Five years later, they find themselves secure and truly beginning to move on. Melchior and Ilse have been married now for three years, and her stomach grows a little more each day with a child. They don't care if it comes as a boy or a girl, but Melchior secretly hopes it has red hair. They will name it Moritz if it's a boy, Wendla if it's a girl. Ilse can't wait to sing to it-she just knows in her heart it will be a musical child. Ernst fears for its inevitable stubbornness.
Maxim left Germany for France to become an actor. Nobody is really sure if he succeeds, but they do hear rumors now and then of a blonde German boy who lives on a stage. Joel returned to help rebuild the house in the woods. They still see their fair share of runaways, but since the fall of the elders in the village, it seems to happen less often. He visits them all as often as he can, and always has a story or two about the children he looks after.
The village as a whole was crippled by the ordeal. Nobody knew what had become of Frau Robel, and arguments over what should have been done were still known to break out among the elders. The children, now the adults, simply sighed and looked away, sometimes brushing their fingers briefly across the lines of the scars they all accumulated from whips and burns. They all did what was expected of them and married people of the opposite sex within their own station. But when they sit around the fireplace at night, holding the small hands of the next generation, they whisper that it needn't be this way for them, that they are free to love whoever makes them happy. And they pray the couple that started it all is safe.
It was discovered after a thorough search of the Robel place that a rough gallows had been in the making when Herr Robel died. A letter dotted with tears in Ernst's script explaining why he had run off was found in the dead man's coat pocket, along with a rosary that many recognized as the ones they made in Sunday school as children, wooden beads on a braid of white string. They burned Herr Robel's body and buried Yero's behind the church.
Hanschen and Ernst finally settled into a community near Berlin, small enough to stay unnoticed by most officials, but large enough that they could blend in and pass as roommates if anybody asked. They got the sense that they weren't the only "roommates" in the area-why, just down the street lived a pair of girls who seemed too close to be friends- but they were too cautious to do anything more in public than occasionally hold hands in the café. They get by on Ernst's paintings and the speeches Hanschen writes. As it turns out, his knack for persuasion pays well. For the first time in awhile, they are safe, happy, content.
But there are days when the memories build up like clutter, and suddenly neither of them can breathe. When that happens Hanschen orders a cab to take them to the edge of the city. He knows if they walk east for about a mile they'll reach a meadow of tall grass, dotted with bluebottle and edelweiss. There's fresh air there, fresh air, sunshine, and solitude. It's as close to Heaven as either of them can imagine and it's not unusual for them to spend the entire day- sunrise to well after sunset- lying on the grass. They dream of the future and reflect on the past, but most of all they concentrate on the present, on blue-or brown- eyes and blonde-or black- hair. Hanschen has a habit of tracing Ernst's scars with gentle kisses, as if trying to erase them. Sometimes Ernst swears he can feel them fading. There's no shortage of "I love you" from either of them.
Frankly, Ernst's faith in God has never been stronger.