MARCO ODERMATT wins the Garmisch-Partenkirchen downhill race on February 28th 2026 ahead of ALEXIS MONNEY and STEFAN ROGENTIN, making this a triple Swiss podium.
They spend hours taking apart their rifles, cleaning them and then reassembling. They sit in endless briefings with increasingly more horrifying war news from somewhere simultaneously far away and still too close. They eat their part of ever similar and never satisfying rations. They sleep in shifts.
It feels almost cruel, the way they‘re up so high in the mountains and barely ever see any nature, other than the sliver of sky that‘s visible through the crenels.
So, there you go. It‘s a lot of sitting around and waiting, a lot of boredom, some fear.
At least they‘re allowed to talk to each other, most of the time, even if it‘s not always easy to find a way to communicate - Franjo‘s French much worse than Alexis‘ clunky German.
Years later, even after the war is over, that‘s the shape Franjo‘s memories of the réduit come in; carefully formed out vowels, softened consonants, swallowed endings. Sometimes, when he wakes in the middle of the night, heart pounding from a nightmare, he imagines Alexis still there - in the bunk beside him, warm and ever awake. „I‘m so used to your snoring at this point, it‘s like an alarm going off when you stop,“ he used to joke.
Presently, if Franjo reaches out, it‘s within plausible deniability that he’s just stretching and only accidentally grazes Alexis‘ arm before settling his hand just south of the gap between their mattresses. And Alexis is already falling asleep again, ever exhausted by the long days of waiting for catastrophe, so it‘s definitely only an accident when his hand slides into Franjo‘s, fingers intertwining.
There‘s not really anything to read, and if there is, it‘s yesterday‘s paper, filled with unimaginable horrors. Some of the men receive letters, from their girlfriends or fiancées. They carry them around for weeks and reread them until the paper grows frail where it‘s folded. Franjo spends his time reading Alexis‘ face. Committing it all to heart; the soft shape of his upper lip, the severe cut of his hairline over his collar, the exact shade of blue in his eyes, the tilt of his eyebrows. Sometimes Alexis catches him staring and smiles, privately.
They don‘t speak about their lives, really. It doesn‘t seem right. Because they‘re trapped in a mountain bunker in times of war, for one, and the world is tilting off its axis, and nobody knows if they‘ll really ever get back to normality. But mostly because it doesn‘t seem to fit into their normal now - the shared waiting, the companiable eating, the sleeping with their shoulders almost pressed together.
Franjo could say that there‘s nobody waiting for him, back home - nobody but his mother and an uncle, who he hopes is providing for her. He could say that he‘s gone dancing with a couple of girls, before the mobilization. That he‘s never studied any of their faces as closely as he‘s studied Alexis‘ face. He doesn‘t, because he doesn‘t know what Alexis would say in turn. Instead, the talk about skiing. About how much they miss the feeling of absolute freedom when you‘re going faster and faster down a snow covered slope. About how Alexis broke his collarbone as a teenager when his ski caught on a hidden stone and he fell. You can still see the scar from the surgery, and when it‘s cold, the bone aches a little. It‘s always cold in the réduit, and Franjo fixes his eyes on Alexis‘ collarbone like he can warm it up solely with the power of his thoughts, through all the layers of their scratchy uniforms.
It‘s a lot of sitting around, mostly. Franjo never knows, later, if it‘s one of the worst or the best times in his life.
