The Fish Can Sing Read Online Free Page B

sold fresh fish for the pot cheaper than others did; they called it underhand to compete at cut prices against good men. But how much is one lumpfish worth? And what is the value of a pound of haddock? Or plaice? One could answer just as well by asking, What does the sun cost, and the moon, and the stars? I assume that my grandfather answered it for himself, subconsciously: that the right price for a lumpfish, for instance, was the price that prevented a fisherman from piling up more money than he needed for the necessities of life.
    In accordance with the economic law of supply and demand, people were inclined to raise the price of fish when catches were meagre or the weather unfavourable – all except Björn ofBrekkukot. If anyone came to him and said, “I shall buy everything you have on your wheelbarrow today at twice or even three times the usual price,” he would just look blankly at the person who was making such an offer, and continue to weigh one pound after another in his scales, or to hand people one lump-fish after another from his wheelbarrow according to what each person needed for his pot – and at the same price as usual.
    But then came the days when catches were plentiful and the weather was fine and there was an abundance of all kinds of good-quality fish; and those days came more and more often as time passed, especially after the decked ships had begun to shovel fish out of Faxaflói by the boatload – not to mention the trawlers. Yet when supplies were plentiful and most fishermen felt compelled to lower their prices in the streets, it never occurred to my grandfather to lower his; he sold his catch at the same price as he always did, and then the fish on his barrow became by far the most expensive. In this way my grandfather Björn of Brekkukot rejected all the fundamental rules of economics. This man kept in his heart a secret money-valuation of his own. Was this standard right or wrong? Was the bank’s standard perhaps more right? Or the standard at Gúmúnsen’s Store? It may well be that my grandfather was wrong, yet not wrong enough to discourage most of the regular customers at his wheelbarrow from trading with him also on those days when his fish was more expensive than anywhere else. Everywhere in town, even as far as Árnapóst and all the way up to Mosfell district, what’s more, one could hear people maintain that Björn of Brekkukot’s fish tasted better than other fish; people believed that Björn of Brekkukot in some mysterious way hauled better and finer fish from the sea than other men could. And for that reason everyone wanted to buy from Björn of Brekkukot, even on the days when his fish was more expensive than anywhere else.

4
WHAT IS THE VALUE OF THE BIBLE?
    I have now said something about fish, but I have not said anything yet about the Bible. I cannot leave this subject without referring briefly to the price of the Bible in our house.
    My grandfather Björn of Brekkukot was no bookman. I never knew him to read anything other than the family
Book of Sermons
by Bishop Jón Vídalín – unless one counts that he sometimes ran his eye over the advertisements in the
Ísafold
. He read aloud from Vídalín every Sunday just after noon. He usually read correctly (although he sometimes made mistakes) but never really well, and he always laid special emphasis on two things: to get the proper pulpit drone into his reading, and not to skip any of the figures which gave book, chapter and verse references to scriptural citations – sometimes several times in each sentence. But he never expanded these abbreviations when he read them; instead he would say, for instance, Mark, Rom, Cor, and Hab. Nor did he ever use ordinals among the numbers that accompanied these references, and he paid no attention to commas or other punctuation marks between the numbers. Instead of reading, for instance, “First Corinthians, thirteenth chapter, fifth verse” (written as I. Cor, 13: 5), he would