As a man, his answer was supposed to be an absolute no. A man should piss all around his territory. A man should rule, and rule alone in this extra comfortable two-room rental, as well as in the life attached to it. If that wasn’t possible, he would have to end this life, break up with the girl and start fresh with a new one, one who was more submissive to a man’s needs.

He also knew that the times when men thought this way about themselves were long gone. He wasn’t a ruler in this flat; he wasn’t a hunter in the jungle. He and she were equals, even though that equality had been upset tonight.

Of course, he could look at it from a different angle. What if Nikolett was sick, in need of some sort of help? No matter how you looked at it, biting dogs was a habit that wasn’t widely accepted in society, therefore it could very well be considered a pathological condition. Maybe with some therapy she could be made to give up this new habit, and a new kind of balance could be reached in their relationship, a balance where Zoltán could finally be dominant. But again it meant that when a woman dominated a man it was a sort of sickness to be cured. Zoltán, on an intellectual level, disapproved of the notion, but at the same time, deep down, he agreed with it.

What if one of these nights Nikolett gets caught biting a dog, he asked himself. She would definitely be prosecuted for vandalism or animal abuse or both. In any case, this life would be over, only in a more humiliating manner than if Zoltán walked away right now.

He thought back to the honey-colored Sundays, the Prosecco from Aldi, the extra comfort, and his heart ached with grief. How could he just walk away from all that?

He curled into a fetal position in the bed and fell asleep.

In the morning they didn’t talk about it. Nikolett put on her mask and left for work. Zoltán switched on his computer because a call was starting in half an hour.

At night, Nikolett went running again.

Zoltán sat in the window, watching the park, a place that used to promise serenity, offer coolness in the summer heat, leisure and recreation. Now the park seemed like a jungle, a closed ecosystem where two types of beings existed: predator and prey. Somewhere under the disguise of darkness the battle for life is being fought every moment. Zoltán felt thrilled and fearful as the park rose above its own mundanity. He listened carefully to hear the painful whining of a dog from between the trees, to hear the gasp of the dog’s owner realizing that their pet had fallen prey. At times he thought he heard something, but it must have just been his imagination.