Clouded Hindsight : CROSSING THE BORDER: An Erotic Journey, <i> By Kim Chernin (Fawcett/Columbine: $22; 328 pp.)</i>

In the space of a few short months in 1971, Kim Chernin deserted her 8-year-old child and devoted husband in order to traipse off on a foreign adventure; she led another man on until his frustrated love for her turned him into a basket case, and she permanently disillusioned still another man, a 21-year-old Israeli soldier 10 years her junior, with whom she had a heavy affair. In those same few short months Kim Chernin ruined the marriage of a woman who had fallen in love with her, almost caused that woman’s husband to commit murder because he was so distraught over their lesbian affair, then abandoned her woman lover as she had abandoned the others.

Or did she? In her autobiographical “Crossing the Border: An Erotic Journey,” Chernin, looking back from the vantage point of middle age on events that occurred--or perhaps did not occur--two decades ago, explores the trickiness of memory, the unruliness of young appetites and the desire of the mature self to make sense of and forgive one’s often-puzzling, often-silly younger self. The young Kim Chernin she depicts is amoral, self-absorbed and outrageous in her egotism. Or is it that the 51-year-old Chernin, conquered now by the stifling, tyrannical superego she had so valiantly fought two decades ago, places the worst possible construction on the 31-year-old Kim Chernin’s tortured struggle toward self-knowledge? And what construction are we, the readers, to place on it?

Chernin’s memoir begins as Kim arrives on a kibbutz near the northern border of Israel. For young American Jews, Israel in 1971 was still a country of idealism and high energy, a land that could call forth the best in one. Has Kim come frivolously, looking for excitement, hoping to be “seized by the hair,” to fall madly in love, as Chernin of the 1990s suggests at one point? Or has she come, as the writer speculates at another point, because, having left husband and child, she felt desperately alienated everywhere else, felt that her name was inscribed in the Book of the Dead and that only in Israel would she find redemption?

Under kibbutz rules, guests are permitted only to visit for a few days. But the simplest kibbutz tasks, such as washing the dishes, bring Kim unaccustomed rapture. She knows she must stay.

This is not enough for the egotistical Kim, as the 1990s Chernin suggests with some degree of shamefacedness: “She wanted to be loved, chosen, have rules broken for her.” She did not want to be permitted to stay out of “abstract justice.” The reader is becoming as impatient with 31-year-old Kim as the writer is.

Impatience grows. Simon, who loves her so tenderly that he cannot make love to her, sings to her instead: “I watch over your sleep . . . my little one . . . I watch over you.” He reminds her of the husband she left back home who gave her money to travel and who is taking care of her child. She tells Simon: “You’re wasting your time. . . . I don’t want love. I told you a thousand times I don’t want love. You want me to break your heart, that’s what you want from me.” And she obliges. Simon wanders the cold fields barefooted, with a haunted look. But is it she who has destroyed him? Or was he destroyed long before Kim crossed his path?

Dov is next. He is the handsome soldier, two-thirds her age, who, she dreams, will help her explore woman’s “preordained, capacious, multiorgasmic sexuality.” He is not only willing to assist, he is crazy about her. Dov “is the sort of man who loves once in his life,” Kim thinks. “This is the time, it won’t happen again.” Is he real or invented? She leaves him for another lover, a woman. Or does he leave her? For a reason as mundane as the fact that he is 21 and it is time for him to go off to the university?

Kim’s lesbian relationship begins while Dov is away at the university. Sena is a sabra. She has always lived on a kibbutz and is married to a young kibbutznik and leader in the community. But she falls in love with Kim. Neither women has loved another woman before. Their sexual relationship reveals to Kim the primordial experience that men have tried to keep for themselves, the return through eros to a place like that from which they first entered the world: “I now can want, touch, take to myself, the original body of love,” Kim exults.

So why does Kim leave this bestower of primordial bliss? Is it because, as Kim crassly says at one point, “love is not a sublime glue that sticks you forever to this one, to no other. Love is not an enduring attachment, why should it be?” Or is it because Kim realizes that Sena, having spent her entire life on kibbutzim, cannot simply go off to a big city where they might live as lesbian lovers--and that there is no city in the Israel of 1971 big enough for lesbians? Kim runs off to Scotland; Sena returns to her husband, has a child with him, divorces, remarries, has many children and works as a kibbutz librarian.

In Scotland a more mature Chernin suddenly emerges and decides that Kim is a hopeless reprobate who must be killed off. In her place is born the Chernin who, two decades later, recollects her sins--which may or may not have been horrendous. But what of Kim’s desertion of her 8-year-old daughter? Can one forgive that? The daughter can. Larissa is now 28, grew up in one piece, went to Harvard, insists to her mother, who blames herself for the actions of that selfish Kim who never thought of her little daughter: “She must have been thinking (of me). How else could she have sent you to take her place?”

The daughter forgives Kim, but can Chernin? Can we? Her self-absorption is often boring. She makes a tedious tally of the hearts piled up at her feet. Yet it becomes clear that her tally is born out of a desperation to be assured that she is cherishable. She manages to force a modicum of sympathy from us, making us remember our own youthful insecurities and peccadilloes. And then there is the question, with which Chernin herself struggles, of what really happened. Was Kim so dashingly culpable in fact, or was it only in childish wishful thinking that she was a femme fatale ? Chernin, now a psychotherapist in Berkeley, finally looks for Kim’s good points, lets herself be charmed by the vitality and imagination that have disappeared in staid middle age, and ends in a healthy reconciliation with her younger self. The reader, having not so much emotional investment in Kim and exhausted by her tally, is somewhat less charmed.