My Dad, the Globetrotting Businessman, Paleographer...and Spy?

Growing up, I thought everyone’s parents told them bedtime stories about being chased by the secret police and dodging bullets. As an adult, I started to wonder just who Dad really was.

Illustrations by Vaughn Parish | Story edited by Brendan Spiegel

“When I came home from work, the cook told me that some men had entered the house with machine guns drawn,” my father recalled dramatically as he tucked me and my brother in to bed.

At bedtime, instead of reading us stories from the pages of fairytales or books of cartoons, my dad used to tell my twin brother and me stories about his own life. This particular tale was from 1972, when he was working in the tea trade in Bangladesh. He’d been in his early 20s at the time, living in Bangladesh just six months after the country had been partitioned from Pakistan following a bloody war.

Growing up, I didn’t know that it was unusual for a parent to tell stories from their own life when tucking their kids in, nor did I realize that most parents didn’t have the type of stories he did. But this is what we did, and we were engrossed by my dad’s nightly adventures in Colombia, Bangladesh, Germany and Lebanon. We even had our fan favorite stories that we asked our dad to tell frequently. Our most commonly requested story was about the time my dad and my late grandfather played a soccer match against an entire team of kids in Bangladesh.

My father, whose name is Daniel René Métraux, was born on November 13, 1948, in Nyon, Switzerland, a French-speaking town not too far from Geneva. Never a dedicated student, he’d had to repeat a year of school, then dropped out at the age of 15. He joined an apprenticeship program, where he went to school one day a week while working at a bank. Like a lot of people, his life seemed to get more interesting after he left his hometown. But he didn’t move to start university or a desk job. Instead, my dad played backup point guard in West Germany’s top basketball league.

My father, Daniel Métraux, at age 19 in 1968. (Photos courtesy Julia Métraux)

I started to tell people stories from my father’s life a few years ago when I went to university. I was friends with a bunch of student journalists and writers, and, as we were preoccupied with telling stories, it felt natural to bring up stories from my dad’s life. One of the first questions that I always got was about how he went from being a high school dropout with little motivation to living such an interesting life. A few people, perhaps a bit jokingly, also asked me if he was a spy.