Cabaret and Pocket Change

Start by admitting 
from cradle to tomb

It isn’t that long a stay.

Life is a cabaret, old chum,

It’s only a cabaret, old chum, and I love a cabaret!

Liza Minnelli as Sally Bowles, Cabaret

The original inspiration for Cabaret was Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin Stories. This wrenching book (#58 on TIME's 100 Best English Language Novels since 1923) was a result of Isherwood's stay in Berlin between 1929 and 1933 when the sophisticated city danced on the perilous edge of upcoming destruction. 


A British native, Isherwood eked out a living as an English tutor and reveled in Berlin’s glamorous, scandalous night life, cultural creativity and sexual freedom, while mingling with firebrand Communists, wealthy Jews, homosexuals, and general bohemians before the catastrophic Nazi dictatorship swept over Germany and most of these colorful characters either fled or met their doom. Isherwood himself understood the signs of the encroaching times and headed off to sunny California not long after the Nazis acquired power and the concentration camp replaced the cabaret as a German national symbol.

Meanwhile, as Liza also notes in Cabaret „Money makes the world go around, that clinking clanking sound!“ and indeed, a little extra pocket change is generally a desirable thing. So from Cabarettian Berlin to Roulettian Petersburg, I decide to follow in Isherwood's employment footsteps and earn some extra roubles providing English lessons. My first student is a ten-year-old girl called Dearlise. Most Russians have predictable names: for women, it’s Olga, Masha, Natasha, Tanya, Sveta, or Ira.  My friends roll their eyes when I mention my student's name – it’s so incredibly pretentious.

Dearlise is sweet and slender, greeting me in a finely decorated apartment that lives up to the pretentiousness of her name. Vast and stylish, it exudes a faint whiff of nouveau riche kitsch, and my amazement increases when two finely groomed pedigreed Abyssinian cats are trotted out to meet me.

These are not the average Russian circumstances that I have come to accept as standard. I think of Uralian Natasha, who shares one narrow, cramped room in a communal apartment with her seventeen-year-old daughter. In the other rooms that seem not to have been renovated since WWII live two decrepit grandmothers that spend all day watching tv, and Azerbaijanean Nariman who hawks vegetables at a local market and cohabits with the blowzy Ukrainian waitress, Tanya. There is one kitchen and one bathroom between the six of them. It's considered a blessing that no one smokes or drinks much  and there are no feisty alcoholic scenes at three in the morning as is often the case in those crowded communal flats.

Well, Dearlise is a charming child and between reading Where the Wild Things Are and The Cat in the Hat in her spacious, lacy bedroom with puffy kingsize bed, upright piano, and florid rose wallpaper, I learn a little more about her circumstances. She lives in this luxurious apartment with her nanny, her grandmother and her grandfather, who she says has lots of secretaries and a big, black, expensive American Range Rover. Her real Mama and Papa reside with her six-year-old brother in Germany, where Dearlise was born. Mama is Ukranian and Papa italiano. Papa, it seems, was one of nine happy Italian children, and as the oldest thereof, he inherited the family’s apparently wildly profitable factory complex in Germany that produces rubber tires and the like. With all of this international confusion, I can't keep track of who owns what houses and where, but it's clear – while these folks may not be in the ranks of Prokhorov or Abramovitch, they're certainly financially far better off than anyone else I know, here of course, but even for the most part in New York! This also is Putin’s Russia. And personally, I'm thinking I should have requested a higher hourly rate.

So why is a girl possessing German and Ukrainian passports that was born in Germany to an Ukranian mother and an Italian father with houses and factories near Stuttgart, sitting here with me in a luxurious St. Petersburg apartment reading The Cat in the Hat?  I’m sure there’s an explanation somewhere, though it may not be a good one.

PS:  The new law has recently gone into effect in Petersburg that makes the distribution of gay propaganda illegal and so far four people have been arrested thereunder. There were hearings for two of the four on Monday. One was postponed because the arresting officer did not show up. The other person was found guilty of disobeying police orders to disband (the same charge that got Red Kirill into trouble back in March at  that unauthorized anti-Putin demonstration) while the charge of "homosexual propaganda" was left unaddressed. We'll see what happens to Madonna when she comes to Petersburg in August during a world concert tour: she plans to protest against this law.