about the little grey men that have both of their houses bugged and listened to. They talk about boring, bland things like the Olympics, and East laughs a bit when Saxony tells him that he'll receive his Trabant in a few months.
"What will you do with it anyway ?" East asks, taking a gulp of his drink. There are things he doesn't say, that he doesn't need to say in his bugged apartment.
Saxony shrugs, his long blond hair shining in the afternoon light as he places it back behind his ear. East would say something about him growing up too close to Austria and picking up his girly habits. He doesn't because it feels like the kind of information he wants to keep from being added to his file. He has done his time in Bautzen and he doesn't want the nameless interrogator to have any more precise words to throw at his face anymore.
"Go to the Datsche, maybe." Saxony's accent sounds stupid, but then his brother says the same about the Berlinese dialect. It's a matter of perspective.
"Yeah, why not. I could use a ride there too."
Saxony gives him a dirty look and East realises that some things never change, really. East's relationships with the rest of the family have always been complicated to say the least, but Saxony hasn't been too much of an asshole for the last few decades, and it's not like he was Bavaria or anything. East actually likes him now, or maybe it's just that the fact that they're stuck in this shit together has forced them to at least keep a resemblance of brotherly friendship.
Saxony leaves in the afternoon, heading back South, and they take the tram together toward the train station. East's tail follows them there, and even if Saxony seems to mind, East doesn't, not really, shrugging to indicate him not to worry. They don't speak, get off on Alexanderplatz, and the sun shines bright in the sky. The break-dancers, the skaters and the new romantics are there, little bits of the Western world filtering through the wall that feels closer with every passing step. Saxony is demunely provincial in his clothes and way of holding himself, but East can't really blame him.
"That's where we bid each other farewell," East announces before they enter the train station. He doesn't need to turn around to see that his tail is still there. The grey men are always there, just like in Bautzen, and this whole country is an open-air prison furnished with cheap Spartan furniture and alcohol whose pissy taste East has grown to like.
Saxony nods. "Goodbye, then."
East watches him walking through the open doors of the train station, sighs. Saxony might be sharing this piece of shit country with him, but he doesn't feel it the same way East does, the longing for West that had gotten East a little stay with the shield and sword of the country he was supposed to represent. Saxony thinks him an idealist with no grip on reality, and maybe he is, somehow. He never truly got himself to ask Saxony if the Stasi had made him one of their informants since his release from the state prison. He probably is.
He doesn't head back home right away, sits aimlessly not too far from the World Clock, wishing he had brought some of the leftover vodka-cola they had made themselves at home. It's one of those days, where he physically aches for a proper coffee, the kind of fancy shit that prissy Austrian drinks. Friedrichstraße isn't too far from here, and he wonders idly for a moment if he could try again, try to leave, screaming as he does. He couldn't and he won't. It would be pointless.
He can't get himself to go and walk there, hoping that West will try, try to get a permission and cross the border, and they'll go out and have a shit meal in Café Moskau and talk about little nothings since East doesn't want to get in trouble more than that. West would pay in shiny D-Marks in Delikat stores and East would only watch in fascination. It doesn't really matter, whatever would happen whenever he would get to see West again. What matters is that East would get to see him again, and that meant everything.
But West won't cross the border, has never done, even now that Russia talks about change and a beautiful future with vague, non-descript words like "Glasnost" and "Perestroika". Sometimes, East picks up a copy of Pravda, the original Russian print, hoping that he'll find something new, something that doesn't sound like the bullshit he gets from East-German newspapers. It's in that kind of moments that he hates himself for refusing to learn Russian properly for all these years.
West won't cross the border because West, even with his Ostpolitik and conciliating chancellors, cannot really find it in himself to try and go see what it's like on this side of the wall. He's good in Bonn, in a capital that isn't Berlin, that never will be like Berlin. He's been gone since the end of the war, has never came back, not even to watch as tanks faced each other over Checkpoint Charlie. His letters are long, sentimental, and he says too much because he can't know like East does that these letters they exchange are read by bureaucrats in pristine grey uniforms before arriving to East's mailbox.
Trains come and trains go over Alexanderplatz. His little grey man is still there, watching from afar, and East sighs, opening his old battered Brecht copy to feign reading. He's not even forty years, and yet he already feels so old.