It's that time of the year again, West can't help but to think. It's weird, how East still lives nearly twenty years after his dissolution. He's not ready to go away yet, the same way Bavaria is still kicking around Munich, bitching about football, the Bundesrepublik and Austria for reasons West doesn't really understand. West isn't sure if he's okay with it, but there are many things he's not okay with that he has learnt to live with. It's not like they were together very often anyway. West still has his own house in Wannsee and East his flat on Karl Marx Allee. They both say that it's a matter of practicality, but both know that it's because East can't let go of the old furniture and empty Spreewaldgurken pots that still sits around his old place.
West and East's relationship is a strange one, really. West remembers sometimes their first meeting, after Willy Brandt knelt and showed him in a simple gesture what would really end the Cold War.
Ostpolitik had done its job, in a way, and no tanks faced each other anymore, waiting for the nuclear apocalypse to happen at last. West bought the house in Wannsee, coming to West-Berlin once in a while, even if it hurt a bit to look at buildings that were there no more and remember the war. All around the city, there was a wall, and on the other side the unknown. He had never seen East, and whilst he now acknowledged that he existed he wasn't sure he wanted to see him face to face.
Strangely enough, it was East that tried to contact him first. Russia's new ways hadn't caught up with his own bosses, but he had somehow gotten himself to write something down and send it to West-Berlin. It was short, really, simple health enquiries that didn't seem much and the stiff, comical socialist salutations. West hadn't known what to do with it at first, really, because he still really didn't know how to feel about the situation, even after decades of silent, freezing war. He had shaken his head, written a few lines answering in concise, precise manner to East's questions, returning them politely. It was weird. More than thirty years of separate existence seemed like the world, suddenly.
West had paused, placed his pen on his desk, remembered Prussia and the terrible things he represented. Prussia was dead, deader than the empire that should have lasted a thousand years and that still haunted West's nightmares whenever he spent too much time thinking about it. The Allies had killed him with words on paper and he had gone away rather fast after that, without much regrets or anger, telling West that they'd probably see each other whenever he was ready to rise from the ashes again and take over the world. The tone of his voice had frightened him, for a moment, and Prussia had left that half-destroyed house they had shared since the end of Prussia's empire not too far from Potsdamer Platz never to reappear.
It was only after two years of letters and short phone calls that they finally got to meet, West getting a permission to spend an afternoon in East-Berlin, meeting this estranged brother with the weird handwriting in Friedrichstraße's train station.
They had only exchanged glances at first, giving each other a polite salute. It had been a shock, really, to see how closely his unknown brother resembled Saxony and spoke with the same thick Berlinese dialect as Prussia, but West had somehow managed not to let it show too much. It reminded him of things he didn't like to think about too much anymore, of another life and another Germany that dreamt of glorious war and turned human beings into soap.
They had headed out, not really speaking. East's whole body language seemed ridiculously tense, the way he held himself. He had the same lean, almost feline body type as Prussia, and walked the same way, his unfashionable, practical shoes making his steps heavy the same way those steel-caped boots had made Prussia's so long ago. West tried not to make too many connections as they walked toward Alexanderplatz. East-Berlin's streets felt the same, somehow, after the war and the years, and West recognised the old buildings, still felt a bit surprised by the new additions. The Spree had the same grey colour it always had in the winter, in West or East Berlin alike.
It's weird, because even now, West can't really remember what they talked about when they sat not too far from the subway station and ate East's Ketwürste. He only remembers that odd kind of knot inside his stomach whenever East called Russia "Großer Bruder" and chewed his food with purposeful bites.
Sometimes, when he forgets that West is there, East still does it, and it makes Russia smile an odd kind of smile. He laughs it away, tells East something in Russian and East makes this odd kind of face, somewhere between embarrassment and bitterness as he looks back at West. It should bother West more than it does, because he doesn't understand Russian, has never done, but he always shrugs the incident away. It bothers Bavaria very much, but a lot of things bother Bavaria so West stopped caring too much about whatever he said with that funny accent of him a long time ago. West's days are quiet, now, and he goes to work, fills mind-numbing paperwork every day without fail. He doesn't have the time or the energy to hate Russia with the same burning passion as Prussia used to, back in the days.
"I'm happy I met you," East had said simply as West headed back to his own Berlin and his own life.
"I'm glad I met you too."
East and West's relationship had somehow never changed much over the last few years of the GDR. They wrote, phoned, always exchanging banalities and, to please East, a few socialist salutations West hoped his bosses never heard about. East didn't mention Prussia and neither did West, maybe because there really wasn't anything to say about him anymore. They met once in a while, too, when West was in Berlin and got permission to cross the border for a few hours, unsure as how would East react if he brought him something from the West. He couldn't know, and so he didn't. They spoke about the books East read and the Olympics. At one point or another they decided that they should go running together in the Zoologischer Garten, and they do, because East, in his boring grey tracksuit, is lean and mean, just like Prussia was, outrunning West fast and laughing that low hum characteristic to Thuringia. It surprises West but he doesn't react sourly as maybe it would have been the case if East and himself had met a few years earlier.
Then suddenly, spring, summer and fall had come, and walls had fallen. East had stopped calling and West had guessed that it was because he had been busy, out there, in a country that seemed to change after so many years spent under the same grey sky. November rolled around and West dragged Bavaria along this time in the Volkswagen to Berlin. They hadn't seen East crossing the Brandenburg gate or going to one of West Berlin's crowded sex shops. He disappeared, for some reason, but it didn't keep the both of his living brothers to cheer as his people discovered life outside walls of grey concrete and empty doublespeak.
West still remembers the summer of 1990, the football games, the east and the west reunited as fall fell over Berlin's grey skies. He had stopped thinking about East, all of a sudden, but East hadn't stopped thinking about him. East knocked on his door on a warm night, not too long after what should have been the GDR's 41st anniversary. There was an odd stiffness to his movements, how he moved and talked. He had lost that quiet arrogance that had characterized every single of his exchanges with West up until now.
"You know, when they started to shoot fireworks to celebrate over the Brandenburg Gate ? I sat in my cell and thought that the end had finally come, and that we'd all be turned to dust."
All what West knows of East's time in prison comes from that night, with the glass of water that sat innocently on the table, and East's careful words, his accent giving an even harsher tone to the realities he described, the small cell and the bad food, and the feeling of slowly disappearing from reality, bit by bit.
They don't talk about it anymore, not even when East and Bavaria fight about East's allowance or Bavaria's football team. They break plates and punch walls but they never talk about East's time in the prisons he built because there isn't anything to say about it that isn't etched into East's skin since the day he came to Wannsee for the first time.
The first few years had been strange, to say the least. East didn't talk much, and if he did, it was to complain about how shitty Coca-Cola next to Club-Cola and bitch over Bavaria's religion. It bothered West more than it should, and sometimes he found himself wondering why, why East wasn't simply going away after his dissolution just as Prussia had done before.
The movements of his own mind scare him sometimes, and he tries not to show it too much when East talks about things he shouldn't talk about, missing the old days of a glorious, prouder Germany. Bavaria gives him a dirty look and leaves every time he does, but he never explicitly names the Germany he's talking about. West can't say if Bavaria's anger comes from East's words or the way he says it, with the same tone and inflection as Prussia did, all those years ago. He'll probably never know. Prussia's name isn't something any of them ever say in presence of each other, even though West knows that Bavaria calls East "The Prussian" when they can't hear him.
A decade rolled under their feet, the three remaining brothers of the Berlin Republic, and they didn't see each other too much, going to Munich for Christmas and taking the train back to Potsdamer Platz for New Year's Eve. East still smoked and drank like it was his day job, still kept the old little green guys on the traffic lights, still bitched once in a while about how everything was simpler when the government took care of everything. West didn't understand him in any way better than during that first meeting, all those years ago, in what once was East Berlin.
It's that time of the year again and East always locks himself in his flat for a few days, watching Goodbye, Lenin! on repeat until West comes to his place, prepares him a bit of that dreadful Mocca-Fix he doesn't know why East insists on drinking. Some years, it's better than other, some years it's worst. Today is different, though, because West has news for East, about the Museum they want to open not too far from Museumsinsel and the plan they have to bulldozer that eyesore Palast der Republik somewhere in the near future. West doesn't know how East will react to it.
What he doesn't expect is to find East's apartment emptied of his belongings, with a note against the door telling West in four simple words what their relationship has come to, and why he'll never come back.
"Wir sind ein Volk."
Germany folds the paper carefully with the tips of his fingers, and suddenly he realize that the wall inside his head fell too.