On the bus, a porter was handing out tiny cakes. It was wonderful to be eating a prepackaged cake full of candied fruit—an experience it would never have occurred to me to seek out—while watching the glittering Mediterranean being shunted away behind the thick windows, replaced by the mountains and the steppe. Dusk began to fall, and I turned on my seat light and took out my new book: The Portrait of a Lady, chosen somewhat perfunctorily from the one shelf of English-language books—all discount paperback “classics”—at the bookstore in Antalya.
