West has this weird kind of emptiness in his face when East knocks on the door of his house in the middle of the night. His berlinese house isn't in town like East's own flat on Karl-Marx Allee. It's a small suburban home in the northern part of the city's extended periphery, with a garden and room for West's dog. It fits him the same way East's own present home fits him; reluctantly and awkwardly, but somehow managing to work it out.
Hi brother lets him in without saying a word and East would like him to be angry, to shout and slam his fist on the table like he used to back when they were bitter and starving because of East's fucking Kaiser. West only looks at him with something like disappointment in his face, and it hurts more than a thousand Russian tanks rolling over Berlin in ruins, somehow. East steps inside, grins because it's easier this way, doesn't take off his shoes, plays the game, says nonsense about West's job and lights up without West's permission. West looks at him, flinches a bit, sits uncomfortably on one of the kitchen's chairs in front of his brother.
"Please don't smoke here."
East only makes a clicking sound with his tongue as an answer, using one of West's coffee mug on the table as an ashtray.
"You know," he says between two puffs of smoke, "You'd be better in Cologne at this time of the year. Berlin's weather is really fucking shitty in autumn."
"You know that I have work here."
"Meh." Of course West has work to do. West had always had so much work to do. "You got anything to eat? I'm starving."
West lets out a distant, tired smile, rises, opens up the fridge, his bulking form peering inside. He looks too tall for the furniture, somehow, and East can't help but to think about those atrocious plastic chairs from the old days he kept out of nostalgia in Karl-Marx Allee.
"I've got some leftover Weißwurst and cheese"
East laughs.
"You fucking Bavarian. Whatever. Hand me the beer."
West takes out the sausages anyway, cuts a few slice of bread, and places them neatly on a plate. East takes the beer he's offered with a nod, drinks it with disdainful sips. He doesn't like its taste but he needs the alcohol. Hopefully he'll get to crash the Maserati again and West will have to buy him a new one. West cuts himself a piece of Weißwurst, eats it the Bavarian way. The stereotype makes East's head ache.
"How was your day?" asks East, not because he really cares but because the silence is starting to make him uneasy.
"I went to Potsdam."
East looks at him, dumbfounded. If there's a place in Germany that West loathes more than Berlin or fucking Nurnberg, it's Potsdam. His silence is a question in itself and West continues speaking, a piece of Weißwurst between his fingers. He hasn't taken out the mustard out of laziness, maybe. Bavaria, back when he lived, couldn't eat those without it.
"It had been a while. Park Sanssouci is still pretty."
West sighed, raised his eyes up to look at East. The guilt, the suffocating guilt is still there, but it doesn't really matter anymore. He's honest when he opens his mouth once again and speaks.
"I thought I would meet you there."
East's cigarette is forgotten in the makeshift ashtray and West doesn't even make a move to stop him as he put it off against the same mug, letting it fall in the cup. Eyes closed, East thinks back to the end of the war, to forty years on each side of the wall, of how he wants to die but doesn't at the same time. He looks at West's blue eyes and he realises that it isn't out of cowardice that he does this, the shame and the self-hate. It's out of love too.
East opens his mouth and says words that make the colour of West's eyes change to a brighter, prouder shade of blue.
Of all people living on this piece of shit earth, it was Russia that had somehow managed to understand the complicated relationship that united East to West.