Chronicle & Humor: Bernard, the 100 Riels, and the Cambodia That No Longer Gives Change

Bernard pays in cash. Always. It is, along with the stool and the refusal to walk, one of the three pillars of his civilisation.

Illustration only

His wallet is a monument. Thick, swollen, dog-eared, stuffed with riels folded in an order only he understands, a few soft dollar bills tucked between them. He draws it out slowly, always, the way you draw an ID card and a threat at once. It is his pride. Bernard is the last man in the neighbourhood who pays for real.

The trouble is that the neighbourhood has stopped wanting his real.

It started with Sophea. One morning, on the counter, next to the ashtray, a small laminated white square appeared. A QR code. Bernard looked at it the way you look at a damp stain on the ceiling: something that announces trouble. “What’s that.” “KHQR,” said Sophea. “People scan. It’s easier.” Bernard laid his banknotes flat on the counter, as an act of passive resistance. Sophea took them. Sophea always takes them. But the square stayed. And it had babies.

Now everyone scans. The mango lady scans. The cigarette man scans. The kid selling petrol out of Fanta bottles scans. Bakong, ABA, a satisfied little beep, and done. The whole of Cambodia has started going beep, and Bernard is left with his wads of cash — alone, analogue, magnificent.

“Back in my day,” he likes to remind everyone, “we paid in riels. In cash. You counted.”

His day is eight years. Eight. But in Bernard’s head, eight years in Cambodia are easily worth a century anywhere else — heat and humidity included, with a bonus for the power cuts. He speaks of 2018 the way others speak of prehistory.

That Thursday, he fancies something other than an Angkor, who knows why — a sudden craving for a fresh coconut. He crosses to the stall on the corner. Behind the fruit, nobody. Nobody visible, anyway. Then a small head pops up: a boy, maybe seven, minding the shop while his mother is out for lunch.

“One coconut.” Bernard holds out a banknote. A hundred riels first, then he corrects himself and holds out more. The boy doesn’t look at the price. The boy looks at the paper.

He takes it by the very tips of his fingers. Turns it over. Holds it up to the light. Frowns with the seriousness of an expert examining a forgery.

“What is it?”

“It’s money,” says Bernard.

The boy doesn’t look convinced. He knows money; money is when Mum holds the phone close and it goes beep. This soft thing with a bridge on it doesn’t go beep. He taps it. Nothing.

“Where do you scan it?”

“You don’t scan it anywhere. You hand it over. You take it, you give me my change, and that’s that.”

The concept of “giving change” hits the child like a metaphysical riddle. He has no change. He has never had change. He has a QR code taped to a polystyrene box and a natural gift for brandishing it. He pushes it toward Bernard, full of hope. “You scan?”

“I don’t scan.”

“Why?”

Good question. Bernard doesn’t have the app. Bernard has a phone he uses to steady the wobbly table and, on scorching evenings, as a fan. But you don’t explain that to a seven-year-old who already, plainly, takes you for a caveman come to pay in dead leaves.

The boy, magnanimous, proposes a compromise. He keeps the banknote — “for my collection” — and Bernard can take the coconut anyway, as a gift, because the gentleman looks old and lost. The national currency of the Kingdom of Cambodia has just been reclassified, by a child, as a curiosity — somewhere between a marble and a bottle cap.

Bernard heads back to the bar without his pride and without his change, but with a coconut given out of pity, which is worse.

He broods. For a long time. And deep in his brooding, an idea takes root, slow and magnificent like him. The next day he announces it to Sophea the way one proclaims a republic.

“Here’s how we’ll do it. You’ve got the gadget. The QR, the app, the beep. I’ve got the cash. So when I need to pay for something out there, you scan, you pay with your phone, and I pay you back here, in cash, into your hand. Like men.”

Sophea thinks about it. “So I become your bank.”

“I become nothing at all,” says Bernard, with great dignity. “I delegate.”

And that is how Bernard — last bastion of hard cash, a man who has never given in and never will — triumphed over modernity by finding the one solution that now leaves him incapable of buying anything at all without going through a thirty-year-old intermediary who looks at him, every time, with the patience one reserves for monuments and old cats.

He pays for the next day’s coconut through this system. Two transactions, one emotional commission, one beep.

“You see,” he says, recounting his wads, satisfied. “There’s always a way to stay free.”

Sophea scans. Sophea nods. Sophea, this month, is running one more bank debit than before.